03 - The Genesis of Higher Criticism

III- THE GENESIS OF HIGHER CRITICISM THE year 1914 saw the beginning of the most horrible catastrophe the world has ever seen since the Flood. This war has devastated a dozen nations, thrown the whole world into a tumult of apprehension, killed and wounded many millions. That this should or could happen in the most highly civilized and Christianized nations of earth has led the whole world to ask, "Is Christianity a failure?" This frightful carnage among Christian peoples, butchering one another with all the ferocity of savages, has given point to the infidel’s sneer that after nineteen hundred years of Christianity, the world is no better than in the time of the monster Nero, and seems in some respects worse. Is the cause of this war to be found, as skeptics assert, in the failure of Christianity? Or is it to be found in the rejection of Christianity by those who profess to accept it? That the so-called Christian nations have failed somewhere, none can deny. But are the nations as Christianized as we have been led to suppose? Even in the United States, only about a third of the inhabitants so much as make a profession of Christianity. "Are all those who profess religion real believers in the Bible?" is a question that is asked more insistently, as evidence becomes clearer that many of the religious leaders are teaching infidelity. The Rev. G. A. Gordon, of Boston, is known throughout the nation as a careful, scholarly minister. He recognizes something new in the history of religion. "A new mood has arisen in the sphere of religion. It fills the educated world. It reaches the entire intelligence of the time. Is this new mood for better, or for worse? Is there any law or force upon which one may look for control of the fearful flood? When Christian scholars, teachers, preachers, disciples of the Lord, have, in one degree or another, abandoned immemorial traditions, is there any guide on whom we may rely?"-"Religion and Miracle," pages 149, 150. The Rev. R. F. Horton, one of the leaders of English religious thought, observes the same tendency. "The Bible, which was declared by Chillingworth to be the religion of the Protestants, has been dissected, analyzed, discredited, denied, by Protestant scholars."-"My Belief," page 88. The Rev. Dr. G. A. Smith, known internationally as conservative, is likewise aware of this new movement and its results. Higher criticism "has shaken the belief of some in the fundamentals of religion, distracted others from the zealous service of God, and benumbed the preaching of Christ’s gospel."-"Modern Criticism and Preaching of the Old Testament." A new movement that is so prolific of disastrous results is worthy of careful study- yes, demands most serious consideration; for if these men are right, the greatest danger that ever confronted the church is even now besetting her, and immediate aid is needed. The attack on the church and the Bible has changed greatly in the last generation. To-day there is not the crude and violent unbelief that repels by its coarseness. Infidelity is just as infidelic, but it is more refined. It has taken on culture and learning. It no longer inhabits mainly the taverns and the gambling hells. Its headquarters are now in the great universities and some of the renowned theological institutions, and its propagators are often their learned professors and theologians. But in neither place is it called by its right name. In the university, infidelity parades under the garb of science; and in the church, it is called higher criticism. It everywhere scorns the coarse unbelief of Paine, while adopting his very arguments. It eschews with a shudder the vulgarity of Rousseau, while vigorously maintaining his conclusions. It clothes itself in the pleasing livery of culture and learning, or the grave habiliments of Christianity. For hundreds of years, the thinking of Europe was held in thralldom by the speculations and superstitions of the ancients and the traditions of the fathers. When, however, the mind began to free itself, the power of superstition was broken, tradition lost its strength, and men ventured to think for themselves. From believing everything, they swung to the opposite extreme. Thus we find thinkers of the eighteenth century, led by Descartes, Hume, and Gibbon, doubting everything. They went so far as to doubt not only the truth of the Bible, but the existence of God, and even their own existence. Finally some leaders of religious thought, in search for intellectual novelty, imbibed freely of the rising critical movement among unbelievers, and began gradually to apply the principles of doubting to the Bible.

"Criticism is not this or that opinion," says Professor Nash, "neither is it this or that body of opinions. It is an intellectual temperament, a mental disposition."-"History of Higher Criticism," pages 84, 85. It is a movement of doubt, of denial, of skepticism, that is gathering force in both the world and the church with each passing year. Its roots are in heathenism, its poisonous fruitage is in the professedly Christian church. This new form of infidelity - higher criticism- must not be confounded with lower or textual criticism, which has to do solely with ascertaining from the oldest documents the exact text of Scripture. This study was made increasingly necessary by the advent of the wholesale criticism, which ran like wildfire over the world of thought. All honor to those noble scholars who, like Tischendorf, and Tregelles, and Griesbach, and Westcott, and Hort,* have devoted the energies of their great minds and long lives to the humble but important work of textual investigation. (*This is to be queried. -temcat)

Higher criticism is an entirely different affair. It devotes itself to considering the "integrity, authenticity, literary form, and reliability" of the Bible. Charles A. Briggs, D. D., "Study of Holy Scripture," page 92. This sounds innocent enough; but when the results of this method are to destroy the integrity, deny the authority, alter the literary form, and evaporate the reliability of the Scriptures, an investigation is seriously demanded.

