The Appalling Results of German Rationalism and Destructive Criticism

The fifth important lesson of the year 1917 is the appalling results of German Rationalism and Destructive Criticism. This war could never have been if an increasingly numerous body of German scholars since 1833, when David Strauss gave to the world his “Leben Jesu,” had not been undermining the faith of German preachers, and through them the faith of the German people in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. If the German rulers and people had continued to believe as Luther, whose four hundredth anniversary we celebrated this year, taught them to believe, then this war never would have been. But David Strauss, Ferdinand Baur, Wellhausen Graf, Friedrich Delitzsch and the rest have done their work, and behold, the war and its shame and its agonies, its death, its destruction, turning the earth that was fast becoming a terrestrial paradise, into a terrestrial Inferno, and this same Rationalism, and this same Destructive Criticism, destructive in more senses than one, we are teaching and exploiting and supporting in our theological seminaries throughout our land today, Yale, Andover, Union, Newton, Crozier, Chicago University, and many others. Are we Americans fools? Can’t we lay to heart a lesson that is written so large over the year 1917?