Higher Criticism Confounds Itself by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 15, 1912

Higher Criticism Confounds Itself

By C. M. S.

THE recently published religious statistics of this country are causing much wonderment and no little anxiety among both the laity and the clergy. They are asking why it is that the rate of increase in church-membership is so low. Some are denying that the figures are accurate. Others accept the figures, and declare that the reason for the small increase lies in the fact that the people are losing faith in the Bible as God’s infallible Word. For the latter class Dr. David Utter, of the Unity Church, Denver, Colo., speaks:—

The reason [for this decline in increase of church-membership] is that civilization is leaving behind it the old or orthodox belief. The Bible is no longer accepted by all people, as it once was, for a volume of unbroken truths. There is so much of myth about it, which the modern mind recognizes as myth, and the rejecting of these portions has led to a general and growing skepticism regarding its infallibility throughout. For instance, the story of creation. Now, that was doubtless written by a man who sincerely believed that he was penning the truth to hand down to coming ages. But to-day all well-informed people believe in evolution. We understand the laws of nature. We know that the world is millions and millions of years old, and that it is gradually developing by natural and necessary processes, and will go on and on.

This clergyman, who represents a large number of others in different denominations, has been reared in that school of infidelity popularly known as the higher criticism; and this class of clergyman, teaching their unbelief of the Word of God and making their attacks upon it in Sunday-school classes and to their congregations from the pulpit, have brought about in the minds of the masses the very conditions which now are deplored. The fault is not with the Old Testament nor with the New Testament. The trouble is that infidels are wearing the garb of the clergy, and in that garb are undermining, in the minds of men, the very foundations of religion. When we take into account that the higher criticism is being taught in the great schools of theology, and that its complement, that Siamese twin evolution-geology, is being taught in the universities, colleges, academies, and even the high schools, it is not to be wondered at that the people’s faith is wavering. When one has lost his faith in the Bible as the Word of God, he is not going to make much effort to convince himself of the genuineness and the worth of Christianity, which finds its only basis in that Word.

Destructive criticism has not made the Bible any less true, nor taken away the necessity of a divine Saviour for mankind. What it has done is so to misrepresent that Word and that Saviour and that Saviour’s work, that the people have been and are being deceived, and are turning away from their only true Guide, losing faith in the only Saviour there is or ever will be, and so are drifting into the rapids of eternal ruin. This makes the people harder to reach with the gospel. It makes the claims of both the law of God and the law of the land to sit lightly upon them. As a consequence of this, they are drifting more rapidly into the pleasures of this world, are seeking to grasp all they can of the things of this world,—the only one they ever expect to see,—and are therefore letting self and selfish aims drive them into all manner of excesses. This accounts not only for the decreasing rate of gain in church-membership, but also for the rising tide of criminality throughout every portion of the world where the destructive criticism is being inculcated. The responsibility for these conditions lies at the door of the destructive criticism of the Bible. It is so axiomatic that even the higher critic himself ought to be able to see it. It would be a genuine miracle if such results did not follow such teaching.

Again we quote the words of our Saviour: “When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” Was it not a genuine miracle that he should look down over a space of two thousand years, and see the conditions which we see? He saw them, and he asked the question which shows that he saw them; and higher criticism, which denies him and his miracles and the bulk of the Old Testament, is itself doing the work which is bringing about the conditions that we see now, and that he saw then. Truly this is a miracle, a fulfilment of prophecy, in which the higher critic plays a conspicuous rôle; and by doing the work which brings about this divinely foreseen condition, he unintentionally proves the existence of miracles, and confounds himself because of his denial of them.

C. M. S.