BY CANON DYSON HAGUE, M. A.,
RECTOR OF THE MEMORIAL CHURCH, LONDON, ONTARIO. LECTURER
IN LITURGICS AND ECCLESIOLOGY, WYCLIFFE
COLLEGE, TORONTO, CANADA. EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF HURON.
What is the meaning of
the Higher Criticism? Why is it called higher? Higher than what? At the outset
it must be explained that the word “Higher” is an academic
term, used in this
connection in a purely special or technical sense. It is not used in the popular
sense of the word at all, and may convey a wrong impression to the ordinary
man. Nor is it meant to convey the idea of superiority. It is simply a term of
contrast. It is used in contrast to the phrase, “Lower Criticism.”
One of the most
important branches of theology is called the science of Biblical criticism,
which has for its object the study of the history and contents, and origins and
purposes, of the various books of the Bible. In the early stages of the science
Biblical criticism was devoted to two great branches, the Lower, and the
Higher. The Lower Criticism was employed to designate the study of the text of
the Scripture, and included the investigation of the manuscripts, and the
different readings in the various versions and codices and manuscripts in order
that we may be sure we have the original words as they were written by the
Divinely inspired writers.
(See Briggs, Hex., page
1). The term generally used now-a-days is Textual Criticism. If the phrase were
used in the twentieth century sense, Beza, Erasmus, Bengel, Griesbach,
Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorff, Scrivener, Westcott, and Hort would be
called Lower Critics. But the term is not now-a-days used as a rule. The Higher
Criticism, on the contrary, was employed to designate the study of the historic
origins, the dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible, and that
great branch of study which in the technical language of modern theology is
known as Introduction.
It is a very valuable branch of Biblical science, and is of the highest
importance as an auxiliary in the interpretation of the Word of God. By its
researches floods of light may be thrown on the Scriptures.
The term Higher Criticism, then,
means nothing more than the study of the literary structure of the various books
of the Bible, and more especially of the Old Testament. Now this in itself is
most laudable. It is indispensable. It is just such work as every minister or
Sunday School teacher does when he takes up his Peloubet’s Notes, or his
Stalker’s St. Paul, or Geikie’s Hours with the Bible, to find out all he can
with regard to the portion of the Bible he is studying; the author, the date,
the circumstances, and purpose of its writing.
WHY IS HIGHER CRITICISM IDENTIFIED
WITH UNBELIEF?
How is it, then, that the Higher
Criticism has become identified in the popular mind with attacks upon the Bible
and the supernatural character of the Holy Scriptures? The reason is this. No
study perhaps requires so devout a spirit and so exalted a faith in the
supernatural as the pursuit of the Higher Criticism. It
demands at once the ability of the
scholar, and the simplicity of the believing child of God. For without faith no
one can explain the Holy Scriptures, and without scholarship no one can
investigate historic origins. There is a Higher Criticism that is at once
reverent in tone and scholarly in work. Hengstenberg, the German, and Horne,
the Englishman, may be taken as examples. Perhaps the greatest work in English
on the Higher Criticism is Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study and
Knowledge of the Holy Scripture. It is a work that is simply massive in its
scholarship, and invaluable in its vast reach of information for the study of
the Holy
Scriptures. But Horne’s Introduction
is too large a work. It is too cumbrous for use in this hurrying age. (Carter’s
edition in two volumes contains 1,149 pages, and in ordinary book form would
contain over 4,000 pages, i.e., about ten volumes of 400 pages each). Latterly,
however, it has been edited by Dr. Samuel Davidson, who practically adopted the
views of Hupfield and Halle and interpolated not a few of the modern German
theories. But Horne’s work from first to last is the work of a Christian
believer; constructive, not destructive; fortifying faith in the Bible, not
rationalistic. But the work of the Higher Critic has not always been pursued in
a reverent spirit nor in the spirit of scientific and Christian scholarship.
SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.
In the first place, the critics who
were the leaders, the men who have given name and force to the whole movement,
have been men who have based their theories largely upon their own subjective
conclusions. They have based their conclusions largely upon the very dubious
basis of the author’s style and supposed literary qualifications. Everybody
knows that style is a very unsafe basis for the determination of a literary
product. The greater the writer the more versatile his power of expression; and
anybody can understand that the Bible is the last book in the world to be
studied as a mere classic by mere human scholarship without any regard to the
spirit of sympathy and reverence on the part of the student. The Bible, as has
been said, has no revelation to make to unbiblical minds. It does not even
follow that because a man is a philological expert he is able to understand the
integrity or credibility of a passage of Holy Scripture any more than the
beauty and spirit of it. The qualification for the perception of Biblical truth
is neither philosophic nor philological knowledge, but spiritual insight. The
primary qualification
of the musician is that he be
musical; of the artist, that he have the spirit of art. So the merely technical
and mechanical and scientific mind is disqualified for the recognition of the
spiritual and infinite. Any thoughtful man must honestly admit that the Bible
is to be treated as unique in literature, and, therefore, that the ordinary
rules of critical interpretation must fail to interpret it aright.
GERMAN FANCIES
In the second place, some of the
most powerful exponents of the modern Higher Critical theories have been
Germans, and it is notorious to what length the German fancy can go in the
direction of the subjective and of the conjectural. For hypothesis-weaving and
speculation, the German theological professor is unsurpassed. One of the
foremost thinkers used to lay it down as a fundamental truth in philosophical
and scientific enquiries that no regard whatever should be paid to the
conjectures or hypotheses of thinkers, and quoted as an axiom the great Newton
himself and his famous words, “Non fingo hypotheses”: I do not frame
hypotheses. It is notorious that some of the most learned German thinkers are
men who lack in a singular degree the faculty of common sense and knowledge of
human nature. Like many physical scientists, they are so preoccupied with a
theory that their conclusions seem to the average mind curiously warped. In
fact, a learned man in a letter to Descartes once made an observation which,
with slight verbal alteration, might be applied to some of the German critics:
“When men sitting in their closet and consulting only their books attempt
disquisitions into the Bible, they may indeed tell how they would have made the
Book if God had given them that commission. That is, they may describe chimeras
which correspond to the fatuity of their own minds, but without an
understanding truly Divine they can never form such an idea to themselves as
the Deity had in creating it.” “If,” says Matthew Arnold, “you shut a number of
men up to make study and learning the business of
their lives, how many of them, from
want of some discipline or other, seem to lose all balance of judgment, all
common sense.” The learned professor of Assyriology at Oxford said that the
investigation of the literary source of history has been a peculiarly German
pastime. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient Orient as if they
were modern German professors, and the attempt to transform the ancient
Israelites into somewhat inferior German compilers, proves a strange want
of familiarity with Oriental modes
of thought. (Sayce, “Early History of the Hebrews,” pages 108-112).
