p. 6 | Higher Criticism by Earle Albert Rowell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 31, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 21.

Higher Criticism

By Earle Albert Rowell

IV. Higher Criticism and Inspiration

Since we have found that the Higher Critics’ theories are so completely contrary to the Bible teaching, we need not be surprised if their views of inspiration are also unscriptural. Since they cut the Bible up according to their individual caprice, one would naturally expect their ideas of the sacredness and inspiration of the Holy Writ to be anything but high. And such we shall find to be the truth.

“Reason for the rational, conscience for the right—these are the sole organs for appreciating the last claims upon us, the courts of last appeal, whose verdict it is not only weakness, but treason, to resist.”—Martineau, “Seat of Authority,” page 129. Further he says: “We have not simply to take, but always to choose.”—Page 297.

It is self-evident that in such a view there can be no room for a belief that God’s Word is inspired; for no one who believed that the words of the Bible are really the inspired words of God, would have the impious presumption to reject some and accept others. As McIntosh puts it:

“It boldly declares that the seat of authority in religion, as in everything else, is not in any Book or Person outside of man, but in man himself; not in Scripture or in Christ, but in reason and conscience; not in revelation or in God, but in intuition and consciousness, in experiment and observation, in science and philosophy.”

How delusive, therefore, is the claim of Higher Critics that they are giving us a better view of inspiration.

The Miraculous Discarded

Higher Critics make inspiration an impossibility, for they claim that mistakes are necessary, otherwise “the writers were lifted above opinions and were not allowed to think.”—Id., page 360. What strange logic: The more mistakes a man makes, the better thinker he is! It is such reasoning as this that Higher Criticism is driven to in defense of its baseless and absurd theories.

Even the words of Christ are not considered inspired. “The authority and finality which they deny to the New Testament in general, they deny to Him in particular,” says another of the Higher Critics, McFadyen, “Old Testament Criticism and the Christian Church,” page 11. In fact they talk and write learnedly of “the mistakes of Christ.” Nothing is sacred or inspired to them.

Another reason for their denial of the real inspiration of the Bible, is found in the fact that Higher Criticism ignores where it does not deny the supernatural. To get rid of the miracles, the inspiration of their accounts must be denied. As McFadyen says, “Its watchword is evolution, and it has no place for miracle.” Since inspiration itself is supernatural, its existence can not be allowed.

Discarding the inspiration of the Bible takes out of the history of Israel all that makes it distinctive. “A non-miraculous Old Testament history will issue in a non-miraculous Jesus; and then Christianity will be, in the famous phrase of Kuenen, ‘but one of the principal world religions, nothing less and nothing more.’”—Id., page 12.

Dr. Kuenen, in “Prophets and Prophecy in Israel,” takes all of its six hundred ample pages to show that the prophets were not moved to speak by God, but that their utterances were all their own. On page 585 he gives voice to the views of Higher Critics in general and his own in particular:

“So long as we derive a separate part of Israel’s religious life directly from God, and allow the supernatural or immediate revelation to intervene in EVEN ONE SINGLE POINT, so long also our view of the whole continues to be incorrect, and we see ourselves here and there necessitated to do violence to the well-authenticated contents of the historical documents. It is the supposition of a NATURAL DEVELOPMENT ALONE which accounts for ALL of the phenomena!”

Bible “Errors”

“And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of the Lord.” Num. 33:2. Not so, say the Critics, for in the first place Moses never wrote a word of the Bible, and in the next those who did write the books accredited to Moses, composed them out of their imagination for purposes of fraud. As for being inspired of God, nothing is further from the Critical theory, or more utterly contrary to its flimsy assumptions and presumptuous unbelief.

“The most that we can claim for them [the Bible writers] is that they were inspired by God in their work, so that they were guided into truth and preserved from error as to all matters of religion, faith, and morals.”—Briggs, “Study of Holy Scripture,” page 331. But he says that they err in religion (page 643), and “they err in their morals. But errors in moral precept were such as were necessary in order to educate Israel for a nobler time.”—Id., page 644. So we see that even tho the most that Higher Critics say can be claimed for inspiration is meager and unsatisfactory, they make no secret of the fact that even this is discarded, and they boast that Bible errors “are innumerable, and the erroneousness indefinite and indefinable, and the untrustworthiness unlimited and illimitable.”

Since the authority of the Bible must be derived from its inspiration, its trustworthiness, and this authority has been ruthlessly torn away, the Bible is shorn of its power, deprived of its comfort, and its readers are left to darkness and despair.

The Theory of Inspiration

The most prevalent theory of inspiration among Higher Critics is that entertained by Dr. G. A. Smith in his “Isaiah.” “Isaiah prophesied and predicted all he did from, loyalty to two simple truths, which he tells us he received from God Himself: that sin must be punished, and that the people of God must be saved. This simple faith, acting along with a wonderful knowledge of human nature and ceaseless vigilance of affairs, constituted inspiration for Isaiah.”—Page 373. With reference to prophets in general he says, “By a faith differing in degree, but not in kind, from ours, these men became prophets of God.”—Page 372. And then he consistently illustrates his meaning by telling us that men of science, “by their knowledge of laws and principles of nature,” or some great generals by their “taking for granted” that the sun will rise, or patriots like Mazzini, whom he classes as a prophet like Isaiah, all had “the same divine movement on their natures,” and are as much inspired as any writer of the Bible. The writings of Browning, of Carlyle, of Ruskin, of Gladstone, are on this theory as much inspired as those of Paul or Isaiah. In fact the Higher Critics go so far as to claim that even infidels are as much inspired as the Bible writers, for we are told that infidels like “Hume, Strauss, and Voltaire were guided in their attacks on the Bible by God!”—Briggs, “Study of Holy Scriptures,” page 80.

Thus we have arrived by the Higher Critical route to the conclusion that even the worst infidels the world ever saw were as much inspired in their attacks on the Bible as was John, or Paul, or Peter, in writing it! How such patent absurdity and glaring contradiction can be gravely preached by the leading theological teachers of the world is beyond my comprehension. They who believe such things certainly strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. Higher Criticism was born of rationalism, cradled in skepticism, nursed by infidelity, and is now baptized and adopted by the church. Strange blindness! Woful infatuation! Terrible will be the awakening, awful the penalty, when those who now so flippantly discard the most sacred writings as no better than the infidel ravings of Hume or Voltaire, meet “the Word I have spoken,” for “the same shall judge him in the last days.” John 12:48.

These Higher Critics may be presidents of theological colleges, or the pastors of influential churches; but the humble child of God knows that “if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.” Isa. 8:20. The Christian can never be moved who stands firmly upon the fact that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroly furnished unto all good works.” 2 Tim. 3:16.