Background
During my short time at Saint Joseph
of Arimathea Anglican Theological College, I was introduced to the methods and
fruits of modern biblical criticism which now prevail among Anglican
theologians. However, my personal studies of the Anglican divines — and
especially of the Oxford Movement — convinced me that the new methods of
theological liberalism were completely out-of-step with the Anglican tradition.
This paper was researched in the seminary library over the course of about two
months, and copies were given to the faculty upon my departure. Although this
essay assumes some of the more salient theological errors of Anglicanism, I
think orthodox Catholics might appreciate the struggles of the Oxford divines
and their successors, so many of whom found their final refuge in the Church of
Rome.
INTRODUCTION
In The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of
Anglicanism, Dominican Aidan Nichols devotes an entire chapter
to “Liberal Catholicism”, by which he means the post-Tractarian
movement within the Church of England launched in 1889 by Charles Gore’s
publication of Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the
Incarnation. Actually, the seeds of Liberal Catholicism go back at least
as far as the Essays and Reviews published in 1860 under the
leadership of arch-liberal Benjamin Jowett. The essence of Liberal Catholicism
is an acceptance of the methods and conclusions of German Higher Criticism
applied to the Bible, combined with a curious insistence on maintaining
historic creedal orthodoxy and High Church principles. Charles Gore himself,
although a champion of Higher Criticism, emerged as an opponent of those who
quite predictably sought to apply the methods of the new criticism to the
truths of the Creed. But the Lux Mundi men had unleashed forces beyond
their control: the great majority of ordinary Christians could not follow the
intricate nuances of Oxford scholars, and to them it seemed that the whole
faith had come undone. In The Reconstruction of Belief (1924), Gore
describes the confusion which followed in the wake of Liberalism’s
triumph:
And contemporaneously with the great scientific movement, of
which Darwin is the central figure, there emerged within the horizons of the
religious world, which had been building its spiritual fabric upon the
infallibility of Scripture, the startling conclusions of literary and
historical criticism … It rapidly converted the scholars; but it was very
revolutionary. And it presented itself to the ordinary man as the discovery
that the Bible is not true — woman was not really made of a rib taken from
the side of man; the Garden of Eden was a myth; mankind was not saved from a
universal deluge in the persons of Noah’s family in an ark; the Tower of
Babel was not a true account of the origin of languages; many things written in
the Bible did not actually happen — could not indeed have happened as is
described: the Bible had been proved not to be true.
But the Anglo-Catholics believed that if the Church of England has
taught that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to
salvation”, it assumes that Holy Scripture as a whole is reliable
and authoritative. This study is intended to document the views of those whose
efforts to revive the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism were never meant to be
at the expense of Holy Scripture. While Protestantism pitted the Church against
the Bible at the expense of the former, Liberal Catholicism threatened to do
the same at the expense of the latter. For the Anglo-Catholics, however,
neither approach had anything to do with the Truth.
This writer is a first-year seminarian with no background in this
subject and very little time for extensive research: undoubtedly there is a
great deal of history and literature of which he is yet unaware. The reader is
asked to forgive what are sure to be salient omissions. However, one thing is
clear: the voices of Anglo-Catholic opposition to modern biblical criticism are
so seldom heard today that many will be surprised to learn they exist at all.
Yet their warnings were in many ways prophetic, and their influence continues
among a sturdy remnant in our times. At minimum, then, let this small effort
help bring to remembrance that Great Tradition for which they labored.
KEBLE, PUSEY, AND LIDDON
The much beloved John Keble was born in 1792 and ordained a priest
in 1816. He is best known for his poetry and his preaching of the sermon on
“National Apostasy” in 1833. He subsequently contributed to the
“Tracts for the Times” and worked closely with Newman and Pusey in
the Oxford Movement, and is therefore revered by contemporary Anglo-Catholics
as a father in the Faith.
This writer was unable to find any writings of Keble on the
subject of biblical criticism other than quotes from a relatively late
biography, although he is frequently mentioned as an intractable opponent of
the new school. He died in 1866, twenty-three years before Lux Mundi
and the avalanche that followed. However, German rationalism was already in the
air, and in 1860 there was published the Essays and Reviews —
largely regarded as a daring precursor to Lux Mundi — which
challenged the doctrines of the inspiration of Scripture and the eternity of
Hell. The reaction to Essays and Reviews was strong and forceful:
legal action was taken against two of the essayists; the book as a whole was
synodically condemned; the Archbishop of Canterbury issued an encyclical
against it; and 11,000 clergymen signed a protest declaring their belief in the
doctrines under question. But still, something had changed. The views reflected
by the prominent essayists were obviously gaining in popularity or else the
book would not have been written, and Keble was greatly disturbed. He wrote in
a personal letter:
I am much obliged by the loan of this book, which would be
instructive if one knew how to profit by it. But how it makes one’s heart
ache! Especially the last and first essays, the only ones, to my feeling, which
have any heart in them. It fills one with uneasiness to think how very sure a
man who writes and teaches in that tone is to make his way with warm young
hearts, and I wish more than ever that it were possible to censure and expose
the doctrines without any personal attack.