ANTI-SUPERNATURALISTS
In the third place, the dominant men
of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is
not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter of fact, as we shall
presently show. Some of the men who have been most distinguished as the leaders
of the Higher Critical movement in Germany and Holland have been men who have
no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the
possibility of a personal supernatural revelation. The men who have been the
voices of the movement, of whom the great majority, less widely known and less
influential, have been mere echoes; the men who manufactured the articles the
others distributed, have been notoriously opposed to the miraculous. We must
not be misunderstood. We distinctly repudiate the idea that all the
Higher Critics were or are
anti-supernaturalists. Not so. The British-American School embraces within its
ranks many earnest believers. What we do say, as we
will presently show, is that the dominant minds which have led and swayed the
movement, who made the theories that the others circulated, were strongly
unbelieving.
Then the higher critical
movement has not followed its true and original purposes in investigating the
Scriptures for the purposes of confirming faith and of helping believers to
understand the beauties, and appreciate the circumstances of the origin of the
various books, and so understand more completely the Bible?
No. It has not;
unquestionably it has not. It has been deflected from that, largely owing to
the character of the men whose ability and forcefulness have given predominance
to their views. It has become identified with a system of criticism which is
based on hypotheses and suppositions which have for their object the
repudiation of the traditional theory, and has investigated the origins and
forms and styles and contents, apparently not to confirm the authenticity and
credibility and reliability of the Scriptures, but to discredit in most cases
their genuineness, to discover discrepancies,
and throw doubt upon
their authority:
THE ORIGIN OF THE
MOVEMENT
Who, then, were the men whose
views have molded the views of the leading teachers and writers of the Higher
Critical school of today? We will answer this as briefly as possible. It is not
easy to say who is the first so-called Higher Critic, or when the movement
began. But it is not modern by any means. Broadly speaking, it has passed
through three great stages:
1. The French-Dutch.
2. The German.
3. The British-American.
In its origin it was
Franco-Dutch, and speculative, if not skeptical. The views which are now
accepted as axiomatic by the Continental and British-American schools of Higher
Criticism seem to have been first hinted at by Carlstadt in 1521 in his work on
the Canon of Scripture, and by Andreas Masius, a Belgian scholar, who published
a commentary on Joshua in 1574, and a Roman Catholic priest, called Peyrere or Pererius, in his
Systematic Theology, 1660. (LIV. Cap. i.) But it may really be said to have
originated with Spinoza, the rationalist Dutch philosopher. In his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (Cap. vii-viii), 1670, Spinoza came out boldly and
impugned the traditional date and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and
ascribed the origin of the Pentateuch to Ezra or to some other late compiler.
Spinoza was really the fountain-head of the movement, and his line was taken in
England by the British philosopher Hobbes. He went deeper than Spinoza, as an
outspoken antagonist of the necessity and possibility of a personal revelation,
and also denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. A few years later a
French priest, called Richard Simon of Dieppe, pointed out the supposed
varieties of style as indications of various authors in his Historical
Criticism of the Old Testament, “an epoch-making work.” Then another Dutchman,
named Clericus (or Le Clerk), in 1685, advocated still more radical views,
suggesting an Exilian and priestly
authorship for the Pentateuch, and
that the Pentateuch was composed by the priest sent from Babylon (2 Kings, 17),
about 678, B.C., and also a kind of later editor or redactor theory. Clericus
is said to have been the first critic who set forth the theory that Christ and
his Apostles did not come into the world to teach the Jews criticism, and that
it is only to be expected that their language would be in accordance with the
views of the day.
In 1753 a Frenchman named Astruc, a
medical man, and reputedly a free-thinker of profligate life, propounded for
the first time the Jehovistic and Elohistic divisive hypothesis, and opened a
new era. (Briggs’ Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, page 46). Astruc said
that the use of the two names, Jehovah and Elohim, shewed the book was composed
of different documents. (The idea of the Holy Ghost employing two words, or one
here and another there, or both together as He wills, never seems to enter the
thought of the Higher Critic!) His work was called “Conjectures Regarding the
Original Memoirs in the Book of Genesis,” and was published in Brussels. Astruc
may be called the father of the documentary theories. He asserted there are
traces of no less than ten or twelve different memoirs in the book of Genesis.
He denied its Divine authority, and considered the book to be disfigured by useless repetitions, disorder, and
contradiction. (Hirschfelder,
page 66). For fifty
years Astruc’s theory was unnoticed. The rationalism of Germany was as yet
undeveloped, so that the body was not yet prepared to receive the germ, or the
soil the weed.
THE GERMAN CRITICS
The next stage was
largely German. Eichhorn is the greatest name in this period, the eminent
Oriental professor at Gottingen who published his work on the Old Testament
introduction in 1780. He put into different shape the documentary hypothesis of
the Frenchman, and did his work so ably that his views were generally adopted
by the most distinguished scholars. Eichhorn’s formative influence has been
incalculably great. Few scholars refused to do honor to the new sun. It is
through him that the name Higher Criticism has become identified with the
movement He was followed by Vater and later by Hartmann with their fragment
theory which practically undermined the Mosaic authorship, made the Pentateuch
a heap of fragments, carelessly joined by one editor, and paved the way for the
most radical of all divisive hypotheses.
In 1806 De Wette,
Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Heidelberg, published a work which ran
through six editions in four decades. His contribution to the introduction of
the Old Testament instilled the same general principles as Eichhorn, and in the
supplemental hypotheses assumed that Deuteronomy was composed in the age of
Josiah (2 Kings22:8). Not long after, Vatke and Leopold George (both Hegelians)
unreservedly declared the post-Mosaic and post-prophetic origin of the first
four books of the Bible. Then came Bleek, who advocated the idea of the Grundschift
or original document and the redactor theory; and then Ewald, the father of the
Crystallization theory; and then Hupfield (1853), who held that the original
document was an independent compilation; and Graf, who wrote a book on the
historical books of the Old Testament in 1866 and advocated the theory that the
Jehovistic and Elohistic documents were written hundreds of years after Moses’
time. Graf was a pupil of Reuss, the redactor of the Ezra hypothesis of
Spinoza. Then came a most influential writer, Professor Kuenen of Leyden in
Holland, whose work on the Hexateuch was edited by Colenso in 1865, and his
“Religion of Israel and Prophecy in Israel,” published in England in 1874-1877.
