Background of and Reaction to Higher Criticism.
The philosophical movements of the Enlightenment (roughly the 1700s) focused on a fundamental questioning of the certainties of the Middle Ages and a reaction to the clashes over truth during the Protestant Reformation. Traditional views of religion and culture came under severe inquiry and even open attack.
For example, Rene Descartes began his philosophic inquiry by questioning everything, except his own existence. He then built the philosophy of Rationalism from one presupposition. “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am).
Enlightenment thinkers reasoned that unless something made rational sense (Rationalism) or could be tested and proved to the senses (Empiricism), it should not be accepted. The Cosmos was seen as merely “the product of cause and effect in a closed system.” Enlightenment thinking obviously had a dramatic impact on religion, excluding the supernatural as a factor in real human experience. Religious dogma and doctrine were questioned and discarded, not only by those of marginal religious commitment, but by some within Judeo-Christianity.
In the early 1800s the philosophy of George Hegel took the next logical step. Hegel began by asking certain basic questions: If the supernatural is not a factor in the routine workings of the Cosmos, how did things arrive at their present state? Are things moving in the direction of progress? If so, what mechanism causes things to progress?
Hegel’s answer was his Dialectic Process, which stated that the Cosmos is a closed system of cause and effect, driven by the conflict of the principles of thesis with its opposite, antithesis. In other words, the Universe is propelled in the direction of progress by a clash of opposing forces or ideas. The interaction of these opposite forces produces a blending of the two, which Hegel called synthesis. Hegel saw this process as a manifestation of Absolute Mind, which was the term he used for the source of reality (similar to the concept of Brahman in Hinduism).
This dialectical philosophy quickly became the dominant theory in Western intellectual and academic circles. Variations of the Hegelian dialectic were quickly adapted to other disciplines by those eager for an explanation of reality which did not need a Creator. For example:
Biological diversity and environmental suitability were explained by Charles Darwin as the survival of the fittest. The clash of species and the resulting adaptations and genetic mutations used Hegel’s dialectic in the Theory of Evolution (Origin of Species, 1858).
Politics was seen by Karl Marx as a violent conflict between social classes, ultimately resulting in a redistribution of wealth and a communist utopia (The Communist Manifesto, 1848).
Bible scholarship also took a page from Hegel in the Higher Critical Movement, which began in the late 1700s, and became academically dominant in the second half of the 1800s. The Bible was seen as merely a collection of folklore, religious codes of behavior, political propaganda and even downright forgery edited late in biblical history.
Higher Criticism. The Higher Critics were led by German scholars such as K.H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen, who studied the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) using a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis. The premise of the Documentary Hypothesis was that the Pentateuch couldn’t possibly have been written in the form in which we now know it. Therefore, the documents must have “evolved” over time through a process similar to Hegel’s dialectic, from primitive religious ideas and practices, ancient oral stories, legends and early written fragments of questionable historical value.
These sources were then woven together over time by various editors, who blended and changed them into distinct religious documentary traditions within Israelite tribal groups (Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist and Priestly). Finally, these four documents were further edited and combined into their current form in the Pentateuch. The Documentary Hypothesis opened the door to other critical approaches to studying and understanding the biblical documents of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
The basic flaw of the Critical Approach is in making certain arbitrary assumptions:
1. History and religion should be understood as fundamentally naturalistic. True to its Enlightenment roots the Critical View explains reality in purely naturalistic terms, dismissing the possibility of the supernatural. Miraculous accounts in the Bible are seen as embellishments made to gain credibility by certain groups and individuals, or merely as legends perpetuated by simple tribal people.
2. Critical methodology is always assumed to be superior to other approaches. Wellhausen and other early critics took almost no notice of archeological discoveries in their day, which sometimes disproved their assertions. Since then, the basic gist of Higher Criticism has never been revised despite a wealth of new information and findings, many of which have tended to support the accuracy of the biblical accounts.
3. The ancient Israelite peoples were ignorant nomads. For instance, the early Critics asserted that writing was extremely rare in ancient times and unknown to ancient Israelites. Yet ancient writing and documents are routinely uncovered by archeologists. Egypt, Sumer, Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and Meso-America all had writing early in their histories. It was expedient for the Critics, however, to take the position that ancient Hebrews had little or no access to writing so that they could argue that, if figures like Moses and the other greats of the scriptures existed at all, they couldn’t possibly have written a document of the stature of the Pentateuch.
4. The Patriarchs are essentially legendary figures. Critics see Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the others as Paul Bunyan-like heroes developed by people who needed to see their founding fathers as larger-than-life. Critics believe that the biblical stories of the Patriarchs actually tell us nothing about the Patriarchs themselves. All that can be learned from the biblical accounts is what the times may have been like when the stories were first told, and what the composers of those stories thought life may have been like in earlier times.
Traditionalist Reactions to Higher Criticism. Traditionalists were initially caught unprepared by the critical onslaught of the late 1800s. At first, those loyal to the inspiration of scripture simply responded with vehement opposition to Higher Critical views and with indignant denouncements of these new theories. This initial emotional reaction was followed in the mid and late Twentieth Century by more thoughtful scholarship, factual defense of the Bible and interaction with the views of critically-oriented academia.
Jewish Reaction. The more conservative groups within Judaism either defended the divine origins of scripture or took the approach that the origins of Scripture were irrelevant because the traditions have become a time-tested glue holding Jews together. The more liberal elements of Judaism have been influenced to large degree by Critical thought. Hence, they are freer to redefine traditional observance of the Torah (Moses’ Law) and blend with the society around them.
Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox Reactions. The Vatican and the various Eastern Orthodox bodies have maintained their longstanding positions on the divine inspiration of scripture, though there is much internal debate on unofficial levels. The issue has not been quite as major among Roman Catholics or Orthodox as for Protestants, because both of these groups have other sources of divine authority besides the Bible. For example, both groups also accept the decisions of various ecumenical church councils on a par with the teachings of the Bible. Roman Catholics further accept the pronouncements of popes as binding.
Protestant Reactions. Protestant Christianity has been deeply divided on the issues raised by Higher Criticism and related movements of modernist theology. Fundamentalist groups have flatly denied the arguments of the Critics, refusing to become involved in academic debate and increasingly retreating into cultural isolation. Evangelicals have been more willing to dialog with the larger culture. They have attempted to defend scriptural inspiration and reliability based on the disciplines of textual criticism and manuscript study. Since the mid Twentieth Century, Evangelicals have entered the debate over the reliability of scripture with growing confidence. However, the ascendancy of Post-modern thought in the years just prior to the dawn of the Twenty-first Century has changed the focus of the debate away from the factually-based defense Evangelicals have labored so hard to assemble, toward a larger debate over the nature and meaning of reality itself.
Modernist Protestants have attempted to accommodate Christian faith and doctrine to the viewpoints of academia and of the larger society. In doing so, they have become culturally mainstream, but have arguably tended to lose much of their Christian distinctiveness. This trend is attested to by their dramatic losses in church membership, as people have either ceased to think of themselves are particularly Christian, or have migrated to churches which emphasize distinctive Christian teachings.
Michael Bogart