Keble’s biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, summarizes his
views thus:
The modern Anglo-Catholic party has identified itself completely
with a school of Biblical criticism which Keble himself considered dangerous
and subversive, so dangerous that, referring to the spread of the ‘new
criticism’ at Oxford, he could write that the real question was
‘whether the University of Oxford now is, and means to be hereafter, a
believer in the Bible or no?’
The scholarly Edward Bouverie Pusey was born in 1800, ordained a
priest in 1828, and he reposed in 1882. Pusey is best remembered for
reluctantly assuming the leadership of the Oxford Movement after Newman’s
departure to Rome, and for his involvement in the subsequent "ritualist"
controversies. He revived the practice of auricular confession, and he began
the first order of nuns that England had known in 300 years. His sanctity is
legendary, and his influence upon the history of Anglo-Catholicism is second to
none. Like his dear friend Keble and Tractarianism in general, Pusey was
hostile to the German Rationalism of Eichhorn, Ewald, Graf, Strauss, Baur, and
Wellhausen — which he determined was a reaction to a dead Lutheran
orthodoxy lacking in spiritual vitality — and to the opinions promulgated
in Essays and Reviews, which he believed to have been influenced by
the same rationalist theology. His distress over Essays and Reviews is
reflected in the following letters and speeches:
To Keble:
I used to maintain, and do maintain, that the Church must bear
with much, for fear of worse evils. But she must not bear with this denial of
our Lord the Atoner, and of God the Holy Ghost, who spake by the Prophets
… I never felt so desponding as I do now, not at people’s attacks
(these we must expect), but at the acquiescence in them on the part of
religious men.
To the Times:
I cannot imagine anything more demoralizing than that clergymen
should profess their beliefs in great fundamental truths, and assert the
contrary; that they should affirm to God, as the mouthpiece of the congregation
in prayer, what they should contradict in their sermons or their writings.
To the Hebdomadal Council:
We are at the beginning of a deepening and widening struggle for
life or death for the life or death of the University as a place of religious
learning; for the life or death of the Church of England as an instrument of
God for the salvation of souls.
To the Guardian:
The well known passage in the unbelieving Westminster
Review states the extent to which the truth has been attacked. Look at the
list. "Now, in all seriousness we would ask, what is the practical issue of all
this?
Having made all these deductions from the popular belief, what
remains as the residuum? In their ordinary, if not plain, sense, there has been
discarded the Word of God, the creation, the fall, the redemption,
justification, regeneration and salvation, a day of judgment, creeds, liturgies
and articles, the truth of Jewish history and the Gospel narrative; a sense of
doubt thrown over even the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Ascension, the
Divinity of the Second Person, and the Personality of the Third. It may be that
this is a true view of Christianity, but we insist, in the name of common
sense, that it is a new view." How can such an undigested heap of errors
receive a systematic answer in brief space, or in any one treatise or volume?
Or why should these be more answered than all the other attacks on the same
subject, with which the unbelieving press has been for some time teeming?
People seem to have transferred the natural panic at finding that such attacks
on belief could be made by those bound to maintain it to the subjects
themselves; as if the faith was jeopardized because it has been betrayed. With
the exception of the still important science of geology, the Essays and
Reviews contain nothing with which those acquainted with the writings of
unbelievers in Germany have not been acquainted for thirty years.
Pusey was mystified by the phenomenon of priests who could pray
the liturgical prayers of the Church of England, which assume the inspiration
of Scripture and affirm classical Christian orthodoxy, while at the same time
contradicting this theology in their sermons and writings without any scruples
of conscience. The Liberals wanted to argue that it was still Christianity they
were teaching, but if that were Christianity, what was it previously? What was
the religion and theology of the liturgy? Even the unbelievers could see that
what was proposed in Essays and Reviews was not development, but a
revolution thoroughly inconsistent with the formal and liturgical
profession of the English Church.
In a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, Pusey
outlines the stages of unbelief. There were many in the Church of England who
would not embrace the whole scheme of Liberalism as represented by the
essayists, but nevertheless were influenced by it all. Rationalism first
attacks those revealed facts that are seemingly irrelevant to the core of the
Faith — especially, as was gaining ascendance in his day, Old Testament
history and the creation narratives:
The first question as to any doctrine of the faith (such as the
transmission of original sin), or any recorded fact of Holy Scripture, is the
turning point, whether men will believe in any doctrine or any
revelation of God … People busy themselves with the pettiest objections,
which scarcely lie at the outskirts of revelation, and leave the central
question, on which the whole turns; "Has God revealed Himself to His creatures?