Kuenen was one of the most advanced exponents of the rationalistic school. Last, but not least, of
the continental Higher Critics is Julius Wellhausen, who at one time was a
theological professor in Germany, who published in 1878 the first volume of his
history of Israel, and won by his scholarship the attention if not the
allegiance of a number of leading theologians. (See Higher Criticism of the
Pentateuch, Green, pages 59-88). It will be observed that nearly all these
authors were Germans, and most of them professors of philosophy or theology.
THE BRITISH-AMERICAN CRITICS
The third stage of the movement is
the British-American. The best known names are those of Dr. Samuel Davidson,
whose “Introduction to the Old Testament,” published in 1862, was largely based
on the fallacies of the German rationalists. The supplementary hypothesis
passed over into England through him and with strange incongruity, he borrowed
frequently from Baur. Dr. Robertson Smith, the Scotchman, recast the German
theories in an English form in his works on the Pentateuch, the Prophets of
Israel, and the Old Testament in the Jewish Church, first published in 1881,
and followed the German school, according to Briggs, with great boldness and
thoroughness. A man of deep piety and high spirituality, he combined with a
sincere regard for the Word of God a critical radicalism that was
strangely inconsistent, as did also
his namesake, George Adam Smith, the most influential of the present-day
leaders, a man of great insight and scriptural acumen, who in his works on
Isaiah, and the twelve prophets, adopted some of the most radical and least
demonstrable of the German theories, and in his later work, “Modern Criticism
and the Teaching of the Old Testament,” has gone still farther in the
rationalistic direction.
Another well-known Higher Critic is
Dr. S. R. Driver, the Regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who, in his
“Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament,” published ten years
later, and his work on the Book of Genesis, has elaborated with remarkable
skill and great detail of analysis the theories and views of the continental
school. Driver’s work is able, very able, but it lacks originality and English
independence. The hand is the hand of Driver, but the voice is the voice of
Kuenen or Wellhausen.
The third well-known name is that of
Dr. C. A. Briggs, for some time Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union
Theological Seminary of New York. An equally earnest advocate of the German
theories, he published in 1883 his “Biblical Study”;
in 1886, his “Messianic Prophecy,” and a little later his “Higher Criticism of
the Hexateuch.” Briggs studied the Pentateuch, as he confesses, under the
guidance chiefly of Ewald. (Hexateuch, page 63).
Of course, this list is
a very partial one, but it gives most of the names that have become famous in
connection with the movement, and the reader who
desires more will find a
complete summary of the literature of the Higher Criticism in Professor
Bissell’s work on the Pentateuch (Scribner’s, 1892).
Briggs, in his “Higher
Criticism of the Hexateuch” (Scribner’s, 1897), gives an historical summary
also. We must now investigate another question, and that is the religious views
of the men most influential in this movement. In making the statement that we
are about to make, we desire to deprecate entirely the idea of there
being anything
uncharitable, unfair, or unkind, in stating what is simply a matter of fact.
THE VIEWS OF THE
CONTINENTAL CRITICS
Regarding the views of
the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly
all, if not all, of the real leaders.
1. They were men who denied
the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What
Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; “legendary
exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes.”
2. They were men who denied
the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians
have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous
conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture.
3. They were men who denied
the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the
universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural.
Their theories were excogitated on pure grounds of human reasoning. Their
hypotheses were constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture. As
to the inspiration of the Bible, as to the Holy Scriptures from Genesis to
Revelation being the Word of God, they had no such belief. We may take them one
by one. Spinoza repudiated absolutely a supernatural revelation. And Spinoza
was one of their
greatest. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous, and considered that the so-called
supernatural element was an Oriental exaggeration; and Eichhorn has been called
the father of Higher Criticism, and was the first man to use the term. De
Wette’s views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George
were Hegelian rationalists, and regarded the first four books of the Old
Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen, says Professor Sanday, wrote in the
interests of an almost avowed Naturalism. That is, he was a free-thinker, an
agnostic; a man who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and
living God. (Brampton Lectures, 1893, page 117). He wrote from an avowedly
naturalistic standpoint, says Driver (page 205). According to Wellhausen the
religion of Israel was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation
from an imperfectly
monotheistic kind of semi-pagan
idolatry. It was simply a human religion.
THE LEADERS WERE RATIONALISTS
In one word, the formative forces of
the Higher Critical movement were rationalistic forces, and the men who were
its chief authors and expositors, who “on account of purely philological
criticism have acquired an appalling authority,” were men who had discarded
belief in God and Jesus Christ Whom He had sent. The Bible, in their view, was
a mere human product. It was a stage in the literary evolution of a religious
people. If it was not the resultant of a fortuitous concourse of Oriental myths
and legendary accretions, and its Jahveh or Jahweh, the excogitation of a
Sinaitic clan, it certainly was not given by the inspiration of God, and is not
the Word of the living God. “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the
Holy Ghost,” said Peter. “God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners
spake by the prophets,” said Paul.
Not so, said Kuenen, the prophets were not moved to speak by God. Their
utterances were all their own. (Sanday, page 117).
These then were their views and
these were the views that have so dominated modern Christianity and permeated
modern ministerial thought in the two great languages of the modern world. We
cannot say that they were men whose rationalism was the result of their
conclusions in the study of the Bible. Nor can we say their conclusions with
regard to the Bible were wholly the result of their rationalism. But we can
say, on the one hand, that inasmuch as they refused to recognize the Bible as a
direct revelation from God, they were free to form hypotheses ad libitum. And,
on the other hand, as they denied the supernatural, the animus that animated them in the construction of the hypotheses was the
desire to construct a theory that would explain away the supernatural. Unbelief
was the antecedent, not the consequent, of their criticism. Now there is
nothing unkind in this. There is nothing that is uncharitable, or unfair. It is
simply a statement of fact which modern authorities most freely admit.
THE SCHOOL OF COMPROMISE
When we come to the
English-writing Higher Critics, we approach a much more difficult subject. The
British-American Higher Critics represent a school of compromise. On the one
hand they practically accept the premises of the Continental school with regard
to the antiquity, authorship, authenticity, and origins of the Old Testament
books. On the other hand, they refuse to go with the German rationalists in
altogether denying their inspiration. They still claim to accept the Scriptures
as containing a Revelation from God. But may they not hold their own peculiar
views with regard to the origin and date and literary structure of the Bible
without endangering either their own faith or the faith of Christians? This is
the very heart of the question, and, in order that the reader may see the
seriousness of the adoption of the conclusions of the critics, as brief a
resume as possible of the matter will be given.
