The Preacher Among the Critics
THE “higher criticism,” so called, is a general term for the method of subjecting the Bible to critical tests, linguistic, scientific, historical, etc. We cannot reasonably object to the most critical search into theWord of God, but only to the method, spirit, and temper in which such search may be conducted. We are told to “search the Scriptures” (John v. 39 and vii. 52). It was said of the Bereans that they searched the Scriptures daily whether those things were so (Acts xvii). The Greek words, which are used, are different in both these places. Taken together, they give us grand hints as to the method and spirit of a right search and research. Peter says in his first Epistle, iii. 15, “Be ready always to give an answer to everyone that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in you.”
I. But while this is our duty, we must carefullydistlngulsh the provinces of Reason and of Faith. The province of Reason is to weigh evidence in the scales of judgment; and the three great questions which Reason has to ask and answer are these: First, is this the Word of God? Second, if so, what does it teach? And third, what relation has its teaching to me personally? Beyond this, Reason has absolutely no necessary province. When these three questions are satisfactorily answered. Faith comes in the room of Reason, for Reason may not be able to explore the methods and reasons which guide the mind of God. We are to be obedient to the heavenly vision, even though the heavenly vision is itself a nij’stery.
2. And secondly, the Bible, being a supernatural book, demands faith for any true insight into its mysteries. We are told in I Cor., second chapter, that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” and in the eighth of Romans, that “the carnal mind is enmity against God.” The natural and carnal mind are incapacitated for real insight into the Word of God; hence there is need of a supernatural Spirit to assist us in the right understanding of supernatural truths. In the first verse of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the prophet cries, “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed!” There must always be belief before there is revelation, a reception of the testimony of God before there is a higher impartation of understanding and insight.
3. We must learn that there are two worlds; one of matter, tested by the senses; and one, of the soul, tested by the sensibilities. The world of sense is explored by Science, History, Intellect; the world of the soul by Experience and Conscience, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The scientific spirit, when it exists alone, is therefore not a revealing, but an obscuring medium. The scientific man has the wrong point of view when he seeks to explore Scripture simply as a scientist. We are all familiar with optical illusions which result from the harmonies and complements of color. In the color spectrum, chords seem to exist as -in the musical scale: the complement of blue is orange, of green is red, of yellow is violet; and to fix your eyes on a color imparts the complementary color to other objects when the glance is turned to them. So there is prejudice in scientific habit. Scientific men fix their eyes
SO lonij upon one subject or object that, when they turn to another, they are apt to see it in a false light. With regard to worldly wisdom, we are divinely told that .the Lord knoweth the reasonings of the wise that they are vain. A mirror that is turned downward reflects only the temporal and the material; it needs to be turned upward if it is to reflect the celestial and the spiritual. John Stuart Mill had a motherless and godless childhood, and the idea of a personal God was never allowed from any external source to enter his mind. He appears never to have cast off that idea, for he seems never intelligibly to have had it.
4. The unbelieving spirit willfully perverts and distorts the Word of God; to use a Scriptural phrase, it “wrests the Scripture.” The heart makes the theology. Our difficulties are seldom born of the head, but mostly of the evil heart of unbelief, which departs from the living God; and so Dr. C. F. Deems says, “Believe your beliefs, and doubt your doubts. Never make the mistake of believing your doubts and doubting your beliefs.”
5. Scientific fact is to be carefully distinguished from skeptical, or even scientific, conjecture. Many things assumed by scientific men are, like evolution, only a working hypothesis. Yet how often are these hypotheses assumed to be established scientific facts and laws!
6. It is unfair to decide without a full knowledge of facts. Many antagonisms to Holy Scripture are based upon an imperfect knowledge of historical facts. Thirty years ago it was said that Daniel was incorrect in making the reigning King of Babylon to fall and be slain at the time when Cyrus took the city. Subsequent archaeological disclosures show us that Belshazzar, who was actually reigning at the time, was slain, but that it was Nabonadius his father who escaped, and was made a satrap under Cyrus. Thus, subsequent historical disclosures gave the key to apparent contradictions existing hitherto.
With much of the modern criticism the fault is that it too often assumes that no facts are as yet unknown, and that whatever is not apparent has no actual existence. This is an imperious assumption and presumption, and it is quite remarkable how discoveries in archaeology have been thus far confirmatory of the Divine Word. Socrates said of his
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mission in Athens that it was to bring men from ignorance unconscious to ignorance conscious. He said, “the difference between me and these sophists is: I know nothing and l<now tJiat; others know nothing but do not know that.” His knowledge was limited, but their ignorance was extensive.
7. Positivcness and emphasis of statement must not be substituted for accuracy. The Rev. C. A. Berry said of a prominent London preacher, that he made emphasis to do duty for originality. History is a great commentary on human errors. The first vessel that crossed the Atlantic by steam actually bore a document proving the impossibility of such propulsion. One of the higher critics of America declared that by attacks made upon himself he was goaded on to justify his assault oil the Scriptures as having in them errors, and he gave four examples of the errors that were unmistakable. A subsequent reviewer has shown that in each of those four cases the error is the error of the critic and not of the Scriptures!
