10 - The Church Demolishing Its Own Foundation
X- THE CHURCH DEMOLISHING ITS OWN FOUNDATION
WE "have a touchstone by means of which we may judge of all that does not suit the simple grandeur of Jesus, and may assign it to a later development." This touchstone is higher criticism; for "if we wish to arrive at our Lord’s genuine teaching, we must submit the material transmitted in the Gospels to a careful sifting." More than that, "seeing that all the books of the New Testament, in so far as they were not written by St. Paul himself, probably date from the post-Pauline period, it is difficult to work backwards from them through St. Paul to a correct appreciation of the Lord’s teaching."- Dr. Meyer, "Jesus or Paul," pages 66, 63, 60.
"Matthew, Mark, and Luke are compilations, which reached their present form only after several redactions."- Sunderland, "The Bible," page 121.
"Christianity, like every other religion, has its mythology- a mythology so intertwined with the veritable facts of its early history, so braided and welded with its first beginnings, that history and myth are not always distinguishable the one from the other." Dr. Frederick H. Hedge, "Ways of the Spirit," page 338.
Having arrived at the conclusion that Christ was but a symbol, a memory, the learned divines were now confronted with the fact that the body of the records concerning Christ in the New Testament was diametrically opposed to their theories. Since their conclusion must not be disturbed, no matter what the facts to the contrary, they one and all set out to manufacture the premises on which to base their conclusions, and they were naively indifferent as to the scrap heap from which they chose their material. In order, however, to gain a hearing, their first effort was to make great claims of giving "new light," even while in the very act of extinguishing all the light they had. Says Dr. Wernle: "What is crucial in these [the words of Jesus] is trust in God, purity of heart, compassion, humility, forgiveness, aspiration - this and nothing else. This is the will of God, as epitomized in the Sermon on the Mount. . . And if Christendom has forgotten, for almost two thousand years, what the Master desired first and before all things, it shines forth upon us again out of the gospel to-day as bright and wonderful as if the sun were but now newly risen, to drive away with its conquering beams all ghosts and shadows of the night."- "Sources," Page 162. This sounds fine; but an examination of the passage shows the presumption of stating that belief in a few passages of the ethical teachings of the Sermon on the Mount constitutes the whole of the will of God, and that in accepting all of Christ’s teachings, instead of just these few, Christendom for nineteen centuries has been deluded and deceived, - until rescued from this sad condition by the newly risen sun of higher criticism. Thus we find the learned divines of the world busy at the astonishing and rather difficult feat of endeavoring to prove that one twentieth of the teaching of Christ contains more light than all His teaching; that one dollar is more than twenty; that the sun in nineteen twentieths eclipse is brighter than its unobscured brilliancy at noonday.
We must now choose between the Christ of the Bible and the Christ of the critics, and the two are entirely dissimilar. According to higher critics, a garland of legends, beautiful or absurd, according to the taste of the critic, has been wound about His head, and must be resolutely torn away in order to find the true Christ behind.
Since Paul was regarded as the actual creator of Christianity as a world religion, and as Paul was biased by his Jewish education, he warped the teaching of Jesus; and as it passed through the alembic of his mind, it became something different from the Master’s message. Consequently, the critics tell us, it is only by critical processes that we can come to a knowledge of true Christianity. So "scientific criticism" has girded itself to give us the true religion of Jesus. Meanwhile we are to go without, till they have decided upon the question. Only the aristocracy of culture and the hierarchy of learning understand the gospel. The higher critics make the truth of the Bible possible only to the learned; for they claim that the Bible is not the revelation of God, but that the revealed truth is in the Bible, buried under a mass of errors, and only a man of Hebrew and Greek scholarship and gigantic learning can unearth it. But who has the right gospel, the genuine gospel of Christ, Ritschl or Herrmann, Holzmann or Baldensperger, Harnack or Cheyne, Sabatier or Briggs? Must we wait until these learned gentlemen come to an agreement before we know if Jesus be "our Lord and our God"?
