The Perils of Bible Criticism
It was Mr. E. P. Whipple, we believe, who once remarked that "exegesis" too often means "exit Jesus." It cannot be questioned that there is a sort of Bible study, characterized by subtle wire-drawing and fine hair-splitting, which tends to bring all careful and scholarly Bible study into disrepute. And yet any Christian man will admit, when he stops to think for a moment, that no research and trouble necessary to get at the meaning of the word of God is misspent. The only trouble is that men of little learning, but of much hard sense, have a conviction that the result of much of the critical scholarship of the day is to get out of the Bible not God's message, but a meaning that was never there until the critic's ingenuity put it there. It is a pity that there is just enough of this kind of scholarship to make a conviction not altogether unfounded.—Sel.