8. Scientific intolerance is as offensively conspicuous as religious bigotry ever has been. The authority of great names is often substituted for accuracy of statement, and, as
Dr. Stalker says, the greater part of the modern assaults of higher criticism on the Bible have been simply borrowed wholesale from German philosophers, metaphysicians, and neologists. J. Stuart Mill says, “No man is so likely to see what you do not, as one who does not see what you do.” We venture to add in full an extract from Delitzsch on modern criticism: “Willful contempt of external testimony, and frivolity in the treatment of historical data, have from the first been the fundamental evil apparent in the manner in which modern critics have handled questions relating to Isaiah. These two coryphaei of the modern critical school [Hitzig and Ewald] find themselves hemmed in between the two conclusions * that there is no true prophecy and that there is no true miracle.’ They call their criticism * free,’ but when it is examined more closely, it is in a vise. In this vise it has two magical formularies, with which it fortifies itself against any impression from historical testimony. It either turns the prophecies into merely retrospective glances, as it does the account of miracles into mere sagas, or myths; or it places the events predicted so close to the prophet’s own time that there was no need of inspiration, but only a combination, to make the oversight possible... That school of criticism which will not rest till all the miracles and prophecies which cannofbe set aside excgetically, shall have been eliminated critically, must be regarded by the Church as self-condemned.”
9. It is certainly fair to test any system by its fruits. The severest arraignment of modern higher criticism is found in this, that it is proving utterly destructive of faith in the Word of God, which has been the greatest boon to man. From the middle of Elizabeth’s reign to the Long Parliament, the British people were the people of one Book, and that Book was the Bible, and aiiNthing that destroys the confidence of the people in the Bible is a calamity. We have heard of an American preacher of whom one of his hearers said that he was a master of analysis, but good for nothing in synthesis: he could take the Bible to pieces, but never could put it together again. Modern criticism, so far as it has obtained a hold upon the popular mind, is proving destructive of faith, and, if the present growth of skepticism continues, in the very pulpits where higher criticism is now preached, we shall have Deism preached, as was true in the first half of the last century. We sympathize with Joseph Cook of Boston, who said, “Pillow my head on no guess when I am dying.” One of the saddest fruits of modern criticism is found in the lowering of the standard of faith, in students for the ministry. It was said of a theological seminary in America that it had four students: one was an agnostic, the second a skeptic, the third a dyspeptic, and the fourth a fanatic. Ministers themselves come together in their ministerial meetings, and even appear in the presence of their congregations, to promulgate their doubts. What if we should come to a period of pulpit ministry, when it should be true of our churches as someone says of one of M. D. Conway’s lectures, that he went there and found “three persons and no God.” Let us not hesitate to give the Bible the most careful and painstaking search, but let us do it with reverence, and make no hasty inductions or assumptions. Take it for granted that yon do not know everything and never will. Be sure of the truth and hold it fast; take no man’s “say so “for a final authority. Dispute every inch of ground when you are defending the faith, and, whenever you feel the solid rock beneath your feet, never forsake it for shifting and treacherous quicksands.* The Rev. J. M. Buckley, D. D., the editor of the Christian Advocate, in a sermon before Cornell University, gave an impressive illustration of the dangers attendant upon the acceptance of the theories of higher criticism. He said:” A series of sermons was published in Scotland, teaching that almost
* Rev. Dr. C. II. Waller, in the English Churchman, showed the very dangerous character of the Higher Criticism. A method of study which logically imputes ignorance to the Prophet of whom it was foretold, “Him shall ye hear in all things, whatsoever He shall say unto you,” is, in our judgment, little short of a denial of the one Master and Lord. Dr. Waller says:
“The study of theology, as advocated and pursued by the Oxford Regius Professor of Hebrew, means that, in spite of the Lord’s express statement that ‘’David himself said by the Holy Ghost’ the words of the first verse of Ps. xc, we are to read the Psalm, and discuss 7vithout prejudice — /. c, without bias in either direction — who the author was. Dr. Driver h.xs done this, and has decided that the Psalm was not David’s. He covers his decision with the statement that ’ the cogency of our fiord’s argument is unimpaired, so long as it is recognized that the Psalm is a Messianic one.’ Who does not see that, //” Da7’id is not the author, David’s son is not shown to be David’s Lord?”
Dr. Waller holds up the saying, “without prejudice,” to the light of experience, and makes it abundantly clear that in studying the things of God it has no place. He says:
“Ever since the fall, when man gave up faith in God for trust in his and our great enemy, we have had an inborn prejudice against God’s truth, mingling itself with the natural love of truth and dislike of deception which our Maker implanted in our souls.”
everything held to be fundamental to Christian faith had, by the researches of modern scholarship, been found untenable, and speaking of what remains in an indefinite way. These discourses were republished in the United States. Among those who read and accepted them was a woman, in the city of New York, of great intelligence and intellectuality and of high culture. A year or two later she removed to a suburb upon the Hudson River, continuing to attend the Presbyterian church, but frankly informing the pastor that she had lost faith, and attributing the change to those discourses. Afterward she became ill and died of a lingering disease. During the months of steady but not rapid progress to the grave, the pastor frequently visited her, making every effort to re-establish her faith in the simple provisions of the Gospel, but in vain. To the last she said that she knew nothing, and was not able to believe anything positively. So much had been shaken that she was not certain there was anything that could not be shaken.
“Less than a year after her death, the author of those sermons was summoned to trial for heresy. When the charges were submitted, he asked a little time for reconsideration and submitted a statement that when he prepared those discourses he believed them, but further reflection had convinced him that he had erred in taking many things for granted that had not been proved, deducing conclusions that were not warranted even by his premises, and expressing himself in an unguarded manner, and that he desired to retract several of the discourses in whole, and in part all but one or two. But the woman who had given up her faith in the essentials of the Gospel for faith in him had died in darkness!”
Dr. McCosh tells a similar story of a professor, who in his earlier career trained a generation of doubters, whom in his later life he vainly sought to lead to faith.