Let us not, however, be alarmed by great names; but let us come to close quarters with their teachings. Great men are not infallible. Perchance we may be allowed to exercise our own judgment on a question which concerns our eternal welfare. The lack of agreement, the mercurial decisions, of higher critics can be no better stated than has been done by Adolf Harnack, himself a world-famous higher critic and divine. He says : "The common people are like reeds swaying with the blasts of the most extreme and mutually exclusive hypotheses, and find everything in this connection which is offered them `very worthy of consideration.’ To-day, they are ready to believe that there was no such person as Jesus, while yesterday they regarded Him’ as a neurotic visionary, shown to be such with convincing force by His own words; and yet the day before yesterday, none of these words were His own; and perhaps on the very same day, it was accounted correct to regard Him as belonging to some Greek sect of esoteric Gnostics - a sect which still remains to be discovered. Or, rather, He was an anarchist monk like Tolstoy; or, still better, a genuine Buddhist, who had, however, come under the influence of ideas originating in ancient Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece; or, better still, He was the eponymous hero of the mildly revolutionary and moderately radical fourth estate in the capital of the Roman world. It is evident, forsooth, that He may possibly [italics Harnack’s] have been all of these things, and may be assumed to have been one of them. If, therefore, one only keeps hold of all these reins, naturally with a loose hand, one is shielded from the reproach of not being up to date; and this is more important by far than the knowledge of the facts themselves, which indeed do not much concern us, seeing that in this twentieth century, we must of course wean ourselves from a contemptible dependence upon history in matters of religion."-"Sayings of Jesus," page 13, note.
Upon what basis or principle is it possible to arrive at conclusions at once so absurd and so contradictory? While all critics vary in their results, they are quite unanimous in their guiding principle, as stated by Harnack: "Nothing in the Gospels strikes us as stranger than the frequently recurring stories of demons, and the great importance which the evangelists attach to them. For many minds among us, the very fact that these writings report such absurdities is sufficient for declining to accept them."- "What Is Christianity?" page 63.
Paul Sabatier does not hesitate to tell us that "the miracle is immoral" ("Life of St. Francis," page 433); and Prof. G. B. Foster proclaims that "an intelligent man who now affirms his faith in such stories as actual facts can hardly know what intellectual honesty means."-"Finality of the Christian Religion," page 132.
Thus in a most arbitrary manner, contrary to all real scientific procedure, of which they boast themselves the chief ornaments, they assume the thing that is to be proved, - that miracles are impossible, - tear out of the Bible all accounts containing them, and brand as "immoral" and "dishonest" both the account and one who believes it. Is this argument? Is this logic? Is this science? Yet this is higher criticism.
Another favorite method of filling the Bible with "errors" is to discredit Paul sufficiently to weaken his truthfulness, and thus clear the ground for their own vacuous theories. Dr. Meyer says that by Paul, "we are led so far from Jesus that it will be difficult to trace any longer the lines of connection with Him. And yet St. Paul professes to be a disciple of Jesus Christ!" -"Jesus or Paul," page 40.
Perhaps the reader is curious to learn by what intricate but infallible process of reasoning the doctor arrives at his astonishing results. He very obligingly tells us in no uncertain language: "In the Christ of the first three Gospels, we are dealing not with the historical Jesus, but with the conception formed of Him by the faith and tradition of the primitive communitive, a conception which must have been influenced by St. Paul, seeing that it was written after his times."-Id., page 12.
What logic! The first three Gospels simply "must" be the product of Pauline influence, because they were written after Paul’s time! By a parity of reasoning, the Gospels would equally be the product of Peter’s influence, for they were written after his time. In the same manner, they can be proved to be the product of any of the other apostles. Yet it is upon such broken reeds of logic and smoking flax of evidence that the reliability of the whole New Testament is abjured. It is upon such baseless reasoning that Paul is made out a religious neurotic, liar, and hypocrite, founding the Christian church upon a nightmare. The facility and agility with which the higher critical mind can leap from a pin point of evidence to a whole encyclopedia of wild conclusions is one of the wonders of the century. The certainty with which they proclaim the truth and infallibility of their own conclusions is in direct proportion to the lack of evidence to support them. The words of Dr. Paul Wernle are not less emphatic in their assumption of a complete knowledge of all the events of Christ’s time: "Christ did not discourse in the Synoptic and also in the Johannine way. Either He spoke as a layman, a poet, a prophet, or else as a theologian. Either He testified of the kingdom of God and the will of God, or else of His own person. Either He looked forwards, to His return, or else backwards, to His existence in heaven. He either preached that the doing of God’s will was the only way into the kingdom of God, or else that all depended upon belief in His divine sonship." -"Sources of Our Knowledge of the Life of Jesus Christ," pages 43, 44.
