The Fundamentals on Higher Criticism: What Volume 1 Says

Apologetics Bible Study Doctrine

Volume 1 of The Fundamentals is a reply to the higher criticism of the Bible, the school of scholarship that, by the early 1900s, was teaching that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that the book of Isaiah came from two or more writers, that Daniel was written long after Daniel's day, and that the early chapters of Genesis were legend. Its nineteen essays do not reject the study of the Bible's history. They reject a method that, in their writers' view, began by ruling out the supernatural and then read the evidence to fit. You can read Volume 1 free in TheWay Library; this article walks through what it says.

What "higher criticism" meant

The volume begins with Dyson Hague's History of the Higher Criticism. He starts by clearing up the name. "Higher" did not mean better:

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."
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter I

Lower criticism studied the text itself, the manuscripts and their readings. Higher criticism studied the dates, authors and origins of the books. Hague calls that study "a very valuable branch of Biblical science." His quarrel, and the quarrel of the whole volume, is with what certain critics, mostly German, had made of it. He traces the line from early critics such as Eichhorn and De Wette down to Graf, Kuenen and Wellhausen, and ends where nearly every writer in the volume ends, with Christ:

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.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter I

The method, not the questions

The writers say over and over that they are not afraid of hard questions. W. H. Griffith Thomas puts it this way in Old Testament Criticism and New Testament Christianity:

We do not question for an instant the right of Biblical criticism considered in itself.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter VII

What they object to are the assumptions underneath. Franklin Johnson, in Fallacies of the Higher Criticism, names one of them:

The background of the entire picture which they bring to us is the assumption that the hypothesis of evolution is true.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter III

If religion must have grown slowly upward from simple beginnings, then a full law and a worked-out system of worship cannot have come at the start of Israel's history, so the Law must be late. The conclusion was built into the premise. J. J. Reeve, a seminary professor who had once accepted the critical view, says the same thing from the inside in My Personal Experience with the Higher Criticism:

It is their philosophy or world-view that is responsible for all their speculations and theories.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XIX

Sir Robert Anderson, the former head of criminal investigation at Scotland Yard, brings a detective's eye to it in Christ and Criticism. He says the rationalistic critic "began with the verdict and then cast about to find the evidence." True criticism, he says, goes in with an open mind.

Moses and the Pentateuch

Several chapters defend the traditional view that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. George Frederick Wright, an Oberlin professor and geologist, sums up the arguments of the Jewish scholar Harold M. Wiener in The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch. He begins with the burden of proof: Jews and Christians had accepted Moses as author from the earliest times, and the critics' case rested on inference. He ends with a challenge:

The defender of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch has no occasion to quail in presence of the critics who deny that authorship and discredit its history.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter II

David Heagle's long essay on the Tabernacle in the wilderness takes one test case. The critics held that the Tabernacle described in Exodus never existed and was a later invention. Heagle argues that if the Tabernacle was real, the whole critical scheme falls. Andrew Craig Robinson adds three peculiarities of the Pentateuch that do not fit a late date: it never names Jerusalem, it gives no place to sacred song in its ritual, and it never uses the title "Lord of hosts," though all three were prominent in later Israel. A book written centuries later by priests in Jerusalem, he reasons, would hardly leave them out.

One Isaiah

George L. Robinson of McCormick Seminary defends the unity of Isaiah in One Isaiah. He traces how the book was divided, piece by piece, from the late 1700s on, until critics were assigning parts of it to many hands. At the center of the dispute were the later chapters, which name Cyrus, the Persian king, long before he was born. If those chapters are prophecy, they could not have been written by a later writer looking back. Robinson does not give ground:

Deny to Isaiah the son of Amoz the predictions concerning Cyrus, and the prophecy is robbed of its essential character and unique perspective
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XII

The Book of Daniel

Joseph D. Wilson's chapter on the Book of Daniel opens by naming the root of the problem:

Modern objections to the Book of Daniel were started by German scholars who were prejudiced against the supernatural. Daniel foretells events which have occurred in history. Therefore, argue these scholars, the alleged predictions must have been written after the events.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XIII

Wilson answers that prophecy is not impossible if God is real, and then goes through the historical objections one by one. He points to Ezekiel's mention of Daniel alongside Noah and Job, and to Christ's own reference to "Daniel the prophet." His conclusion is bold:

Daniel is better attested than any other book of the Old Testament.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XIII

Reeve also uses Daniel to show what the critical view costs. A book that has strengthened suffering believers for centuries, he notes, becomes on that view mostly fiction written to look like history.

The early chapters of Genesis

Two essays defend Genesis 1 to 11. James Orr, the Scottish theologian, writes on The Early Narratives of Genesis. He takes up the claim that the two accounts of creation contradict each other and that the Flood story is borrowed from Babylon, and he concludes:

In conclusion, it is clear that the narratives of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, are not myths, but narratives enshrining the knowledge or memory of real transactions.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XI

Dyson Hague's Doctrinal Value of the First Chapters of Genesis shows why it matters. Everything in the Bible, he argues, grows out of these chapters: creation, the fall, sin, the promise of a Saviour, marriage, the unity of the race. Take them away and the rest has no root.

The Book of Genesis is the seed in which the plant of God's Word is enfolded.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter XIV

Christ's own witness

For these writers, the deciding question was not finally about Hebrew style or dates. It was about Jesus. He spoke of Moses as the author of the Law, of Isaiah as the prophet who wrote of Him, of Daniel as a prophet, and of Noah and the Flood as history. William Caven's Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament sets out what Jesus said about the Old Testament and draws the line:

Our object has been to show that the Lord regards the entire book, or collection of books, as divine, authoritative, infallible.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter X

Anderson goes further. He is happy, he says, to allow free study of Scripture, with one limit:

With a single limitation, he would advocate full and free criticism of Holy Scripture. And that one limitation is that the words of the Lord Jesus Christ shall be deemed a bar to criticism and "an end of controversy" on every subject expressly dealt with in His teaching.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Chapter VI

Archaeology and science

The last chapters bring outside evidence. Wright on the monuments and M. G. Kyle on recent archaeology show how discoveries in the Near East had confirmed details of Bible history that critics had doubted. Orr's Science and Christian Faith answers the popular idea that science and the Bible are at war. Many of the great scientists of the past, he notes, were devout Christians, and he finds that "science and the Biblical views of God, man, and the world, do not stand in any real relation of conflict."

A critic who changed his mind

The volume closes with Reeve's own story, and it is a good place to begin if you're new to the subject. He had studied at a leading university, found the critical view attractive, and accepted much of it. Then he looked harder at its starting points and turned back. His last word is that the critical positions are "essentially attempts to undermine revelation, the Bible and evangelical Christianity."

Reading Volume 1

Volume 1 is the most scholarly of the four, and some chapters assume the reader knows the critics by name. If that feels heavy, read Reeve first, then Hague's history, then Wilson on Daniel. For the background of the whole set, see What Are The Fundamentals?, and for every chapter and writer, the full contents. The case continues in Volume 2, which turns from the critics to the Bible's own claims; see The Fundamentals on the Deity of Christ.

Volume 1 is free to read in TheWay Library.