THE POINT IN A NUTSHELL
According to the faith
of the universal church, the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the
Bible, is one consistent, coherent, authentic and genuine composition, inspired
by God, and, according to the testimony of the Jews, the statements of the
books themselves, the reiterated corroborations of the rest of the Old
Testament, and the explicit statement of the Lord Jesus (Luke 24:44; John 5:46-47) was
written by Moses (with the exception, of course, of Deuteronomy 34, possibly
written by Joshua, as the Talmud states, or probably by Ezra) at a period of
about fourteen centuries before the advent of Christ, and 800 years or so
before Jeremiah. It is, moreover, a portion of the Bible that is of paramount
importance, for it is the basic substratum of the whole revelation of God, and
of paramount value, not because it is merely the literature of an ancient
nation, but because it is the introductory section of the Word of God, bearing
His authority and given by inspiration through His servant Moses. That is the
faith of the Church.
THE CRITICS’ THEORY
But according to the
Higher Critics:
1. The Pentateuch consists
of four completely diverse documents. These Completely different documents were
the primary sources of the composition which they call the Hexateuch:
(a) The Yahwist or Jahwist,
(b) the Elohist,
(c) the Deuteronomist, and
(d) the Priestly Code, the Grundschift, the work of
the first Elohist (Sayce Hist. Heb., 103), now
generally known as J. E. D. P., and for convenience designated by these
symbols.
2. These different works
were composed at various periods of time, not in the fifteenth century, B.C.,
but in the ninth, seventh, sixth and fifth centuries; J. and E. being referred
approximately to about 800 to 700 B.C.; D to about 650 to 625 B.C., and P. to
about 525 to 425 B.C. According to the Graf theory, accepted by Kuenen, the
Elohist documents were post-exilian, that is, they were written only five
centuries or so before Christ. Genesis and Exodus as well as the Priestly Code,
that is, Leviticus and part of Exodus and Numbers were also post-exilic.
3. These different works,
moreover, represent different traditions of the national life of the Hebrews,
and are at variance in most important particulars.
4. And, further. They
conjecture that these four suppositive documents were not compiled and written
by Moses, but were probably constructed somewhat after this fashion: For some
reason, and at some time, and in some way, some one, no one knows who, or why,
or when, or where, wrote J. Then someone else, no one knows who, or why, or
when, or where, wrote another document, which is now called E. And then at a
later time, the critics only know who, or why, or when, or where, an anonymous
personage, whom we may call Redactor I, took in hand the reconstruction of
these documents, introduced new material, harmonized the real and apparent
discrepancies, and divided the inconsistent accounts of one event into two
separate transactions. Then some time after this, perhaps one hundred years or
more, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, some anonymous personage
wrote another document, which they style D. And after a while another anonymous
author, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, whom we will call Redactor
II, took this in hand, compared it with J. E., revised J. E., with considerable
freedom, and in addition introduced quite a body of new material. Then someone
else, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, probably, however, about
525, or perhaps 425, wrote P.; and then another anonymous Hebrew, whom we may
call Redactor III, undertook to incorporate this with the triplicated composite
J. E. D., with what they call redactional additions and insertions. (Green,
page 88, cf. Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, pages 100-105).
It may be well to state
at this point that this is not an exaggerated statement of the Higher critical
position. On the contrary, we have given here what has been described as a
position “established by proofs, valid and cumulative” and “representing the
most sober scholarship.” The more advanced continental Higher Critics, Green
says, distinguish the writers of the primary sources according to the supposed
elements as J1 and J2, E1 and E2, P1, P2 and P3, and D1 and D2, nine different
originals in all. The different Redactors, technically described by the symbol
R., are Rj., who combined J. and E.; Rd., who added D. to J. E., and Rh., who
completed the Hexateuch by combining P. with J. E. D. (H. C. of the Pentateuch,
page 88).
A DISCREDITED PENTATEUCH
5. These four suppositive
documents are, moreover, alleged to be internally inconsistent and undoubtedly
incomplete. How far they are incomplete they do not agree. How much is missing
and when, where, how and by whom it was removed; whether it was some thief who
stole, or copyist who tampered, or editor who falsified, they do not declare.
6. In this redactory
process no limit apparently is assigned by the critic to the work of the
redactors. With an utter irresponsibility of freedom it is declared that they inserted
misleading statements with the purpose of reconciling incompatible traditions;
that they amalgamated what should have been distinguished, and sundered that
which should have amalgamated. In one word, it is an axiomatic principle of the
divisive hypothesizers that the redactors “have not only misapprehended, but
misrepresented the originals” (Green, page 170). They were animated by
“egotistical motives.” They confused varying accounts, and erroneously ascribed
them to different occasions. They not only gave false and colored impressions;
they destroyed valuable elements of the suppositive documents and tampered with
the dismantled remnant.
7. And worst of all. The
Higher Critics are unanimous in the conclusion that these documents contain
three species of material:
(a) The probably true.
(b) The certainly doubtful.
(c) The positively spurious.
“The narratives of the
Pentateuch are usually trustworthy, though partly mythical and legendary. The
miracles recorded were the exaggerations of a later age.” (Davidson,
Introduction, page 131). The framework of the first eleven chapters of Genesis,
says George Adam Smith in his “Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old
Testament,” is woven from the raw material of myth and legend. He denies their
historical character, and says that he can find no proof in archaeology for the
personal existence of characters of the Patriarchs themselves. Later on,
however, in a fit of apologetic repentance he makes the condescending admission
that it is extremely probable that the stories of the Patriarchs have at the
heart of them historical elements. (Pages 90-106). Such is the view of the
Pentateuch that is accepted as conclusive by “the sober scholarship” of a
number of the leading theological writers and professors of the day. It is to
this the Higher Criticism reduces what the Lord Jesus called the writings of
Moses.
