What is historical criticism?

So much for Liberal Catholicism itself, but to see it in its true perspective we must be reminded of its relation to a larger field. Recent times, as all are aware, have witnessed a new and most important departure in the theological world. Among other contributions, the nineteenth century has given us Biblical literary science, otherwise known as higher or historical criticism. And this it is which furnishes the most important item of the Modernist programme, on its intellectual side at least. Now this new "science" (!) has raised a question of intense interest and moment to believers everywhere, and to trace its workings is a matter of first importance. The claim of the literary method of studying the scriptures to be a recognised and legitimate science, though but of yesterday, is already conceded in full by not a few Protestant scholars and theologians. There are as yet but few results, as far as (what they will call) established conclusions are concerned; but of what so-called conclusions there are, much parade has been made. There are many professing Christians, however, still far from concurring in any conclusions, who yet profess to believe the methods of this science legitimate and harmless, and deprecate a firm stand as to the real inspiration of the scriptures as being either obscurant or over-suspicious of new light. But simple believers, to whom the Bible is indeed the word of God, have all along distrusted the entire scheme, method and conclusions alike. Not only so, but they emphatically deny not only its harmlessness but also its legitimacy.

My other remark is one of sorrow. All examination of the originals, collecting of manuscript readings, versions, etc., is a proper and most useful employment. It is usually called "textual criticism," or a judgment as to the text, based on the various readings, etc., of different manuscripts. In contrast with this, there is another form of judgment, miscalled "higher criticism," whose purpose it is to judge of the text by its contents, and to accept or reject it according to certain standards adopted by the critics. In this way, judging, and most often mistakenly, by differences of style, new words and supposed doctrines or opinions, the books of the Bible have been cut to pieces. The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is rejected, its date of composition made much later, and practically the Spirit of God is ignored and despised. I have no hesitation in declaring this form of criticism, as usually pursued, to be a work of Satan. It is not within our sphere to examine it. I can only say it has laid its unclean hands upon well nigh every portion of God's word, and as a result has robbed those who are ensnared of a faith in that Word.

A journal of the day sent me gives the Dean of Westminster's theory of inspiration, which is really a denial of God in it. Scientific discovery [?] is assumed to have revealed facts plainly inconsistent with Genesis taken literally, and to cast Christians on Origen's mischievous allegorising. The Dean is one of those who do not go as to miracles all the lengths of many Germans, Dutch, and Americans, to say nothing of some Britons. He talks of the vast difference between the historical evidence for our Lord's miracles, and that for many of the O.T. miracles. But such a defence cannot long resist the dead weight of unbelief. Evidence of sense was enough to render inexcusable those who saw; but it is slight compared with God's testimony in Scripture. If men did believe on evidence only, the Lord did not believe in them (John 2:24-25). Man must be born anew for God's Kingdom; and this is of the Holy Ghost through faith, greater than any miracles, which are a sign to unbelievers, but have per se no power to bring sinners to God. Modern scientists, who dare to assail scripture will have to mend their hypotheses as well as their exegesis; in fact they are scarce better than heathen philosophers. But think of the folly and the sin of professed Christian teachers being influenced by speculative anthropologists, astronomers, biologists, geologists, against God's written word! Ascertained facts are very distinct from human theories, and have never been proved to clash with Holy Writ, ardently desired as this issue has been by some.

As to the Dean's principles, they are not of faith and cannot please God, any more than secure the truth to man. "Biblical criticism proper" is the reducing of the current text, injured by human copying and also by editorial guesswork, to the very words of the Holy Spirit as originally written. But neo-criticism is essentially infidel; because it consists of man's mind sitting in judgment on what no Christian can reasonably doubt to be the deposit for faith through the inspired writers. What he calls "the science of literary and historical investigation," or the self-styled "higher criticism," is unbelieving, illegitimate, and spurious, certainly as applied to Scripture, and uncertain for any other ancient book, such as Homer for instance, in the hands of even a first-rate scholar like Karl Lachmann.

It is certainly a bold and subtle plan of the enemy to import in this sense the scientific spirit into Scripture itself, to fix our minds upon theories of its production which are proclaimed incapable of damage to our faith because merely that, until we find that unawares we have indeed "pushed back" God far into the distance. The "higher" criticism, as distinct from that of textual integrity, concerns itself, it is said, only with questions of "authorship, etc." — where the "etc." will be found much the most important part — of the Bible books. "Its conclusions," says Prof. Driver, "affect not the fact of revelation, but only its form. They help to determine the stages through which it passed, the different phases which it assumed, and the process by which the record of it was built up. They do not touch either the authority or the inspiration of the scriptures of the Old Testament. They imply no change in respect to the divine attributes revealed in the Old Testament, no change in the lessons of human duty to be derived from it, no change as to the general position (apart from the interpretation of particular passages) that the Old Testament points forward prophetically to Christ."

Next we are told whereby these moderns trust to subvert not merely what the church has believed for many centuries, but what the Lord and the apostles taught of the scriptures. 1, Textual criticism, which is in no way their province. 2, Linguistic criticism, which surely belongs to competent Christian students. 3, Their pet "higher criticism," the most visionary attempt to imagine a variety of interpolators instead of the alleged author. 4, Historical criticism, sought to be distinguished from the Higher, it is hard to say why. 5, Archaeology and comparative religion. In these and other ways they hope to revolutionize men's thoughts of the Bible, and urge the clergy to understand their methods, to estimate its results, and to consider how these affect their teaching (pp. 5-7).