Was Nicodemus right, that Jesus Christ was ‘a Teacher come from God’?
If so, what did He reveal?
How, to speak of facts, to which yet our Lord pledges His truth
— how should the known world have been drowned by a flood, or Noah be
saved in the ark, or Lot’s wife have become a pillar of salt, or Jonah
have lived in the fish’s belly, or the men of Ninevah have repented at the
preaching of one stranger, or mankind have sprung from one pair, or devils have
possessed the bodies of men, or Sodom and Gomorrah have perished by that shower
of fire and brimstone; or Israel have been fed with manna in the wilderness? I
speak not of any true or probable interpretation of the facts, which our Lord
so authenticates for us … It touches not faith, in what way Lot’s
wife perished.
But the facts abide.
One could be forgiven for thinking the above sermon was preached
by an American Bible-belt evangelical "fundamentalist". But these are the words
of an English churchman of the highest culture and learning; a man with an
abiding and generous catholicity; indeed, a Christian humanist in the tradition
of Thomas More and Philip Melanchthon. To be a Christian was to believe the
Scriptures: it had always been so, and for E.B. Pusey, it could not be
otherwise.
The introduction to the above quoted volume of sermons by Pusey
was written by a man named Walter Smith, who describes the effects of the new
criticism on Oxford’s best students in the aftermath of "Essays and
Reviews":
Oxford was insensibly filled with a school of thinkers, which
had formerly been neutralized or converted, and which through their special
mode of teaching led others, whither they themselves knew not, nor followed. It
is not one of their opponents who has borne witness that an influential member
of that school, "a most learned and amiable man exercised extraordinary
influence over the education of the most advanced college in Oxford. He led his
pupils quietly on to the negation of all positive Creeds; not because he was an
unbeliever in the vulgar sense of the word, but because his peculiar mode of
criticism cut the very sinews of belief. The effect of his peculiar teaching
may be traced in many a ripened mind of the present day."
Ill-chosen text-books completed the work. Talented young men who
came prepared for scepticism as considering it a mark of intellect, step by
step parted with their faith. The foundations of faith had to be laid anew; the
young had to be won, not to a completer faith, but to Christianity, or to its
most central truths.
Here is described a phenomenon which we will explore later in
greater depth. While it is possible, intellectually, to maintain the faith of
Creed while denying the truth and reliability of the Scriptures, nevertheless
that faith is an unnatural compartmentalization that is evident to nearly
everyone. The effects of this compartmentalization on evangelism and religious
instruction can be disastrous.
Pusey’s chief biographer was the widely-traveled and
influential Harry Parry Liddon, Canon of St. Paul’s and a powerful
preacher who attracted large audiences. Born in 1829, H. P. Liddon lived
through the Oxford Movement, "Essays and Reviews", and "Lux
Mundi" — the latter said to have been so personally traumatic that it
hastened his death one year later in 1890. His enduring legacy seems to have
been his Bampton lectures on the divinity of Christ. For Liddon, the attacks on
the Old Testament — for instance the denial of the Mosaic origin and
authority of the Pentateuch — were a heretical attack on the infallibility
of Christ Himself (considering the references to Moses recorded in the
Gospels). For Liddon, every attack on the Faith was ultimately an attack on the
Incarnation. He writes thus:
Now the argument in question assumes that Christ our Lord, when
teaching religious truth, was not merely fallible, but actually in serious
error. If indeed our Lord had believed Himself to be ignorant of the authorship
or true characterof the Book of Deuteronomy, we may presume that He would not
have fallen below the natural level of ordinary heathen honesty, by speaking
with authority upon a subject with which He was consciously unacquainted. It is
admitted that He spoke as believing Himself to be teaching truth. But was He,
in point of fact, not teaching truth? Was that which He believed to be
knowledge nothing better than a servile echo of contemporary ignorance? Was His
knowledge really limited on a subject matter, where He Himself was unsuspicious
of the existence of a limitation? Was He then not merely deficient in
information, but fallible; not merely fallible, but actually in error? And has
it been reserved for the criticism of the nineteenth century to set Him
right?
The Liberals wanted not the whole Jesus, but part of Him. They
wanted to retain His moral and ethical teachings most especially. But Liddon
points out that it is not possible to so divide the Christ of the Gospels, for
as Christ Himself declares, "If I have told you earthy things, and ye
believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" (St.