A DISCREDITED OLD
TESTAMENT
As to the rest of the
Old Testament, it may be briefly said that they have dealt with it with an
equally confusing hand. The time-honored traditions of the Catholic Church are
set at naught, and its thesis of the relation of inspiration and genuineness
and authenticity derided. As to the Psalms, the harp that was once believed to
be the harp of David
was not handled by the sweet Psalmist of Israel, but generally by some
anonymous post-exilist; and Psalms that are ascribed to David by the
omniscient Lord Himself are daringly
attributed to some anonymous Maccabean. Ecclesiastes, written, nobody knows
when, where, and by whom, possesses just a possible grade of inspiration,
though one of the critics “of cautious and well-balanced judgment” denies that
it contains any at all. “Of course,” says another, “it is not really the work
of Solomon.” (Driver, Introduction, page 470). The Song of songs is an idyll of
human love, and nothing more. There is no inspiration in it; it contributes
nothing to the sum of revelation. (Sanday, page 211). Esther, too, adds nothing
to the sum of revelation, and is not historical (page 213). Isaiah was, of
course, written by a number of
authors. The first part, chapters 1 to 40, by Isaiah; the second by a
Deutero-Isaiah and a number of anonymous authors. As to Daniel, it was a purely
pseudonymous work, written probably in the second century B.C. With regard to the
New Testament: The English writing school have hitherto confined themselves
mainly to the Old Testament, but if Professor Sanday, who passes as a most
conservative and moderate representative of the critical school, can be taken
as a sample, the historical books are “yet in the first instance strictly
histories put together by ordinary historical methods, or, in so far as the
methods on which they are Composed, are not ordinary, due rather to the
peculiar circumstances of the case, and not to influences, which need be
specially described as supernatural” (page 399). The Second Epistle of Peter is
pseudonymous, its name counterfeit, and, therefore, a forgery, just as large
parts of Isaiah, Zechariah and Jonah, and Proverbs were supposititious and
quasi-fraudulent documents. This is a straightforward statement of the position
taken by what is called the moderate school of Higher Criticism. It is their
own admitted position, according to their own writings. The difficulty,
therefore, that presents itself to the average man of today is this: How can
these Critics still claim to believe in the Bible as the Christian Church has
ever believed it?
A DISCREDITED BIBLE
There can be no doubt that Christ
and His Apostles accepted the whole of the Old Testament as inspired in every
portion of every part; from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of
Malachi, all was implicitly believed to be the very Word of God Himself. And
ever since their day the view of the Universal Christian Church has been that
the Bible is the Word of God; as the twentieth article of the Anglican Church
terms it, it is God’s Word written. The Bible as a whole is inspired. “All that
is written is God-in-spired.” That is, the Bible does not merely contain the
Word of God; it is the Word of God. It contains a revelation. “All is not
revealed, but all is inspired.” This is the conservative and, up to the present
day, the almost universal view of the question. There are, it is well known,
many theories
of inspiration. But whatever view or
theory of inspiration men may hold, plenary, verbal, dynamical; mechanical,
superintendent, or governmental, they refer either to the inspiration of the
men who wrote, or to the inspiration of what is written. In one word, they
imply throughout the work of God the Holy Ghost, and are bound up with the
concomitant ideas of authority, veracity, reliability, and truth divine. (The
two strongest works on the subject from this standpoint are by Gaussen and Lee.
Gaussen on the Theopneustia is published in an American edition by Hitchcock
and Walden, of Cincinnati; and Lee on the Inspiration of Holy Scripture is
published by Rivingtons. Bishop Wordsworth, on the “Inspiration of the Bible,”
is also very scholarly and strong. Rivingtons, 1875). The Bible can no longer,
according to the critics, be viewed in this light. It is not the Word in the
old sense of that term. It is not the Word of God in the sense that all of it
is given by the inspiration of God. It simply contains the Word of God. In many
of its parts it is just as uncertain as any other human book. It is not even
reliable history. Its records of what it does narrate as ordinary history are
full of falsifications and blunders. The origin of Deuteronomy, e.g., was “a
consciously refined falsification.” (See Moller, page 207).
THE REAL DIFFICULTY
But do they still claim to believe
that the Bible is inspired? Yes. That is, in a measure. As Dr. Driver says in
his preface, “Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does not banish or
destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament; it pre-supposes it.” That is
perfectly true. Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars is safe. But the
preponderating scholarship in Old Testament criticism has admittedly not been
in the hands of men who could be described as Christian scholars. It has been
in the hands of men who disavow belief in God and Jesus Christ Whom He sent.
Criticism in the hands of Horne and Hengstenberg does not banish or destroy the
inspiration of the Old Testament. But, in the hands of Spinoza, and Graf, and
Wellhausen, and Kuenen, inspiration is neither pre-supposed nor possible. Dr.
Briggs and Dr. Smith may avow earnest avowals of belief in the Divine character
of the Bible, and Dr. Driver may assert that critical conclusions do not touch
either the authority or the inspiration of the Scriptures of the Old Testament,
but from first to last, they treat God’s Word with an indifference almost equal
to that of the Germans. They certainly handle the Old Testament as if it were
ordinary literature. And in all their theories they seem like plastic wax in
the hands of the rationalistic moulders. But they still claim to believe in
Biblical inspiration.
A REVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Their theory of inspiration must be,
then, a very different one from that held by the average Christian. The
following needs to be divided: In the Bampton Lectures for 1903, Professor
Sanday of Oxford, as the exponent of the later and more conservative school of
Higher Criticism, came out with a theory which he termed the inductive theory.
It is not easy to describe what is fully meant by this, but it appears to mean
the presence of what they call “a divine element” in certain parts of the
Bible. What that really is he does not accurately declare. The language always
vapors off into the vague and indefinite, whenever he speaks of it. In what
books it is he does not say. “It is present in different books and parts of
books in different degrees.” “In some the Divine element is at the maximum; in
others at the minimum.” He is not always sure. He is sure it is not in Esther,
in Ecclesiastes, in Daniel. If it is in the historical books, it is there as
conveying a religious lesson rather than as a guarantee of historic veracity,
rather as interpreting than as narrating. At the same time, if the histories as
far as textual construction was concerned were “natural processes carried out
naturally,” it is difficult to see where the Divine or supernatural element
comes in. It is an inspiration which seems to have been devised as a hypothesis
of compromise. In fact, it is a tenuous, equivocal, and indeterminate
something, the amount of which is as indefinite as its quality. (Sanday, pages
100-398; cf. Driver, Preface, ix.) But its most serious feature is this: It is
a theory of inspiration that completely overturns the old-fashioned ideas of
the Bible and its unquestioned standard of authority and truth. For whatever this so-called Divine element is, it ap- pears to
be quite consistent with defective argument, incorrect interpretation, if not
what the average man would call forgery or falsification. It is, in fact,
revolutionary. To accept it the Christian will have to completely readjust his
ideas of honor and honesty, of falsehood and misrepresentation. Men used to
think that forgery was a crime, and falsification a sin. Pusey, in his great
work on Daniel, said that “to write a book under the name of another and to
give it out to be his is in any case a forgery, dishonest in itself and
destructive of all trustworthiness.” (Pusey, Lectures on Daniel, page 1). But
according to the Higher Critical position, all sorts of pseudonymous material,
and not a little of it believed to be true by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, is
to be found in the Bible, and no antecedent objection ought to be taken to it.