Richard Simon, a Roman Catholic priest, is called the "father of higher criticism." In 1678, he advanced the new theory that only the ordinances and commands of the books of Moses were written by him, while the history was the product of various other writers, fused into its present form either by him or by some one else. Simon’s declared purpose was "to show that the Protestants had no assured principle for their religion." How it saddens the heart to see leading Protestants eagerly engaged in aiding this very work!

Simon’s views were so vigorously attacked at the time, that they lay dormant for scores of years; but in 1753, higher criticism again raised its hideous form from the dust. In this year, Jean Astruc, another Roman Catholic, by the publication of his "Conjectures," inaugurated the main movement which for a hundred and fifty, years has been growing with accelerating influence, until to-day it is the dominant theological conception in the religious world. In these "Conjectures," Astruc called attention to the fact that in Genesis, the word for "Creator is sometimes "God" (Elohim) and sometimes "Lord" (Jehovah). For instance, in Genesis 1:1, we read that "God created the heaven and the earth;" and in Genesis 4:9, "The Lord said unto Cain." Absurd as it may seem, it is a fact that the use of "God" in one place and "Lord" in another was adduced as proof that the accounts in which these words are found were written by different men at widely different times. This is the beginning and foundation of that top-heavy structure of higher criticism, which overshadows everything else in the religious world to-day and is casting the black shadow of doubt across every page of Holy Writ. Thus in the Catholic Church was conceived, born, and nursed the modern child of unbelief. With shame I must write that it has been adopted by Protestantism, like many another child of error born of Catholicism, and is eagerly heralded by Protestant divines as the child of light. In 1771, the German critic Semler published the book "Treatise on the Free Investigation of the Canon," which gave a new impulse to the movement. He maintained that as the canon was not formed at one stroke, but gradually, the documents composing the Bible were produced by a like growth. While this theory contained a grain of truth, it was soon warped out of all semblance to fact. The next step was taken in 1780, by J. G. Eichhorn, who combined in one work all the results of previous critics; claimed, in addition, to see other differences between the two "sections" than in the divine name; extended the theory over the whole of the Old Testament; laid down the rule, now, universally accepted by higher critics, that Bible "writings are to be read as human productions and tested in human ways;" and for the first time, gave the process the name of "higher criticism." In 1792, still another Roman Catholic divine, Dr. Geddes, advanced the movement by promulgation of the "fragmentary hypothesis," which resolved the first six books into an agglomeration of longer and shorter fragments between which no threads of connection existed, put together in the reign of Solomon. All this, however, was mild compared with what was soon to follow. The Armory from Which Our Lord’s Effective Weapons Were Drawn (Compare Matthew 4:4, Matthew 4:7, Matthew 4:10)

"Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord." Deuteronomy 8:3.

"Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God." Deuteronomy 6:16.

"Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." Deuteronomy 6:13, Septuagint. With De Wette’s essays, in 1805, began the bold unbelief of higher criticism proper. He flatly refused to find anything in the books of Moses but legend and poetry - history, he maintained, there was none. He advanced the now accepted critical theory that the date of the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy in the temple 624 B. C. was also the date of its composition. It was declared to be a pious fraud perpetrated by priests to establish their power, and hidden by them in the temple, to be discovered by one of themselves. That ministers of the gospel believe and teach such a thing is an astounding fact. That leading ministers of the world believe and teach that one of the sublimest compositions in the world is only a lie, manufactured by hypocritical religious leaders for purposes of fraud, is startling evidence of the pernicious character of the higher critical theory.