John 3:12). Liddon explains the relationship:
The denial of our Lord’s infallibility, in the form in
which it has come before us of late years, involves an unfavorable judgment,
not merely of His intellectual claims, but of the penetration and delicacy of
His moral sense. This is the more observable because it is fatal to a
distinction which has been projected, between our Lord’s authority as a
teacher of spiritual or moral truth, and His authority when dealing with those
questions which enter into the province of historical criticism. If in the
latter sphere He is said to have been liable and subject to error, in the
former, we are sometimes told, His instinct was invariably unerring. But is
this the case, if our Lord was really deceived in His estimate of the book of
Deuteronomy, and if further the account of the origin and composition of that
book which is put forth by His censors be accepted as satisfactory? Our Lord
quotes Deuteronomy as a work of the highest authority on the subject of
man’s relations and duties to God. Yet we are assured that in point of
fact this book was nothing better than a pious forgery of the age of Jeremiah,
if indeed it was not the work of that prophet, in which he employed the name of
Moses as a restraint upon the increasing polytheism of the later years of king
Josiah.
That hypothesis has been discussed elsewhere and by others on its
own critical merits. Here it may suffice to observe, that if it could have been
seriously entertained it would involve our Lord in something more than
intellectual fallibility. If Deuteronomy is indeed a forgery, Jesus Christ was
not merely ignorant of a fact of literary history.
His moral perceptions were at fault. They were not sufficiently
fine to miss the consistency, the ring of truth, in a document which professed
to have come from the great Lawgiver with a Divine authority; while, according
to modern writers, it was only the ‘pious’ fiction of a later age,
and its falsehood had only not been admitted by its author, lest its
‘effect’ should be counteracted.
In a reply to two of his critics following his Bampton Lectures on
the Divinity of Christ, Dr. Liddon explains that an essential premise of any
theological controversy is the trustworthiness of Revelation. In essence, then,
Higher Criticism is the "controversy to end all controversies", for once it is
accepted, there is no basis for further discussion. Either all parties believe
the Bible is unreliable, or some believe it is and others do not, or some
believe this part is unreliable and others believe that part is unreliable. In
any case, the discussion is moved back from the meaning of Revelation to
if and where Revelation exists at all:
Now our Lord’s Divinity is a truth which we must learn by
Revelation, if we are to learn it at all. Nature, measured by experience, and
interpreted by conscience and reason, has nothing to say to it. The first
question then is, whether a Revelation has been really given, and the second
where it is to be found. And if it is agreed that God has really spoken in the
Jewish and Christian Revelations, and that the Bible tells us what He has said,
a further question arises as to the trustworthiness of the record. Unless this
trustworthiness is also recognized, it is impossible to discuss the contents of
Revelation with any hope of arriving at solid results. For any statement
containing matter which is, for whatever reason, unwelcome to either party, may
be at once challenged on a priori grounds, and rejected; and disputants
may thus find themselves as little in possession of a common premise, as if
they had not agreed that a Revelation of God had been made, or recorded at
all.
This then is the issue, as between the Lecturer and his present
critics. He does, and they do not, believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible.
They believe, no doubt, in the trustworthiness of certain parts of it —
such parts of it as are in agreement with opinions which, for independent
reasons, they accept. But they do not treat the Bible as a trustworthy whole;
they accept or reject its statements at pleasure, or for reasons which appear
to them to be sufficient; and, as a consequence, it is not enough for them if a
doctrine is contained in the Bible, unless it be contained in those parts of
the Bible which they think it right to accept.
Let it then be admitted, then, that the spirit of Tractarianism
and the Tractarians themselves — (Newman also shared the views of Keble
and Pusey, predicting the coming revolution: "The Heads of Houses may crush
Tractarianism, and then they will have to do with Germanism.") — resisted
the emergence of modern biblical criticism as something foreign to
Anglicanism and destructive of the orthodox faith.
THE AMERICANS: GRAFTON AND MORTIMER
Charles Chapman Grafton was born in 1830, and according to his
memoirs was influenced by both Pusey and Liddon, even attending Liddon’s
Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Christ. He was an open sympathizer with
Tractarian principles, and became especially known for his growing devotion to
the Blessed Sacrament. At some point he was made Bishop of a diocese in
Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin. His council addresses indicate that he was willing to
allow a certain amount of Higher Criticism so long as it did not affect the
essential truths of biblical history, but as will be seen, that all but
precludes the most important claims of the critics:
Concerning the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament Scriptures;
there has been much study concerning its formation, just as there has been
concerning the formation of the material world. In regard to the Scriptures, it
is immaterial whether the early chapters of Genesis are historical or
allegorical. It is immaterial whether there was one Isaiah or two; whether the
Pentateuch was written by Moses alone, or by the aid of several others. What as
Christians we reject is any theory that casts doubt on the validity and truth
of Our Master’s teaching. we cannot, for instance, accept the theory that
the Patriarchs were fictitious beings when Our Blessed Lord based His argument
of the immortality of the soul on the real existence of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. We cannot believe that the accounts in Deuteronomy of the establishment
of a Tabernacle in the Wilderness was a fiction written up after the return to
Babylon. We believe on Our Lord’s authority that there was an actual
Deluge, that David was the author of the 110th Psalm, and that,
through Moses, God revealed the Law.
