p. 3 | The Doctrine of Religious Evolution

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 20, 1906

“The Doctrine of Religious Evolution”

This is the title of a chapter in that excellent work “Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies,” in which the author, A. H. Sayce, the well-known Assyriologist, mercilessly exposes the weakness of some of the conclusions of the higher critics concerning the Bible. Inasmuch as the modern method of interpretation which is responsible for the conclusions of the New Theology is based upon the evolutionary conception of the Bible, the forcible statement of Dr. Sayce will be of special interest and value. We quote the following: —

Driven from its first assumption of the late use of writing for literary purposes, the “higher criticism” has fallen back on the doctrine of evolution. Evolution is the key-note of modern science, both physical and psychological, the magical key with which it hopes to unlock the secrets of the universe. There has been evolution and development in history, as well as in the forms of life, in the systems of the material universe, or in the processes of thought. There must have been evolution also in religious and moral ideas, in political conceptions and in theological dogmas. If once we could discover its law, we should be able to trace the course it has followed, and know what is first and what is last in the religious systems of the past.

The disciples of the “higher criticism” have assumed not only that the law is discoverable, but also that they have themselves discovered it. They know precisely how religious ideas must have developed in the past, and can consequently determine the relative age of the various forms in which they are presented to us. Certain conceptions of the priesthood or the sanctuary, the “critic” tells us, are older than others; therefore, if there are books or passages which do not conform to his ruling, they must be forced to do so by an alteration of the traditional dates. What the “critic” believes to have been the order of evolution is thus made the measure of their age and authenticity.

But it does not follow that what the “critic” believes must have been the order of evolution was necessarily so. In all probability it was not. The European critic of the twentieth century, writing in his library of printed books, has little in common with the Oriental of the ancient world. The thoughts of the one are not the thoughts of the other; the very world in which they move is not the same.

The “critical assumption,” in fact, is an inversion of the true method of science. We must first know what was the order of the phenomena before we can discover the law of evolution which they have followed. It is only when we have ascertained what forms of life or matter have succeeded others that we can trace in them a process of development. We can not reverse the method, and determine the sequence of the phenomena from a hypothetical law of evolution.

This, however, is just what the “higher critics” of the Old Testament have attempted to do. They have assumed that what seems to them the natural order of the development of spiritual or moral ideas was the actual order, and they have mutilated and re-dated the literary material in order to support the assumption.

It has seemed to them that the institution of an Aaronic priesthood must have grown out of an earlier Levitical system, and that the codification of the law of Israel must have followed and not preceded the development of prophecy; and, consequently, setting tradition at defiance, they have remodeled the ancient history of Israel, rewritten its sacred books, and forced the evidence into conformity with their historical scheme. . . .

In fact, the whole application of a supposed law of evolution to the religious and secular history of the ancient Oriental world is founded on what we now know to have been a huge mistake. The Mosaic age, instead of coming at the dawn of ancient Oriental culture, really belongs to the evening of its decay. The Hebrew legislator was surrounded on all sides by the influences of a decadent civilization. Religious systems and ideas had followed one another for centuries; the ideas had been pursued to their logical conclusions, and the systems had been worked out in a variety of forms. In Egypt and Babylonia alike there was degeneracy rather than progress, retrogression rather than development. The actual condition of the Oriental world in the age of Moses, as it has been revealed to us by archeology, leaves little room for the particular kind of evolution of which the “higher criticism” has dreamed.

But in truth the archeological discoveries of the last half-dozen years in Egypt and Crete have once for all discredited the claim of “criticism” to apply its theories of development to the settlement of chronological or historical questions. It is not very long since it was assuring us that the civilization of Egypt had little or no existence before the age of the fourth dynasty, that no records had been kept or monuments preserved of so “prehistoric” a period, and that the kings whom tradition assigned to it were but the “half-fabulous” fictions of later centuries.

And yet these half-fabulous fictions have turned out to have lived in the full blaze of Egyptian culture; their tombs and public works were on a grandiose scale, their art was far advanced, their political organization complete. The art of writing was not only known, but an alphabet had been invented, and a cursive hand formed. A chronological register of time was kept year by year, and the height of each successive Nile minutely recorded. The civilization of Egypt in the reign of Menes was as high as it was under the Pharaohs of the fourth dynasty. The application of the canons of the “higher criticism” to the earlier history of Egypt has signally failed.

Nor is it better when we turn to the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, and the islands and coasts which were afterward Greek. Here, we were told, there was nothing but the darkness of an illiterate barbarism before the beginnings of the classical age. The traditions which have survived of an earlier period were resolved into myths and fabrications, and we were bidden to believe that the pre-Hellenic history of the Ægean could never be recovered, for none had existed. A knowledge of writing, we were assured, was unknown in the age in which the Homeric poems first took shape, and art sprang ready-made like Athena from the head of Zeus, in the stormy epoch of the Persian wars. Backed by his favorite appeal to the want of evidence, and fortified with his doctrine of development and his assumption of the late introduction of writing, the “critic” was confident that his negative conclusions could never be gainsaid, and that what had passed for the earlier history of Greek lands had been dismissed by him forever to the realm of myth.

The awakening has come with a vengeance. The skepticism of the “critic” has been proved to have been but the measure of his own ignorance, the want of evidence to have been merely his own ignorance of it. The spade of the excavator in Crete has effected more in three or four years than the labors and canons of the “critic” in half a century. The whole fabric he had raised has gone down like a house of cards, and with it the theories of development of which he felt so confident.