While the distinction of the divine names failed after Exodus 6:1-30, the lynx-eyed critics claimed to detect other linguistic phenomena which served as well. So Bleek in 1822, Ewald in 1831, and Stahelm in 1835, developed the new theories. In 1835, a long stride was taken in higher criticism. That year saw the publication of Vate’s "Old Testament Theology," Baur’s "Pastoral Epistles," and Strauss’s "Life of Jesus." The violent religious controversy arising from these productions lasted till 1853, when Hupfeld superseded the "fragmentary hypothesis" with the "document hypothesis," which found three main documents instead of two. The finishing touches were now given in rapid succession. The "document hypothesis" soon gave way to the present prevailing theory, the "development hypothesis," formulated by Reuss, and made public in 1866 by Graf, who turned a critical somersault by advancing the theory that Leviticus was written two hundred years after Deuteronomy. Since 1883, Wellhausen has been elaborating this theory, till his views dominate higher criticism the world over. They have crossed the mountains and permeate France, passed over the channel and control England, sailed the ocean and prevail in America.

There were now four sources recognized in the first half of the Old Testament, designated by the capitals J, E, D, and P. But this was by no means all. These four sources were found to be inadequate to account for all the contents of these books ; so the critics, in an endeavor to make their preposterous theory stand upright, made a further division and subdivision. The original J and E of Astruc were dissolved into this nebulous series: J1, J2, J3, J4; E1, E2, E3, E4, etc., or equivalents, all of which are now part of the recognized critical apparatus of higher critical books and magazines. But the end is not yet. The heights of absurdity might seem to have been reached; but no, the masterpiece of foolishness was yet to come. Having got themselves entangled in the critical cogs, it was impossible to escape. The Rev. C. A. Briggs, D. D., gravely informs us that "there were groups of earlier Ephraimitic (E) and Judaic (J) writers, and they were followed by groups of Deuteronomic (D) and Priestly (P) writers."-"Study of Holy Scripture," page 290. (See also Gunkel, "Genesis," page 58; Cheyne, "Founders of Criticism," page 39; Dr. Driver, "Genesis," page 16.)

Charles Foster Kent, professor of Biblical literature in Yale University, tells us there were whole schools of writers at work for centuries on the "task of collecting, arranging, and combining the earlier writings of their race."-"Beginnings of Hebrew History," page 42. (See also McFadyen, "Messages of Prophecy and Priestly Historians," page 22.) So at last we have arrived by the critical route at the present position of the new theology, - that whole "schools of writers" were continuously engaged for centuries in patching, revising, tessellating, resetting, altering, and embellishing the work of their predecessors, some of which was fraud and forgery! This is what our leading Protestant scholars believe to be the origin and foundation of the Christian religion!

Reluctantly we are led to admit, in the words of Hugh McIntosh, that higher criticism "would bury an expired Christianity with an incredible Bible, beside a dead Christ, in a hopeless grave, from which there is no resurrection; and bury along with them the only consolation of a sorrowful humanity amid the desolations of death and the darkness of futurity, without one ray of hope to alleviate the eternal gloom; and would turn mankind backward millenniums, and convert the dawn of a new century into a midnight darkness and a world’s despair."

However harshly I may criticize the theories of higher critics, I desire to make it emphatically understood that at no time have I anything to say against the morals of a single higher critic. I admire their many noble thoughts, their profound learning. It is not their motive I impeach or even question. But I exercise the same freedom in criticizing their theories that they have already used in criticizing the Bible. It is not because I desire to criticize either these gentlemen or their theories that I have written; it is because, after studying their writings for years, I am more firmly convinced, each passing year, that the greatest danger which ever threatened the church lurks in these very theories. I agree with Principal Andrew Fairbairn that "we ought never to have controversy with men, only with false systems; and with what is false only that we may win the fitter opportunity to speak the truth."-"Studies in Religion and Theology," page 137.

It is not the iniquitous life of the abandoned sinner, nor the debauching example of the libertine, that corrupts men, so much as the subtle influence of harmful opinions fostered and advocated by moral men, noble men, who, under the delusion that they are propagating principles for the good of humanity, exert their great learning and charming genius to lead to eternal ruin. As noble a man as ever lived may, in walking along a hillside, loosen with his foot a stone above the heads of people below. No matter how many errands of mercy those feet have traveled, the danger to those beneath will not be lessened one whit thereby, nor the stone be made any softer when it comes crushing upon them. If I see the stone loosened by feet even now bent on an errand of mercy, shall I hold my peace because the man is noble, religious? Must I hold my peace and see innocent people killed because, perchance, the man who kills them is a gentle-souled Samaritan? Who is so lost to the nobler feelings of humanity, who so indifferent, that he would not cry out with all his might, "Out from under!"