When it came to the New Testament, we see that the good Bishop
could find virtually no place for the most significant conclusions of modern
criticism, and furthermore, we see that he was hostile to its very foundations:
In respect of the New Testament, the tradition and consciousness
of the Catholic Church bears witness to the authorship of the Gospels and the
truthfulness of their record. The Holy Ghost dwells in the Church, and we must
censure those, who, rejecting its traditions, seek to learn the teaching of
Christ, from persons living outside the sphere of the Church’s Divine
illumination. The Holy Scriptures can only be rightly understood by those who
are living members of the Holy Body in which the Holy Spirit dwells, who is the
author of those Holy Writings. It is only by the saints the writings of the
saints are comprehended. Thus there are two kinds of biblical scholars —
the merely intellectual, who criticize the Bible like any other book, and the
spiritually illuminated, who know it to be the awful and profound Word of God.
Only the latter are true scholars; the opinions of the others are of no
value.
And so it is clear that Grafton’s view of the Bible is the
Catholic view, that the Bible belongs to the Church and to God’s people
alone: a sort of family history -- a pearl not to be cast before swine and
trampled upon. For Bishop Grafton there is only one way for the Christian to
approach the Sacred Scriptures: as the "awful and profound Word of God".
He has more to say on the four Gospels, their historicity, and their
enemies:
Concerning Our Lord’s life; it could not be written after
the fashion of modern historical research. His life was divine, marvelous,
sublime. There could be no data given, by mere record of eyewitnesses, which
would enable any person unassisted by the Holy Ghost to write it. For the Holy
Gospels are no less than the life of God upon the earth, written by His Holy
Spirit. St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, being divinely illuminated and
controlled, set forth, unconsciously to themselves, the kingly, prophetical,
and priestly offices of Christ. They wrote of Christ, but Christ by His Spirit
wrote through them. They declared His Messianic offices, His public and the
official side of His life. St. John reveals the awfulness of His Godhead and
His relation to His Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel has necessarily a
peculiar and special training and enlightenment, and could have been none other
than the disciple who leaned on Jesus’ bosom and to whom was revealed
Christ in glory.
The Fourth Gospel was necessary to complete the Revelation of
the Incarnate Son of God, of whom no mortal could by earthly wisdom reveal the
height or breadth or length.
O Marvelous Mind of Infinite Love. O wonderful revelation of
Infinite Holiness. O Burning Bush of Divine Wisdom. Put we our shoes off our
feet and bow we down to Christ in the Gospel. Far away be the disputing of
the unilluminated and unspiritual. Silent be the din of controversy and
novelties of these latter and evil days. Hushed be the sounds of Earth, the
babblings of the schools, the noise of all passing and fleeting things. Hushed
be all the rebellions of mind and heart, that we may as children listen to the
Word of God that abideth forever.
“Hushed be … the babblings of the schools.”
For Bishop Grafton, the Word of God judges the schools and the scholars, and
not vice versa.
Alfred J. Mortimer, the rector of St. Mark’s in Philadelphia,
published Catholic Faith and Practice: A Manual of
Theology in 1898. This splendid two-volume work amounts to
something between a simple catechism for laymen and a dogmatic treatise for
seminarians. (Three copies are on the shelves of St. Joseph’s seminary
library.) It is thoroughly orthodox and unapologetic in its Anglo-Catholicism.
Forty-six pages are devoted to the subject of the Holy Scriptures, and of these
pages, twenty-three — fully one-half — are devoted to the subject of
Higher Criticism. Mortimer’s critique of Higher Criticism is the most
comprehensive and technical of any so far discussed. Aware of the new
criticism’s origin “in a land which since the days of Luther has
been the birthplace of almost every heresy that has disturbed
Christendom”, he begins by asking from whence and from whom the Church
ought to derive her teaching:
Is it conceivable that the Holy Ghost, Whose office it is to
guide the Church into all truth, has given to schismatics and rationalists a
new revelation which contradicts in so many points the teaching of the Church,
and that the Church has, therefore, for at least fourteen hundred years been in
error? Is this consistent with our Lord’s promises that the gates of Hell
should not prevail against the Church, and that the Spirit of Truth should
guide the Church into all truth? And further, on this hypothesis that the
Church has erred for so many centuries and has needed to be enlightened by
schismatics who are outside her unity and reject her doctrine, may it not be
asked by some whether there is left any real basis of Christianity, any serious
reason for believing that Christianity is the full revelation of God in
Christ Jesus?
After a somewhat lengthy (and well worth reading) explanation of
the Church’s doctrine of the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture,
Mortimer turns to the critics:
In the present day, however, we find another and very different
account of Holy Scripture, which comes to us on the authority of a body of men
known as the “higher critics”. They disregard the conclusions on this
subject which the Church has reached under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and
starting from the opposite pole of investigation, under the guidance of unaided
human reason, reach results which in many respects seem to be diametrically
opposed to the teachings of the Church.