Men used to think that inaccuracy would affect reliability and that proven
inconsistencies would imperil credibility. But now it appears that there may
not only be mistakes and errors on the part of copyists, but forgeries,
intentional omissions, and misinterpretations on the part of authors, and yet,
marvelous to say, faith is not to be destroyed, but to be placed on a firmer
foundation. (Sanday, page 122). They have, according to Briggs, enthroned the
Bible in a higher position than ever before. (Briggs, “The Bible, Church and
Reason,” page 149). Sanday admits that there is an element in the Pentateuch
derived from Moses himself. An element! But he adds, “However much we may
believe that there is a genuine Mosaic foundation in the Pentateuch, it is
difficult to lay the finger upon it, and to say with confidence, here Moses
himself is speaking.” “The strictly Mosaic element in the Pentateuch must be
indeterminate.” “We ought not, perhaps, to use them (the visions of Exodus 3
and 33) without reserve for Moses himself” (pages 172-174-176). The ordinary
Christian, however, will say: Surely if We deny the Mosaic authorship and the
unity of the Pentateuch we must undermine its credibility. The Pentateuch
claims to be Mosaic. It was the universal tradition of the Jews. It is expressly
stated in nearly all
the subsequent books of
the Old Testament. The Lord Jesus said so most explicitly. (John 5:46-47).
IF NOT MOSES, WHO?
For this thought must
surely follow to the thoughtful man: If Moses did not write the Books of Moses,
who did? If there were
three or four, or six, or nine authorized original writers, why not fourteen,
or sixteen, or nineteen? And then another and more serious thought must follow
that. Who were these original writers, and who
originated them? If there were
manifest evidences of alterations, manipulations, inconsistencies and omissions
by an indeterminate number of unknown and unknowable and undateable redactors,
then the question arises, who were these redactors, and how far had they
authority to redact, and who gave them this authority? If the redactor was the
writer, was he an inspired writer, and if he was inspired, what was the degree
of his inspiration; was it partial, plenary, inductive or indeterminate. This
is a question of questions: What is the guarantee of the inspiration of the
redactor, and who is its guarantor? Moses we know, and Samuel we know, and
Daniel we know, but ye anonymous and pseudonymous, who are ye? The Pentateuch,
with Mosaic authorship, as Scriptural, divinely accredited, is upheld by Catholic
tradition and scholarship, and appeals to reason. But a mutilated cento or
scrap-book of anonymous compilations, with its pre-and post-exilic redactors
and redactions, is confusion worse confounded. At least that is the way it
appears to the average Christian. He may not be an expert in philosophy or
theology, but his common sense must surely be allowed its rights. And that is
the way it appears, too, to such an illustrious scholar and critic as Dr. Emil
Reich. (Contemporary Review, April, 1905, page 515).
It is not possible then to accept
the Kuenen-Wellhausen theory of the structure of the Old Testament and the
Sanday-Driver theory of its
inspiration without undermining
faith in the Bible as the Word of God. For the Bible is either the Word of God,
or it is not. The children of Israel were the children of the Only Living and
True God, or they were not. If their Jehovah was a mere tribal deity, and their
religion a human evolution; if their sacred literature was natural with
mythical and pseudonymous admixtures; then the Bible is dethroned from its
throne as the exclusive, authoritative, Divinely inspired Word of God. It
simply ranks as one of the sacred books of the ancients with similar claims of
inspiration and revelation. Its inspiration is an indeterminate quantity and
any man has a right to subject it to the judgment of his own critical insight,
and to receive just as much of it as inspired as he or some other person
believes to be inspired. When the contents have passed through the sieve of his
judgment the inspired residuum may be large, or the inspired residuum may be
small. If he is a conservative critic it may be fairly large, a maximum; if he
is a more advanced critic it may be fairly small, a minimum. It is simply the
ancient literature of a religious people containing somewhere the Word of God;
“a revelation of no one knows what, made no one knows how, and lying no one
knows where, except that it is to be somewhere
between Genesis and Revelation, but
probably to the exclusion of both.” (Pusey, Daniel, xxviii.)
NO FINAL AUTHORITY
Another serious consequence of the
Higher Critical movement is that it threatens the Christian system of doctrine
and the whole fabric of systematic theology. For up to the present time any text
from any part of the Bible was accepted as a proof-text for the establishment
of any truth of Christian teaching, and a statement from the Bible was
considered an end of controversy. The doctrinal systems of the Anglican, the
Presbyterian, the Methodist and other Churches are all based upon the view that
the Bible contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (See
39Articles Church of England, vi, ix, xx, etc.) They accept as an axiom that
the Old and New Testaments in part,
and as a whole, have been given and sealed by God the Father, God the Son, and
God the Holy Ghost. All the doctrines of the Church of Christ, from the
greatest to the least, are based on this. All the proofs of the doctrines are
based also on this. No text was questioned; no book was doubted; all Scripture
was received by the great builders of our theological systems with that
unassailable belief in the inspiration of its texts, which was the position of
Christ and His apostles. But now the Higher Critics think they have changed all
that. They claim that the science of criticism has dispossessed the science of
systematic theology. Canon Henson tells us that the day has gone by for
proof-texts and harmonies. It is not enough now for a theologian to turn to a
book in the Bible, and bring out a text in order to establish a doctrine. It
might be in a book, or in a portion of the Book that the German critics have
proved to be a forgery, or an anachronism. It might be in Deuteronomy, or in
Jonah, or in Daniel, and in that case, of course, it would be out of the
question to accept it. The Christian system, therefore, will have to be
re-adjusted if not revolutionized, every text and chapter and book will have to
be inspected and analyzed in the light of its date, and origin, and
circumstances, and authorship, and so on, and only after it has passed the examining board of the modern
Franco-Dutch-German criticism will it be allowed to stand as a proof-text for
the establishment of any Christian doctrine. But the most serious consequence
of this theory of the structure and inspiration of the Old Testament is that it
overturns the juridic authority of our Lord Jesus Christ.
WHAT OF CHRIST’S
AUTHORITY?
The attitude of Christ
to the Old Testament Scriptures must determine ours. He is God. He is truth.