I confess that I am amazed to find a man of learning seriously arguing that because one Gospel represents Christ as speaking of His preexistence, and another of His coming again, therefore one or the other must be false. More than that, the same Gospels speak of both. How does the fact of Christ’s having existed before the world was created preclude His coming again? Or why is His second advent incompatible with His preexistence? On the contrary, is not His preexistence a strong presumption in favor of His ability to come again, and therefore its likelihood, since He tells us He will?
Robert Browning was a layman, a poet, a theologian, and many think him a prophet. But Wernle denies to the Son of the infinite God the ability to be any more than one of these. The four Gospels, then, are unreliable! But Harnack has something better than the Gospels of the poor deluded and deceiving apostles. He, along with other higher critics, has constructed a Gospel of his own, actually rewriting the Gospels. This new Gospel is called "Logia," or is designated by the capital Q. Who or what is this Q that is so much more valuable than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all together?
Concerning Q, Harnack says, "The portrait of Jesus as given in the sayings of a has remained in the foreground."-"Sayings of Jesus," page 250. Is this very valuable document a new Gospel by another of the apostles -by Peter, perchance? Is it a life of Christ from the vigorous pen of Paul, mayhap?
Says Harnack, in the preface to his "Sayings of Jesus," "In the following pages, an attempt is made to determine exactly the second source of St. Matthew and St. Luke both in regard to its extent and its contents, and to estimate its value both in itself and relatively to the Gospel of St. Mark." Who then was the author of Q? "Whoever the author, or rather the redactor, of Q may have been, he was a man deserving of highest respect. To his reverence and faithfulness, to his simpleminded common sense, we owe this priceless compilation of the sayings of Jesus."-Id., page 249.
Backed by the name of Harnack, this raises great curiosity as to what this Q is. How long has it been in existence? "We cannot tell how long this compilation remained in existence."-Id., page 251. What! It is not in existence now? Why, then, this furor about it? What became of it?
"It found its grave in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and probably elsewhere in the apocryphal Gospels. . . . The final blow to the independent existence of Q was dealt when it was incorporated in the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew."-Id.
Thus we see how long this wonderful Q was in existence. It was written, according to higher critics, only a few years before the Gospels, and found its grave in them. Then how did they know it ever existed? - Why, by the wonderful force of their great reasoning powers, or by their "critical divination." The Gospels record parallel accounts of the same event, and therefore there must have been a common source from which they drew; and so these omniscient critics proceed to construct that source from the Gospels, call the result Q, and then criticize the Gospels by their own reconstructed Q. In all, Q contains only 201 verses out of the 3,779 in the Gospels, or only one nineteenth of the whole. (Id., pages 253-271.) With this they supplant the Gospels.
One may think that these things are not important; - but when we find that so renowned a man as Henry Churchill King, president of Oberlin College, publishes a book on "The Ethics of Jesus" (1910), and that all its data is avowedly derived from this source, and not in any instance from the Gospels, it is high time that the attention of the public was called to this perversion of Scripture. Dr. King, along with the other higher critics, thinks that Q is more reliable than any of the Gospels; yet it is derived by the higher critics from the Gospels. "It is hardly too much," says he, "to say that in Q we probably have an even older source for the life and teachings of Jesus than in Mark."- "Ethics of Jesus," page 87. So he uses Harnack’s reconstruction. It is amusing to see how the theologians take one nineteenth of the data we possess, and then found their life of Jesus upon this meager material, and call it "New Light on the Life of Jesus"- the title of a book by Dr. Briggs. The New Testament is so immoral that they have written one of their own! "Luke is especially full of teachings quite as hard for the conscience as the wonder stories of the Bible are difficult for the reason."-Dole, "What We Know About Jesus," page 46.