While it would be quite impossible in this chapter to give an
adequate account of Higher Criticism, or to treat its principles with any
fulness, it may nevertheless be well to point out, as briefly as possible, some
reasons why its conclusions carry but little weight.
In the first place, when we contrast the processes by which the
Church and the higher critics arrive at their respective positions, we observe
that while the Church’s method may lead to absolute truth, that of
the critics cannot possibly do so. For the Church’s teaching
hypothetically rests on the conclusions reached by a body not only specially
trained to consider the subject, but under the promised guidance of the Spirit
of Truth; and these teachings, as we should have expected, are always one and
the same. The Higher Criticism, on the other hand, represents the opinons of a
very much smaller number of independent investigators, who, trusting only to
human reason, and making no claim whatever to supernatural guidance, cannot be
expected to reach any uniform conclusion; nor, as a matter of fact, have they
done so. In other words, if the Church be infallible, its teachings in regard
to Holy Scripture must be absolutely true. But since the opinions of a number
of individuals have not the slightest claim to infallibility, the probability
that they should reach absolute truth is extremely small; and inasmuch as they
do not agree in the results reached by their method, it is evident that those
results are not absolute truth.
From here Mortimer launches into a more technical argument
concerning the specific assumptions, methods, and conclusions of Higher
Criticism as applied to certain biblical questions. After reviewing some of the
technical weaknesses of the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch with
respect to subsequent discoveries and developments (such as the discovery of
writing in the time of Moses), one is left with the feeling that
Wellhausen’s theory is an answer in search of a question. He concludes
with some exasperation:
A Mosaic authorship, therefore, would seem to be the most
probable and natural under the circumstances; but this is sufficient to condemn
it in the eyes of the higher critics.
Furthermore, says Mortimer, the method used to differentiate the
J-E-D-P sources is tautological and fallacious:
But this method, notwithstanding its seeming plausibility, and
the apparent scientific caution and accuracy with which it is applied, is
essentially a fallacy — a vicious circle; for the differences are first
created and then argued from. The documents are first affirmed to correspond
with certain assumed characteristic differences, and then their correspondence
with these characteristics is urged as proof of their objective reality. All
paragraphs, clauses, etc., in which certain criteria occur, are systematically
assigned to one document, and those having another class of criteria are with
like regularity assigned to another document; and when the process is complete
all the criteria in one class are in one document, and those of another class
are in another, simply because the critic has put them there. The
documents agree with the hypothesis, because they have been created by the
hypothesis.
It is admitted that the theory seems attractive and plausible, but
that is because so few are able to penetrate the surface. Beneath its apparent
simplicity lies a tangle of contradictions and dead ends:
Here we may perhaps point out two causes why many people accept
the conclusions of Higher Criticism. First, because the theory, as applied
to the beginning of Genesis, seems so simple. The start is made with the two
names of God, “Jehovah” and “Elohim”, and without any
labour a mere novice is able to understand it. The other reason is that before
the middle of the Pentateuch is reached the theory has become so complex that
very few master it. Because the beginning is simple they suppose that the full
theory can be explained; but when they come to the tangle (say, of the
book of Joshua) they simply take it for granted that the masters of the system
have penetrated the labyrinth and have come out all right, and they do not
venture in themselves.
The theory, as we have observed, seems quite simple at the
beginning of Genesis; but it is only of a very few chapters that this can be
said, for soon we find P using J, and E doing the same, while J uses E. We fly
to a higher critic for an explanation, and the answer is that this is the work
of a bungling redactor, R. For where facts are at variance with the hypothesis
(as they frequently are), the facts, and not the hypothesis, are generally
corrected by the higher critics.
The chapter moves on to analyze Cicero’s Orations,
the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the parable of the Prodigal Son from the
perspective of Higher Criticism. The results are, well, surprising. Mortimer
concludes thus:
To sum up, we may observe: first, that an examination of the
method of Higher Criticism shows that it is inherently vicious, and
therefore that its conclusions are not trustworthy. Secondly, that an
examination of the conclusions derived from it leads to the same result.
We find that its supporters disagree on many points; and, as we look back upon
the history of the system during the past hundred years, we again and again see
positions, once deemed impregnable, abandoned or overthrown by succeeding
schools. Indeed, as some of the more candid higher critics admit, there is
every reason to suppose that its present conclusions will not last ...
Surely Catholics cannot be charged with mere bigotry and prejudice
because they prefer the Church’s theory in regard to Holy Scripture to the
conclusions reached by a method so inherently vicious that whether it be
applied in secular or sacred literature, almost any results (excepting those
that are certain) may be obtained.
