Higher Criticism by Earle Albert Rowell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 7, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 22.

Higher Criticism

By Earle Albert Rowell

By Earle Albert Rowell

V. The Higher Critics and Christ

AFTER dissecting the Old Testament, dissolving the accounts of the fall, the Flood, the Exodus, into myths, and the stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Job, Samson, David, Jonah, and even Solomon into legends; after discounting or flatly denying all that is supernatural in the Old Testament, and leaving us with a “patch-work of legends” and a “collection of forgeries” as the result of their methods, the Higher Critics turned their scalpel upon the New Testament, and have now been dissecting it, and would fain turn their weapon of destruction upon Christ Himself.

Dr. Briggs, who holds a brief for Higher Criticism, says: “The Higher Criticism of Holy Scripture is a science, and its results are as sure as those of any other science.”—“Study of Holy Scripture,” page 105. Let us see, then, what some of the “sure results” of this “science” are when applied to Christ.

“Back to Christ,” has been the cry; and so in the last fifty years more lives of Christ have been written than in all the eighteen hundred years preceding. Having discarded most of the Old Testament as legend or myth, and discredited a large part of the New, Higher Critics at last began to realize that they were on dangerous ground. To excuse their course and steel their arm for further dissecting, they claimed that they were discarding only the inconsequential husk or outer shell to get to the kernel—Christ. Yet in spite of their claim to sacrifice nothing essential, they are making a desperate struggle to convince themselves that they haven’t given up Jesus. When it is pointed out that their understanding is different from ours, they inform us that they have “rediscovered Jesus,” that they have “cast new light upon His life.”

The Inexorable Logic of the Theory

Where Paul or James or John contradicts their interpretation of Him, they calmly tell us that the apostles were wrong. When the facts are against the theory, why, the facts must be altered or excluded, that the theory may stand. In short, the Christ gave His Spirit to guide His disciples “into all truth,” these Spirit-guided disciples “misinterpreted Christ” in many instances, falsified His words in others; and it has been left to modern Higher Critics to interpret Him aright. Now let us briefly review a few points of this new interpretation which is casting so much new light on Christ. Since they had previously regarded the creation, the fall, the Flood, the destruction of Sodom, the Exodus, and much else as myths and in no sense historical, and all the personages mentioned in the books of Moses, with Moses himself, and Job, Jonah, David, Solomon, and even Ezra, as alike unhistorical pure myths; when they found that Christ, in every instance that He has occasion to refer to any of these persons or events, invariably accepts them as actual, real, and historical, they were for a while staggered, and endeavored, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, to reconcile the facts with their theory.

But they soon recognized its impossibility, and so the inexorable logic of their theory led them to take another step in the history of the movement—they boldly said that Christ was mistaken in His belief in these accounts. Christ, then, erred; for hadn’t they, the Higher Critics, proved that Moses and Abraham were myths, and the Flood and the destruction of Sodom moss-covered fables? Christ believed these old myths and legends as actual history, so here was a flat disagreement between the Critics and Christ. The Critics couldn’t be wrong, so of course Christ must be!

Infidelity Then and Now

When Ingersoll lectured on “the mistakes of Moses,” the Christian world was shocked; but to-day, when hundreds of ministers are lecturing on “the mistakes of Christ,” there is hardly a whispered protest in the same churches that were so horrified by Ingersoll. Once the attacks were made by skeptics upon despicable trivialities; but now they are made by ministers in the pulpit the world over, by Catholics and Protestants, not against trifles, but against the foundations of the Christian religion.

Since the fall is discarded as a legend, the fact of sin is ignored or denied; or as Campbell, minister of London City Temple, says, “Sin is, after all, a quest for God.”—“New Theology,” page 151. “Sin is the transgression of the law.” “He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning.” 1 John 3: 4, 8. The devil, then, was engaged in “a quest for God.” But in spite of Campbell’s dictum, we know that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6: 23), and not, as this sugar theology would have us believe, eternal life.

