The New Criticism by Howard Crosby

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 19, 1882

The New Criticism.

By Howard Crosby

THE right position of the Christian mind before the assertions of the new criticism is the conservative one. All the presumption is against the assaults upon the word of God. The faith of ages cannot be overthrown by a handful of nineteenth century scholars. A dozen learned men of this age cannot, by their fine-spun theories, convict of error the ten thousand giants of learning who have lived and testified to the integrity and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. Moreover, the internal testimony of the Bible is a complete stopper to this revolutionary idea. Our Lord, through his ministry, held up the Old Testament (just as we have it) as the ultimate standard of divine truth, and recognized the Pentateuch as the work of Moses. The new criticism corrects our Lord and gives Moses the credit of only a few chapters, while the mass of the Pentateuch was a composition of a period from seven hundred to one thousand years after Moses. It will require a large army of Welhausens to make a Christian believe this. If the Messiah made such a fundamental error as to bolster up a pseudo-Moses, and endorse a pious fraud of Josiah's time and Ezra's time, alas for the truth and righteousness of the Messiah's spiritual kingdom!

The only fact established, on which these slashing critics build, is the fact that the Old Testament is documentary. From this they leap to the conclusion that it is a hap-hazard patchwork, a pot-pourri of various ages and objects, put together by clumsy workmen with the design to perfect a polity, which, by their own acknowledgment, had already decayed! The whole of this kite-tail is manufactured out of modern material, and attached to the one fact of documentary originals. They use in the manufacture the argumentum a silentio, and the free use of the exscinding scissors, wherever a passage awkwardly stands in their way, and in this brusque manner have an easy time of it, in burying Moses, and showing our Lord's ignorance.

Because the men who do this thing are learned men, thousands are ready to follow them, or at least to shake their heads very wisely at their dicta, as if these were oracles not to be despised. But learned men have often been the biggest fools. The knowledge of Hebrew and all the Semitic languages, however thorough and exhaustive, does not make a man wise. The learning of a whole university does not give a man common sense. Walking dictionaries and talking encyclopaedias are often as destitute of clear logic as the dictionaries and encyclopaedias which we buy at the bookstores. To follow a man's conclusions because he is learned, is to become acolyte to an ignis-fatuus. These learned men of the new criticism should be treated as we should treat any others who attack a deeply rooted belief, with very great caution and with all the presumption against them. A haste to accept their doctrine or to show it respect, betrays a weakness that is too often entitled liberality. A man ready to embrace every new Bathybius, cannot be trusted as a guide.

These theorists ought to learn modesty from the ludicrous displays of dogmatic nonsense made by such as they in former days. The Dendera temple, we all remember, was, according to the most learned men in Europe, built seventeen thousand years before Christ. The man who doubted this dictum was behind the age. He belonged to the order of infantile Bible worshipers, whom scientific men despise as the ignobile vulgus, unworthy of any other regard than a sneer. Weak-backed Christians saw the Dendera temple and immediately collapsed. Up went the white flag of surrender. The zodiac was proof positive. Moses and Jesus alike were annihilated by that writing on the wall. Moses lay dead for twenty years under this terrific blow, but with wonderful resurrectionary power he revived when the false copying of the temple was removed, and the name of Tiberius Caesar was revealed as the builder of the temple. The marvel is that our theorists did not then insist that Tiberius flourished seventeen thousand years before Christ. We think they could have manufactured that story with the tools they had.

At another time the Kuenens and Wellhausens of the day, with their Robertson Smith echoes, found that the inspired writer or compiler of Chronicles had a very big and ugly hole in his inspiration. He had (2 Chron. 33: 11) recorded that the King of Assyria carried Manasseh to Babylon, when, of course, no king of Assyria would have done such a thing. He would have carried him to Nineveh, his capital. But the ignorant writer, writing in a late age, perhaps in the Maccabæan period, had a dim notion of a Babylonish captivity in the past, and therefore naturally sent Manasseh to Babylon. The weak-backed Christians rushed at once into their favorite retreat in time of danger. "Oh! the Scriptures were not given to teach us geography or history." The Scriptures may make all sorts of mistakes in every science, and tell us the moon is made of green cheese, and yet be God's holy word of truth! Infidels chuckle when they find Christians ready to acknowledge that the word of God, so reverently quoted and exalted by our Lord, is brimful of crude errors and ridiculous mistakes. However, as to Babylon, when the Assyrian discoveries showed that Esar-haddon, the conqueror of Manasseh lived not at Nineveh, but at Babylon, we did not hear any "beg your pardon" from the learned critics, but they went zealously to work to find another ugly hole in the inspiration of the Bible.

And they are hard at it still, hunting for holes, and every now and then shouting "Heureka," at which shout the feeble ones tremble and the liberal ones say, "Amen," for are they not learned men who shout? —Dr. Howard Crosby.