Higher Criticism by Earle Albert Rowell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 9, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 31.

Higher Criticism

By Earle Albert Rowell

XIII. Higher Criticism and Interpretation

O-DAY there is not the crude and violent unbelief of a century ago. Infidelity is just as infidelic, but it is more refined. It has taken on culture and learning. It no longer inhabits mainly the taverns and gambling-hells. Its headquarters are now in the great universities and popular churches, and its propagators are their learned professors and devout divines.

But in neither place is it called infidelity. In the university it is called science and in the church it is called Higher Criticism. It everywhere scorns the coarse unbelief of Paine, while adopting his very arguments, and eschews the vulgarity of Rousseau, while maintaining his conclusions, and clothes itself in the pleasing garb of culture or learning, or the grave habiliments of Christianity.

With an air of advanced learning and a pose of impartial justice the Higher Critics have advanced a new theory of interpretation which has been reduced by Jowett to one precept: "Interpret the Scripture like any other book."—"Essays and Reviews," page 416.

This method of interpretation has been called by Delitzsch the chief "charism" of our age (American Journal of Theology, January, 1902), and Ryle calls it the special gift of God to the modern church ("The Canon of the Old Testament," page 14), and Dr. Hall says it may "almost be described as a second advent of the Incarnate Lord" (see his "Universal Elements of the Christian Religion," pages 207-255).

The interpretation of the Old Testament by New Testament writers is marked by their practise of seeing Christ in all parts of the Old Testament. But the interpretation of the Old Testament by Higher Critics is, on the contrary, marked by their practise of excluding Him from it entirely. That I have by no means exaggerated will be evident from the words of the eminent divine who has written the most recent, and from the Higher Critical view-point the most authoritative history of interpretation: "There is no evidence that Jesus saw a predictive element in the Old Testament; no evidence that, in His thought, any Old Testament author had foreseen His historical appearance, the circumstances of His ministry, His death and resurrection."—Gilbert, "History of Interpretation," page 71.

A more astounding statement, or a more complete denial of the truth of the Old Testament, or of the teaching of the New, was never made by the most hard-headed infidel; and yet it emanates from an eminent theologian. What shall the Christian think of this in the teeth of Christ's words in Matt. 24: 15, "When therefore ye see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet"? Is there no predictive element recognized here?

What about His quoting Isa. 61: 1, 2 in Luke 4: 17-21, and saying, "To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears"? And still further, "And beginning from Moses and from ALL the prophets, He interpreted to them in all THE SCRIPTURES THE THINGS CONCERNING HIMSELF." Luke 24: 27. And yet "there is no evidence that, . . . in His thought, any Old Testament author had foreseen His historical appearance"! In view of such utter denial of Christ by avowed believers in Him, we may well ask, Where will this baptized skepticism, this Christianized infidelity, end? and what will be the necessary harvest of such teaching in the church?

Not "Mistakes of Moses," but "Mistakes of Christ"

In order to exalt their own authority and infallibility, the Higher Critics must insist that Christ's methods of interpretation were not only faulty but mistaken. "Of what in modern times is regarded as the technical qualification for scientific exegesis, He had, of course, no more than the generation to which He belonged."—Id., page 72. Could anything be more blasphemous than the condescending fatuity of such a statement? Christ's interpretation of the Old Testament is sneered at as blinded by Jewish prejudice, and He Himself actually held up to ridicule because He was not a Higher Critic, or in other words, an infidel!

Higher Critics defend their action thus: "Many people are alarmed, as if, when we begin to remove the dirt from an old master, we were going to destroy the glorious picture itself. But we remove the dirt which has become encrusted, that the picture may be more clearly seen and better appreciated than before."—Joseph Wood, "The Bible," page 12. The reader has in these articles had ample evidence that what the Higher Critics study the Bible for is to find dirt, and that where they can not see any they imagine it and then engage in herculean and learned efforts to remove this imaginary dirt.

What should we think of the student of art who brought a microscope with him into an art gallery, and when he saw what looked like a fly-speck off in the corner of a picture, immediately lost himself in examination of that fly-speck, and then left the gallery without having even noticed the picture itself, but discoursed learnedly and wrote weighty tomes upon the fly-speck in the corner? One who is not willing to squander most of his time in erudite investigation of supposed fly-specks, but prefers to devote it to the study and investigation of the majesties, splendors, and unrivaled beauties of the Bible, is called not only "unscholarly and behind the times," but one minister asserted that one who in simple faith believes the Bible is "a brainless idiot." Yet no one believed the Bible more implicitly than his own Creator and Saviour. Such are the fruits of Higher Criticism.

It is their principles of interpretation that leads the Higher Critics so far astray. One of their primary principles of interpretation, tacitly used or openly avowed, is this: Given a scripture which admits of two meanings, one making sense and the other nonsense, choose the latter meaning as the only one admissible, criticize according to Higher Criticism, and eliminate from the Bible, as evidence of the ignorance of the writer, and proof that the Bible is "full of errors, imperfections, contradictions, prejudices, passions, . . . that it had its birth in the mind of man."—Balmforth, "The Bible from the Standpoint of Higher Criticism," volume 2, page 263.

Wisdom of Man

Another principle is this: If two writers record the same event in the same or practically the same language, why then they both borrowed their ideas from some common source, and are not to be relied upon, because we know not how trustworthy that common source is. On the other hand, if two writers see the same event from different but equally true angles, as Paul and James, or Matthew and John, why then one or the other must be wrong, usually both, and the Higher Critic constructs a theory which alone can be right. Also, if a certain event is recorded by only one writer it is not to be credited, because it is unsupported by other testimony! But that is by no means all, for if a writer is silent concerning certain events that the Higher Critics think he ought to have written about, why then he is ignorant of it and is held up to ridicule because of this ignorance! For instance, the fact that Christ did not in specific terms denounce the sin of slavery is adduced by these learned divines as proof that He did not believe or know it is a sin!! This nightmare system of interpretation is the boasted product of Higher Criticism, and there is hardly a denomination in Christendom that is not honeycombed with its emasculated Christianity, and in imminent danger of being deluded to its destruction by this mirage of destructive Criticism.

Hasty doubters, whether ecclesiastical fanatics, blank atheists, mechanical fatalists, despairing pessimists, or Higher Critics, all make the Bible a patchwork interpreted by a scissors exegesis, which measures religious emotion by a foot rule, and in their fluent and flippant strictures they leave the Christian with nothing upon which to found his faith but the empty covers of the destroyed Bible.

Thus we see the baneful effects of the perverted ingenuity by which Higher Criticism attempts to escape from a difficulty by resorting to a preposterous absurdity. When Higher Critics are compelled by the force of evidence, as has often been the case by discoveries on the ancient monuments, to abandon their arguments, they merely hold the more tenaciously, and assert the more boldly, their disproved conclusions.

This is no trivial matter for the Christian. It strikes at the very foundations of his faith. For if Higher Critics' methods of interpretation are true, then every inspired writer is on one pretext or another discredited as ignorant, or denounced as maliciously deceiving, and faith in the Bible is absurd, and faith in Christ impossible, for we would have no means of knowing Him.

Seeing where these principles lead us, we need no other proof that they are not only false, but the baseless figment of a chimerical imagination. And we are led back to the consideration of the fact that the only safe, the only true method of interpretation is that employed by our divine Lord and Master: "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He INTERPRETED to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." Luke 24: 27, A.R.V.

If we follow this divine principle of interpretation, begin at Moses — that is, at Genesis — and interpret "in all the Scriptures" the things concerning Christ, this Higher Critical product will be seen to be but the spawn from the stagnant cesspool of eighteenth century infidelity.