Now in the face of this conspiracy of soi-disant experts to shake the O.T. to its centre and cast the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets avowedly into a sea of uncertainty, we have the sure fact of infinite comfort to every believer that the incarnate Son of God ruled the divine authority of these very scriptures, and that, risen from the dead, when prejudices disappear from the weakest of saints. The Lord authenticated them as testimonies to Himself in the flattest contradiction of modern criticism. So did the Holy Spirit sent forth from heaven from Him glorified, and this both to such ecclesiastical rulers as Timothy and Titus, and with no less freedom and fulness to the mass of the faithful in the Epistles, remarkably anticipating the sceptical attacks on Moses and David, Isaiah and Daniel, by declaring each the writer of the books attributed to them, as for instance of the latter part of Isaiah no less than the former. "He [Moses] wrote of Me."

The Pentateuch Perhaps no portion of Scripture has been more assailed by destructive criticism than the five books of Moses and the reason is not far to seek, because if the foundations be destroyed, the superstructure must follow. It has therefore been the object of the enemy to impeach the veracity, the credibility and the directly inspired character of this first section of our Bibles. All shades of error are seen here, from the bold attack of the infidel after the manner of Paine (alas, to be heard from many a pulpit today!) to the specious and apparently pious platitudes about God's permission of error and the Lord's self-emptied ignorance of what was true. Higher criticism is but infidelity attacking the word of God. There is a higher criticism — as contrasted with the criticism or study of the text of Scripture — but the use of the word at all has been unfortunate. We have but one mention of the word "critic" in Scripture, and there it is declared that, "The word of God is quick and powerful" and is "a discerner (critic) of the thoughts and intents of the heart." This is the highest criticism, and the highest wisdom is to let the divine Critic judge our hearts and ways, and set them in the light of His own perfect truth. We would have no difficulty then about "higher criticism."

That is important to remember. The intellect used away from God means infidelity, I do not care what name it is called by, for it has hundreds of names. This northern power was a confederacy. Jabin was the head of all the kings of the North. In like manner the sway of mind is called by many names. At one time it may be the Arianism that denied the divinity of our Lord at another, the deadly deism that excluded God from His own world. Later on, it may be rationalism, or, as in our own time, Higher Criticism. But whatever the form, reason, the understanding of man is exalted. They say, Of course Scripture is of great value, and, in a certain sense, authoritative but, remember, intellect comes first. That is the keynote to the whole Higher Criticism. It is that man, puny, sinful man, is capable of giving his judgment upon the word of God. Now, I do not care what place you give Scripture, if you give it a place short of the absolute perfection of God's revelation with absolute authority, you are giving it a place which Jabin himself wants it to have. Do the higher critics, for instance, tell us that they are infidels? Do they tell us that they do not believe in the Bible? No, indeed, they say they believe in the Bible more than we. They say they bring their intellect to bear upon it, and sift out of it men's thoughts, so that sitting in judgment upon it all, they tell us what is divine and what is human. Thus you have sinful man giving judgment upon the word of God. When he does this, he becomes an absolute enemy to the truth of God.

2 Three questions arise in connection with study of any Book of the Bible: (i.) as to the authorship and the materials ("sources") used by the writer, to which those engaged in the higher internal criticism address their inquiries; (ii.) as to the authority attaching to the Book, which is concerned with inspiration, and also with interpretation; (iii.) as to its genuine text, which is the inquiry of textual, external criticism (cf. Barry, p. 28). To each of these topics some remarks will be devoted, as introductory to such study of the Gospel.

Evolution had been accepted as a fact, and now the same principles were applied to the study of the Scriptures. Modern criticism has asked, Why may we not look upon the Scriptures which we hold in our hands, not as original documents, such as they purport to be, but rather as the final result of a long process of evolution? This was applied both to the form, the structure, and the doctrines of the various Bible books.

Against a reverent study and inquiry into the form, structure, and contents of the Scriptures we have no word to say. Indeed, the very purpose of this present series of studies is to encourage a deeper, fuller, wider, and bolder examination into the whole realm of revealed truth; but a casual examination of the so-called modern criticism shows that it is hostile in its intent; it is destructive, not constructive. As in nature God had been so far removed from His creation as to have practically nothing to do with it, so in revelation everything of a supernatural character was eliminated. Miracles were therefore pronounced a priori impossible, or at least most unlikely, and prophecy as well. So, too, the conceptions of God — the earlier ones — were taken as necessarily materialistic and low, developing later on to the more spiritual ideals as a result of the cultivation of the human family.

The Bible books themselves, instead of being complete works, the product of a single writer, or the compilation of an inspired man, were looked upon as compounded of discordant and contradictory traditions. Early myths which had grown by being handed down from one generation to another were combined with much later material by more or less skilful editors, so that, for instance, the book of Genesis, instead of being the coherent and inspired account of the earliest ways of man, and of God's ways with him, came to be a mass of material upon which the higher critic expended his genius in sorting it into its various component parts.

The same treatment was applied to other portions of the Scriptures besides the Pentateuch. Law, Prophets and Psalms all shared the same fate. Passing also into the New Testament, so-called higher criticism found much to encourage its activities in the work of destruction. Eliminating the miraculous element from the first three Gospels, little was found remaining, as we will readily admit; while the exalted teachings of the fourth Gospel rendered it quite impossible that they could have been given by an unlearned fisherman. Therefore this Gospel was the product of a much later date — was, indeed, an effort to graft upon the Christianity of the apostles the more vigorous stock of new Platonic philosophy. Paul never wrote the most of the epistles attributed to him, and the glories of the Revelation were but the ideal dreams of millennarians of a later century, views utterly inconsistent with the Judaism of the early Church.