The Atonement and Incarnation

Since the atonement is founded upon the fact that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3: 23), and is the very heart of our redemption, and the burden of the Bible, and the object of the Gospel, we need not be surprised that their logic compels them to reject this also; nay, they even spurn it.

“The doctrine” of the atonement, says Campbell, “as popularly held, is not only not true, but it ought not to be true: it is a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why in the world should God require such a sacrifice before feeling Himself free to forgive His erring children?”—Id., page 115. This view is everywhere prevalent in Higher Critical books, and is the logical outcome of their fundamentally infidel theories. It is their vicious theory that is sapping the spirituality and cutting the sinews of faith in so many churches.

Of course, with the atonement goes the belief in the incarnation. “The nativity stories belong to the poetry of religion, not to history. To regard them as narratives of actual fact, is to misunderstand them.” So “the simple and natural conclusion is that Jesus was the child of Joseph and Mary.”—Id., pages 101, 102.

Since the Bible says the contrary, the Higher Critics meet the fact thus: “Now one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of Scripture.”—Id., page 176.

Yet God opened the heavens to say: “This is My beloved Son: hear Him.” Mark 9: 7. And Christ said, “The word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me;” and, “The word that I speak, the same shall judge him in the last days. For I speak not from Myself; but the Father that sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life eternal; the things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I speak.” John 14: 24; 12: 48-50. What could have greater “binding authority” than the words of our Creator?

Another Gospel

While claiming to return to the historical Christ, this New Theology disbelieves His most explicit utterances, disowns His lordship over them, repudiates His claims to divinity, calls His belief in the Old Testament a snare and a delusion, rejects completely His authenticated miracles, criticizes, discards, and even spurns much of the Gospel accounts of Him as largely fiction and wholly subject to reason’s pronouncement; and in fact these Higher Critics not only exclude the supernatural and deny or discount prophecy, but hand over nature to science, leave history to secular writers, abandon truth to philosophy, and leave only “feeling, imagination, and illusion” to religion.

What emerges from this man-made chaos is not the Christianity of the apostles, nor the “mind of the Master,” but a perversion, a miserable mongrel, that is another gospel, which indeed is not another. In order to evade the force of their open denial of the authority of Christ, the claim is made that while much of the Gospels is myth and legend, this is really better than if they were true history! Says Campbell, “Myth and legend are truer than history, for they take us to the inside of things, whereas history only shows us the outside.”—Id., page 255. This is an astounding statement. Lies and error truer than truth! Lies and deception the core and center, and truth only the outside or husk! Such a vain imagination refutes itself, but it shows to what makeshifts the New Theologians are driven in order to defend their actual infidelity.

But with it all and through it all, they doggedly affirm that they at least have saved enough out of the wreck for salvation, that the kernel of God’s truth imbedded in the Bible myths and legends remains untouched by their scorching fires of criticism. But who shall say what and how much is essential to salvation? From Acts 10: 35; Psalm 19; Rom. 10: 5-18; 1: 18-32; 2: 14, 15; John 1: 9, and other Scriptures, we find it clearly taught that some who have never heard of the Bible or of Christ may be saved. Then to them neither the Bible nor any part of it is absolutely necessary to their salvation.

Therefore if the Bible is trustworthy only in what is essential to salvation, their logic leads to the necessary but glaring conclusion that it is not trustworthy in anything, is not needful, and may be a superfluity.

That this is not a far-fetched conclusion deduced from their theories, is evident from the bold declaration of one of the Higher Critical ministers, R. J. Campbell: “I close by solemnly adding: Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth, but trust the voice of God within you.”—Id., page 199.

As if the truth that came direct from God through Jesus (John 12: 49, 50), who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14: 6), and who is “full of grace and truth” (John 1: 14), and who said of the Bible, “Thy Word is Truth” (John 17: 17)—as if this truth could be contradicted by the God of truth speaking in the heart!

Since, then, Higher Criticism is a frank denial and open repudiation of the teachings of Christ, of His atonement, of His saving grace, shall we drink at these broken cisterns of infidelity the waters of skepticism? Instead, “let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” Rev. 22: 17.