Says Dr. King: "Various attempts to reconstruct the document Q have been made by Wendt, Resch, A. Wright, Reville, Wernle, Hawkins, Wellhausen (1905), Harriack (1907), and B. Weiss (1908). With the exception of Weiss’s, Harnack’s reconstruction is the most recent, and may also be regarded as the fruit of the most thoroughgoing study. . . . Our study will be based upon Harnack’s reconstruction."-"Ethics of Jesus," page 10.
Speaking of Q, Wernle says, "On the whole, the historical value of these discourses is very high, higher than that of anything else."-"Sources," page 138. So Dr. King accepts this as the "assured results of criticism."-"Ethics of Jesus," page 76.
Dr. Burkitt, however, does not accept even all of the meager Q. He selects only what he calls the "double attested sayings," which amount to thirty-one, and sets these up as all we know of Jesus. ("The Gospel History and Its Transmission.") Q contains 201 verses, but Burkitt’s reconstruction admits only one third of this.
Professor Schmiedel, the peer of Harnack as a higher critic, narrows the data still more: "I select nine such passages [not open to question], and in order to emphasize their importance, give them a special name; I call them the foundation pillars of a really scientific life of Christ."-"Jesus in Modern Criticism," page 24. And here is the principle upon which he so arbitrarily selects them : the passages that run counter to the exalting of Jesus. "When we first make our acquaintance with a historical person in a book which is throughout influenced by a feeling of worship for Jesus, in the first rank of credibility we place those passages of the book which really run counter to this feeling."-"Jesus in Modern Criticism," page 24. So we find the great churchmen selecting for the life of Christ only the passages that are held in common (Harnack’s Q), those that are doubly attested (Burkitt), and those that are exceptional (Schmiedel). We are now reduced to just twenty-five verses, or one one hundred and fifty-first of the whole four Gospels, for a "scientific" life of Christ. At this rate, it will not be long before the critics arrive at the conclusion that we have no basis for a life of Jesus, and no foundation upon which to build our hopes of salvation. To the present-day presumption of infallible and omniscient higher criticism, nothing is impossible. The ease with which they accomplish the impossible is nothing short of amazing. In one sweeping sentence, without reason or evidence, they disdainfully brush aside all the New Testament records of Christ, and with a knowledge as superior to Christ’s own familiar friends as nearly two millenniums’ distance from Him can give them, they noisily and in all seriousness sit down to write anew the gospel of Jesus, to tell us of His words and His actions away back in distant Palestine!
Wisdom, it appears, was born with the critics. Although Christ said that the Holy Spirit would bring to the apostles’ minds all He had said, and lead them into all truth, it appears that the poor, deluded apostles were never so led, and that Christ really meant the twentieth century higher critics! They treat with apathetic contempt or tolerant scorn all who are simple enough to believe the words of Christ and the records of the apostles - all who are so old-fashioned as to believe in the exploded doctrine of salvation through the merits of and belief in Jesus, or so foolish as to come to Him that they may find rest for their souls. The wonder is not so much that these things are said, but that they are said by professed Christians; not in a corner, but all over the earth; not by obscure men, but by the church’s greatest. It may seriously be doubted whether the avowed enemies of the Bible have ever said either as many or half as harsh things against it as its declared believers are now saying under cover of higher criticism. When Voltaire made his famous boast that though twelve men founded Christianity, one man would serve to overthrow it, he did not dream that the theological savants of Europe, Asia, and America would combine in the twentieth century to aid him in his nefarious design.
Neither did Tom Paine imagine, when he vauntingly "unchained his lion," the "Age of Reason"-- which was to devour the Bible that twentieth century "doctors of divinity" would revile the Bible in a manner to have made him stand aghast at their bolder infidelity. Verily, higher criticism makes strange bedfellows.