Attackers and defenders How “higher criticism” developed, came to America, and provoked a response
Isaac Cruikshanik, Sedition, levelling and plundering; or, the pretended friends of the people in council, 1792 . Hand Colored etching.—[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ] © The Trustees of the British Museum
James C. Ungureanu By the early twentieth century, it seemed the Bible was in trouble. Civil history, geology, paleontology, biblical criticism, evolutionary biology, and anthropology offered powerful alternative explanations of the world and humanity’s place in it. Three possible responses arose—to abandon the Bible altogether as an authoritative source for knowledge about the world, to attempt to reconcile science and scholarship with the Bible, or to reject anything that seems to compromise the Bible’s authority. Inner truth These trends touched America, but they had begun much earlier with English deists of the seventeenth century such as Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), and Conyers Middleton (1683–1750). They vehemently protested the established church, condemning revealed religion in general and Christianity in particular. German thinkers built on these foundations. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared his age “an age of criticism” and called readers to reject the authority of the church and the Bible. Kant embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment in Germany. At first many philosophers still proclaimed orthodoxy while exalting reason, rather than church authority or tradition, as the final arbiter of truth. But soon this dependence on reason reached beyond orthodoxy. German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) believed the “true Christian” remains safe by depending on “inner truth” rather than “written traditions” and was deeply troubled by the idea that transcendent revelation could cross the “ugly broad ditch” of history into human experience. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the father of liberal Protestant theology, redefined religion as an immediate feeling of absolute dependence on God. This continuing separation of faith from reason allowed nineteenth-century German “neologians” to favor philological and historical readings of the Bible— arguing radical positions such as that the Pentateuch has no genuine historical material at all. By the early 1830s, the Tübingen School arose. These thinkers were influenced largely by theologian
burning it down This cartoon imagines influential
skeptics Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine plotting radical attacks under satanic influence.
Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), who had adopted the philosophy of Georg Hegel (1770–1831) that history is a struggle between opposing forces, inexorably generating the Geist, or spirit of reason. Baur and his colleagues interpreted each biblical text separately as a product of its particular time and place. Their approach became known as “historical” or “higher” criticism. It would transform academic study of the Scriptures and also provoke considerable controversy. One of higher criticism’s most controversial developments came when Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) divided the purported literary origins of the Pentateuch into four sources—the J (Yahweh), E (Elohim), D (Deuteronomic), and P (Priestly). This reduced the entire Pentateuch from a unified record of divine revelation to a product of historical change. Liberal Protestant assumptions about what counted as authentic religion lurked behind Wellhausen’s work. He contrasted the “religion of the letter”—the allegedly dead, ritualistic, and legalistic faith of postexilic Judaism—with the “religion of the spirit”—the fresh and vital belief of the prophets. His deeper (and anti-Semitic)
Issue 143 33