THE MISSIONARY PROBLEM
Frank Weston, the Bishop of Zanzibar, was a devoted missionary of
Christ to the inhabitants of an island nation off the east coast of Africa.
Born in 1871, he was greatly grieved that the Church in his native England
seemed to embrace without caution the theology of the new critical school. In a
chapter titled “The Fight With Modernism”, the bishop’s
biographer records his deep sadness at the ascending Liberal theology which, in
his view, seriously undermined the Church’s ability to evangelize the
nations:
Save our converts in Africa from reading in books by Christians
at home all those things which are calculated to make them doubt whether there
be a God at all, and such a thing as Catholic Revelation.
The danger of modern biblical criticism was that it essentially
agreed with all of those things that the enemies of the Church in foreign lands
used against her. Weston’s biographer, H. Maynard Smith, summarizes the
problem:
Imagine a Mohammedan speaking: “We have always maintained
that your Scriptures are corrupt and interpolated, and lo! now your learned men
tell you we are right. The Prophet told us that Jesus did not really die on the
Cross and rise again, and your learned men agree that He only rose again in the
imaginations of His disciples. We have been taught that Jesus was a prophet and
not God, and your learned men say the same. We reject your doctrine of the
Trinity and so do your learned men. The Prophet said that Jesus was born of a
virgin and did many mighty works, but your learned men do not even believe
that. They only need a little more reverence and faith before accepting our
Prophet: and you, you should silence your learned men, before bringing your
fraudulent Gospel to us.”
How were missionaries to evangelize in the face of the rationalism
pervading the Church at home? How could the Bible be explained to the native
convert according to the faith-less principles of the critics and their
ever-changing conclusions? Weston writes:
I do not hesitate to say that a Church which has two views in
its highest ranks about the trustworthiness of the Bible, the authority of the
Church, and the infallibility of the Christ has surrendered its chance of
winning the Moslem; for his dependence on his Book, his tradition and his
Prophet will not be broken by a debating society, but by the living, speaking
Church of the Infallible Word incarnate. So that the Ecclesia Anglicana
needs at once to choose between the liberty of heresy and the duty of
handing on the Faith as she received it. She cannot have the one while she
fulfills the other. And the sooner she chooses the better for her, the heathen
and the Moslem.
The same could be said for winning to Catholicism the Lutheran,
the Calvinist, and the evangelical Protestant, whose steady reliance upon the
Bible can only be supplemented — rather than replaced — by the
Catholic Church. Let converts from Protestantism retain that which the Catholic
Church bestowed to them in the first place, and their conversion will be more a
completion than a repudiation.
Liberal Catholicism may seem somewhat harmless to the devout
Western churchgoer, who attends his Mass, recites his Creed, and goes home to
his Offices without giving it much thought. Let every man make of the words
whatsoever he will. However, in the realm of evangelism and missionary work,
the whole Faith is at stake. Christ rose from the dead “according to
the Scriptures”: the Bible’s objective truthfulness and authority
is forever enshrined in the Creed of the Church, which is taught to every
convert and catechumen from the beginning. Of what use is a Bible whose facts
are contrived, whose authorships are forged, whose miracles are imagined, and
whose interpretation is dependent upon the latest "scholarship"? Such is not
the faith of apostles and martyrs: no man will ever die a martyr to maintain
the transient truths of Higher Criticism. This is an important point: modern
biblical criticism makes the Bible virtually inaccessible to the
ordinary layman or the mission-field convert: one must look to the latest
scholarship, rather than to the Catholic Church, to know whether Moses really
existed, whether Jesus did or did not fulfill the Law and the Prophets, etc.
Smith writes:
Frank, who had been teaching Africans for sixteen years, knew
that God intended His Revelation for the poor, the simple and for children, and
not merely for scholars and critics living in academic seclusion.
It became fashionable for Liberals to say that, while the facts of
the Bible may not be true, the ideas or “truths” they represent must
remain. Hence the historical narratives of the Bible became merely symbolic of
"higher truths". In theory, then, one could still remain a Christian while
denying the history but upholding the "truths" that Bible fiction symbolizes or
represents, But the good bishop of Zanzibar begged to disagree:
In religion a fact is of far more vital importance than an idea.
Ideas are always liable to particular interpretations, and quickly change their
color, and alter their weight, as they are accepted by this man or that; nor
have they any permanence in their original shape. Whereas a fact is a concrete
expression of an idea in time, and for all time; and carries its own power of
correcting whatever false ideas may be based upon it. Therefore the Church has
always chosen fact as the basis of her dogma; just as the world prefers ideas
as more likely to produce that foggy atmosphere in which each system may hide
its defects.
Christianity is an historical religion, and Christian theology is
rooted in certain historical facts — facts about which both the missionary
and the convert must have absolute conviction. The acceptance of critical
methods threatened to undermine the conviction that was necessary for
evangelization. For the new school of critics, everything was an open question.