His is the final voice. He is the Supreme Judge. There is no appeal from that
court. Christ Jesus the Lord believed and affirmed the historic veracity of the
whole of the Old Testament writings implicitly (Luke 24:44). And the Canon, or collection
of Books of the Old Testament, was precisely the same in Christ’s time as it is
today. And further. Christ Jesus our Lord believed and emphatically affirmed
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch ( Matthew 5:17-18;
Mark12:26-36; Luke 16:31; John 5:46-47). That is true, the
critics say.
But, then, neither
Christ nor His Apostles were critical scholars! Perhaps not in the twentieth
century sense of the term. But, as a German scholar said, if they were not
critici doctores, they were doctores veritatis who did not come into the world
to fortify popular errors by their authority. But then they say, Christ’s
knowledge as man was limited. He grew in knowledge (Luke 2:52). Surely that
implies His ignorance. And if His ignorance, why not His ignorance with regard
to the science of historical criticism? (Gore, Lux Mundi, page 360; Briggs, H.
C. of Hexateuch, page 28). Or even if He did know more than His age, He
probably spoke as He
did in accommodation
with the ideas of His contemporaries! (Briggs, page 29). In fact, what they
mean is practically that Jesus did know perfectly well that Moses did not write
the Pentateuch, but allowed His disciples to believe that Moses did, and taught
His disciples that Moses did, simply because He did not want to upset their
simple faith in the whole of the Old Testament as the actual and authoritative
and Divinely revealed Word of God. (See Driver, page 12). Or else, that Jesus
imagined, like any other Jew of His day, that Moses wrote the books that bear
his name, and believed, with the childlike Jewish belief of His day, the
literal inspiration, Divine authority and historic veracity of the Old
Testament, and yet was completely mistaken, ignorant of the simplest facts, and
wholly in error. In
other words, He could
not tell a forgery from an original, or a pious fiction from a genuine
document. (The analogy of Jesus speaking of the sun rising as an instance of
the theory of accommodation is a very different thing). This, then, is their
position: Christ knew the views He taught were false, and yet taught them as
truth. Or else, Christ didn’t know they were false and believed them to be true
when they were not true. In either case the Blessed One is dethroned as True
God and True Man. If He did not know the books to be spurious when they were
spurious and the fables and myths to be mythical and fabulous; if He accepted
legendary tales as trustworthy facts, then He was not and is not omniscient. He
was not only intellectually fallible, He was morally fallible; for He was not
true enough “to miss the ring of truth” in Deuteronomy and Daniel. And further.
If Jesus did know certain of the books to be lacking in genuineness, if not
spurious and pseudonymous; if He did know the stories of the Fall and Lot and
Abraham and Jonah and Daniel to be allegorical and imaginary, if not
unverifiable and mythical, then He was neither trustworthy nor good. “If it
were not so, I would have told you.” We feel, those of us who love and trust
Him, that if these stories were not true, if these books were a mass of
historical unveracities, if Abraham was an eponymous hero, if Joseph was an
astral myth, that He would have told us so. It is a matter that concerned His
honor as a Teacher as well as His knowledge as our God. As Canon Liddon has
conclusively pointed out, if our Lord was unreliable in these historic and
documentary matters of inferior value, how can He be followed as the teacher of
doctrinal truth and the revealer of God? (John 3:12). (Liddon, Divinity of Our
Lord, pages 475-480).
AFTER THE KENOSIS
Men say in this
connection that part of the humiliation of Christ was His being touched with
the infirmities of our human ignorance and fallibilities. They dwell upon the
so-called doctrine of the Kenosis, or the emptying, as explaining
satisfactorily His limitations. But Christ spoke of the Old Testament
Scriptures after His resurrection. He affirmed after His glorious resurrection
that “all things must
be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and
in the Psalms Concerning Me” (Luke 24:44). This was
not a statement made during the time of the Kenosis, when Christ was a mere
boy, or a youth, or a mere Jew after the flesh (1 Corinthians 13:11). It is the
statement of Him Who has been declared the Son of God with power. It is the
Voice that is final and overwhelming. The limitations of the Kenosis are all
abandoned now, and yet the Risen Lord not only does not give a shadow of a hint
that any statement in the Old Testament is
inaccurate or that any
portion thereof needed revision or correction, not only most solemnly declared
that those books which we receive as the product of Moses were indeed the books
of Moses, but authorized with His Divine imprimatur the whole of the Old
Testament Scriptures from beginning to end.
There are, however, two
or three questions that must be raised, as they will have to be faced by every
student of present day problems. The first is this: Is not refusal of the
higher critical conclusions mere opposition to light and progress and the
position of ignorant alarmists and obscurantists?
NOT OBSCURANTISTS
It is very necessary to
have our minds made perfectly clear on this point, and to remove not a little
dust of misunderstanding. The desire to receive all the light that the most
fearless search for truth by the highest scholarship can yield is the desire of
every true believer in the Bible. No really healthy Christian mind can advocate
obscurantism. The obscurant who opposes the investigation of scholarship, and
would throttle the investigators, has not the spirit of Christ. In heart and
attitude he is a Mediaevalist. To use Bushnell’s famous apologue, he would try
to stop the dawning of the day by wringing the neck of the crowing cock. No one
wants to put the Bible in a glass case. But it is the duty of every Christian
who belongs to the noble army of truth-lovers to test all things and to hold
fast that which is good. He also has rights even though he is, technically
speaking, unlearned, and to accept any view that contradicts his spiritual
judgment simply because it is that of a so-called scholar, is to abdicate his
franchise as a Christian and his birthright as a man. (See that excellent
little work by Professor Kennedy, “Old Testament Criticism and the Rights of
the Unlearned,” F. H. Revell). And in his right of private judgment he is aware
that while the privilege of investigation is conceded to all, the conclusions
of an avowedly prejudiced scholarship must be subjected to a peculiarly
searching analysis. The most ordinary Bible reader is learned enough to know that the
investigation of the Book that claims to be supernatural by those who are
avowed enemies of all that is supernatural, and the study of subjects that can
be understood only by men of humble and contrite heart by men who are
admittedly irreverent in spirit, must certainly be received with caution. (See
Parker’s striking work, “None Like It,” F. H. Revell, and his last address).