If the Gospel of Jesus Christ hadn’t quite been proven false today, well,
it may be tomorrow. Some archaeologist may yet dig up His bones. But one
doesn’t convert to a religion that hasn’t made up its mind about the
facts. For the Bishop of Zanzibar, liberalism was deadly to the Great
Commission and therefore to his whole life’s work. His biographer
describes Frank Weston’s heartbreaking predicament:
No doubt, in an Oxford common room religion was an interesting
subject for free discussion, but for him it was life. He had not sacrificed his
career, home, country and friends because he "somehow felt" that certain
speculative opinions might be true. People with such nice feelings proceed to
an English deanery, and not to a hut of sticks and mud in the wilds of Africa.
For him our Lord’s honor and the extension of His Kingdom were the only
things in life that mattered; and for him his creed was as certain as the
multiplication table. He had thought deeply about its implications and found it
coherent and consistent with itself; he had worked it out in life and knew its
fruits in experience. He was sure that this creed alone could save the African
race; and what paralyzed him was the thought that the Church which had sent him
to convert the heathen, was indifferent as to what was believed at home.
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS
C. S. Lewis would probably not have referred to himself as an
Anglo-Catholic — but since he received the Holy Eucharist weekly, went to
confession regularly, prayed for the dead, and believed in Purgatory, this
writer feels no dishonesty in representing him as such. In spite of his broad
appeal, his spiritual home was squarely within the tradition formed by the
Caroline divines and the Oxford Movement. Lewis was neither a pastor nor a
theologian, but rather a scholar of secular literature and a talented writer
himself. He is best known for his works in Christian apologetics and his
children’s stories.
As a convert from twentieth-century skepticism he was intensely
interested in those issues which bedeviled twentieth-century skeptics: science,
progress, and yes, modern biblical criticism. As a privileged insider to the
academic cloister, he knew that what motivated the bulk of critical scholarship
was a lack of faith. Perhaps the simplicity of the gospel narratives, the
primitive miracle stories, and the expected credulity were an embarrassment to
the critics’ sophisticated world. Lewis warned ordinary readers of the
Bible to be on their guard:
When you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars,
remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic
assumptions, beggings of the question … will meet you on every side
— even from the pens of clergymen … In using the books of such people
you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a
bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not upon historical and
linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are
impossible, improbable, or improper.
As a writer of fiction, Lewis was himself the subject of modern
literary criticism. Interestingly, the findings of the critics concerning his
own writing had convinced him that the same methods were of no value in
studying the Scriptures:
All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis
of the text it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and
where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences — the whole
Sitz im Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great
ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing. I think I should be
convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm — the herb
molly — against it. You must excuse me if I speak for a while of myself
…
What forearms me against all these reconstructionists is the
fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched
reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way
…
Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash off such
histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed
the author’s mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him,
what his overall intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed,
why — and when — he did everything … My impression is that in
the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been
right; that the method shows a record of 100 percent failure.
For these reasons Lewis held that the preponderance of higher
critics — now theologians within the Church — were responsible for
the greatest mischief:
The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of
divines engaged in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in that
discipline is the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge
mass of beliefs shared in common by the Early Church, the Fathers, the Middle
Ages, the Reformers, and even the nineteenth century.
Lewis was not dogmatic with respect to biblical inerrancy or any
particular interpretation of the creation narratives in Genesis. But he was
certain that, whatever the answers were to the vexing questions of the Bible,
the faith-starved school of higher critics was incapable of arriving at them.
CONCLUSION
It is to be admitted that, today, there are several theological
streams within what is broadly called Anglo-Catholicism. If only the most
conservative and traditional of these is represented here, that is because it
is the most neglected and forgotten among them. Furthermore — in the
opinion of this writer anyway — it is the most authentic and the most
internally consistent. Considering that this stream carries with it the most
influential and distinguished personalities of the Anglo-Catholic movement, the
marginalization of their views is a most unfortunate irony.
A final argument shall take the form of an editorial note.
Anglo-Catholicism with its Branch Theory has always been interested in
ecumenism and the reunification of Christendom. It seems to this writer that,
if the divided camps of Christendom are to be reunited on a common foundation,
an essential component of that foundation is the doctrine of Holy Scripture.
Roman Catholics and classical Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists), as well
as most evangelical sects, have a formal doctrine of biblical infallibility;
the same doctrine is implied, though not formalized, in the Anglican and
Eastern Orthodox traditions. From this basis a significant amount of doctrinal
unity is produced: Chalcedonian orthodoxy is confessed by Lutherans,
Calvinists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox alike, and
evangelical Protestants for the most part are in agreement. The doctrine of the
inspiration, authority, and reliability of the Bible is therefore an important
key to orthodox ecumenism, and, perhaps, ought to be jealously guarded for the
sake of our separated brethren alone. |