THE SCHOLARSHIP ARGUMENT
The second question is also serious:
Are we not bound to receive these views when they are advanced, not by
rationalists, but by Christians, and not by ordinary Christians, but by men of
superior and unchallengeable scholarship? There is a widespread idea among
younger men that the so-called Higher Critics must be followed because their
scholarship settles the questions. This is a great mistake. No expert
scholarship can settle questions that require a humble heart, a believing mind
and a reverent spirit, as well as a knowledge of Hebrew and philology; and no
scholarship can be relied upon as expert which is manifestly characterized by a
biased judgment, a curious lack of knowledge of human nature, and a still more
curious deference to the views of men with a prejudice against the
supernatural. No one can read such a suggestive and sometimes even such an
inspiring writer as George Adam Smith without a feeling of sorrow that he has
allowed this German bias of mind to lead him into such an assumption of
infallibility in many of his positions and statements. It is the same with
Driver. With a kind of sic volo sic jubeo airy ease he introduces assertions
and propositions that would really require chapter after chapter, if not even
volume after volume, to substantiate. On page after page his “must be,” and
“could not possibly be,” and “could certainly not,” extort from the average
reader the natural exclamation: “But why?” “Why not?” “Wherefore?” “On what
grounds?” “For what reason?” “Where are the proofs?” But of proofs or reason
there is not a trace. The reader must be content with the writer’s assertions.
It reminds one, in fact, of the “we may well suppose,” and “perhaps” of the
Darwinian who offers as the sole proof of the origination of a different
species his random supposition! (“Modern Ideas of Evolution,” Dawson, pages
53-55).
A GREAT MISTAKE
There is a widespread idea also
among the younger students that because Graf and Wellhausen and Driver and
Cheyne are experts in Hebrew that, therefore, their deductions as experts in
language must be received. This, too, is a mistake. There is no such difference
in the Hebrew of the so-called original sources of the Hexateuch as some
suppose. The argument from language, says Professor Bissell (“Introduction to
Genesis in Colors,” page vii), requires extreme care for obvious reasons. There
is no visible cleavage line among the supposed sources. Any man of ordinary
intelligence can see at once the vast difference between the English of
Tennyson and Shakespeare, and Chaucer and Sir John de Mandeville. But no
scholar in the world ever has or ever will be able to tell the dates of each
and every book in the Bible by the style of the Hebrew. (See Sayce, “Early
History of the Hebrews,” page 109). The unchanging Orient knows nothing of the
swift lingual variations of the Occident. Pusey, with his masterly scholarship,
has shown how even the Book of Daniel, from the standpoint of philology, cannot
possibly be a product of the time of the Maccabees. (“On Daniel,” pages 23-59).
The late Professor of Hebrew in the University of Toronto, Professor
Hirschfelder, in his very learned work on Genesis, says: “We would search in
vain for any peculiarity either in the language or the sense that would
indicate a two-fold authorship.” As far as the language of the original goes,
“the most fastidious critic could not possibly detect the slightest peculiarity
that would indicate it to be derived from two sources” (page 72). Dr. Emil
Reich also, in his “Bankruptcy of the Higher Criticism,” in the Contemporary Review,
April, 1905, says the same thing.
NOT ALL ON ONE SIDE
A third objection remains, a most
serious one. It is that all the scholarship is on one side. The old-fashioned
conservative views are no longer maintained by men with pretension to
scholarship. The only people who oppose the Higher Critical views are the
ignorant, the prejudiced, and the illiterate. (Briggs’ “Bible, Church and
Reason,” pages 240-247). This, too, is a matter that needs a little clearing
up. In the first place it isnot fair to assert that the upholders of what are
called the old-fashioned or traditional views of the Bible are opposed to the
pursuit of scientific Biblical investigation. It is equally unfair to imagine
that their opposition to
the views of the Continental school
is based upon ignorance and prejudice. What the Conservative school oppose is
not Biblical criticism, but Biblical criticism by rationalists. They do not
oppose the conclusions of Wellhausen and Kuenen because they are experts and
scholars; they oppose them because the Biblical criticism of rationalists and
unbelievers can be neither expert nor scientific. A criticism that is
characterized by the most arbitrary conclusions from the most spurious
assumptions has no right to the word scientific. And further. Their adhesion to
the traditional views is not only conscientious but intelligent. They believe
that the old-fashioned views are as scholarly as they are Scriptural. It is the
fashion in some quarters to cite the imposing list of scholars on the side of
the German school, and to
sneeringly assert that there is not
a scholar to stand up for the old views of the Bible.
This is not the case. Hengstenberg
of Basle and Berlin, was as profound a scholar as Eichhorn, Vater or De Wette;
and Keil or Kurtz, and Zahn and
Rupprecht were competent to compete
with Reuss and Kuenen. Wilhelm Moller, who confesses that he was once
“immovably convinced of the irrefutable correctness of the Graf-Wellhausen
hypothesis,” has revised his former radical conclusions on the ground of reason
and deeper research as a Higher Critic; and Professor Winckler, who has of late
overturned the assured and settled results of the Higher Critics from the
foundations, is, according to Orr, the leading Orientalist in Germany, and a
man of enormous learning. Sayce, the Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, has a
right to rank as an expert and scholar with Cheyne, the Oriel Professor of
Scripture Interpretation. Margoliouth, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at
Oxford, as far as learning is concerned, is in the same rank with Driver, the
Regius Professor of Hebrew, and the conclusion of this great scholar with
regard to one of the widely vaunted theories of the radical school, is almost
amusing in its terseness. “Is there then nothing in the splitting theories,” he
says in summarizing a long line of defense of the unity of the book of Isaiah;
“is there then nothing in the splitting theories? To my mind, nothing at all!”
(“Lines of Defense,” page 136). Green and Bissell are as able, if not abler,
scholars than Robertson Smith
and Professor Briggs, and both of
these men, as a result of the widest and deepest research, have come to the
conclusion that the theories of the Germans are unscientific, unhistorical, and
unscholarly. The last words of Professor Green in his very able work on the
“Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch” are most suggestive. “Would it not be
wiser for them to revise their own ill-judged alliance with the enemies of
evangelical truth, and inquire whether Christ’s view of the Old Testament may not,
after all, be the true view?” Yes. That, after all, is the great and final
question. We trust we are not ignorant. We feel sure we are not malignant. We
desire to treat no man unfairly, or set down aught in malice. But we desire to
stand with Christ and His Church. If we have any prejudice, we would rather be
prejudiced against rationalism. If we have any bias, it must be against a
teaching which unsteadies heart and unsettles faith. Even at the expense of
being thought behind the times, we prefer to stand with our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ in receiving the Scriptures as the Word of God, without objection
and without a doubt. A little learning, and a little listening to rationalistic
theorizers and sympathizers may incline us to uncertainty; but deeper study and
deeper research will incline us as it inclined Hengstenberg and Moller, to the
profoundest conviction of the authority and authenticity of the Holy
Scriptures, and to cry, “Thy word is very pure; therefore, Thy servant loveth
it.”
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