A New Witness for God (Vol. 1-3). B. H. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ perceptible influence on the lives of the multitude unless back of them stands divine authority, accompanied by a conviction of the fact of man's immortality and his accountability to God for his conduct. Shorn of these parts, what remains may be beautiful; but it would be as the beauty of a man from whom the spark of life had fled—the beauty of the dead. Of course the orthodox Christian denies that this style of attack on the Christian religion has had any success. To him it is an "attack" which has "failed." "In spite of all the efforts of an audacious criticism," says one, "as ignorant as bold—the truth of the sacred narrative stands firm, the stronger for the shocks that it has resisted; the boundless store of truth and life which for eighteen centuries has been the ailment of humanity is not (as Rationalism boasts) dissipated. God is not divested of his grace, or man of his dignity—nor is the tie between heaven and earth broken. The foundation of God—the everlasting gospel—still standeth secure—and every effort that is made to overthrow, does but more firmly establish it."²⁷

      Let us examine this matter more nearly, and with less partiality than Rawlinson has done. If for the new school of critics to succeed means that the orthodox view respecting Jesus of Nazareth, and the religion he founded must be entirely overthrown by being driven out of existence, then the new criticism is an "attack" which has "failed," for orthodox Christianity, that is, the Christianity which recognizes Christ as divine—as God, and the New Testament as divinely inspired and stating the substantial facts of Messiah's life—is still with us.

      There are a number of reasons why the orthodox view of Christ has not been entirely overthrown by the new criticism. First, the great body of Christians which constitute the Catholic Church have been preserved in the orthodox faith of Christ by the protecting aegis afforded by the authority of that Church. Recognizing the church as superior to the written word, alike its custodian and interpreter, and accepting the meaning which the church attaches to the Bible as infallible, Catholics, I say, have been preserved from the faith-shattering effects of the New Criticism. Second, the criticism has been conducted, in the main, and especially in the early stages of it, in the German language, and hence has been largely confined to the German nation. Third, the discussion wherever it has taken place has been carried on over the heads of the laity; it has not been within their reach, hence to a large extent it has been without effect upon them—an "attack that has failed." But in each case, let it be remembered, its non-effect is the result of not coming in contact with it. In one case it has been kept away from the people by the authority of the church; in the other through the inability of the laity, outside of Germany, to understand the language in which the attack was written; and thirdly, through the inability of the masses to bring the necessary scholarship to the investigation.

      But, on the other hand, if to attract to itself a large following, both among clergymen and laity, and especially among scholars; if to modify prevailing orthodox opinion concerning the historical character of the Old Testament, and force concessions respecting the character at least of some parts of the Christian documents; if to permeate all Christendom—the Catholic Church perhaps excepted—with doubt concerning the divinity of Christ, and to threaten in the future the faith of millions of Christians—if to do this is to succeed, then the new criticism is succeeding, for that is what it is doing. Forty years ago it was the complaint of German orthodox writers that this German neology, as the new criticism is sometimes called, had left "No objective ground or standpoint," on which the believing theological science can build with any feeling of security.²⁸ "Nor," says the same authority, "is the evil in question confined to Germany. The works regarded as most effective in destroying the historical faith of Christians abroad, have received an English dress, and are, it is to be feared, read by persons very ill-prepared by historical studies to withstand their specious reasonings, alike in our country and in America. The tone, moreover, of German historical writings generally is tinged with the prevailing unbelief; and the faith of the historical student is likely to be undermined, almost without his having his suspicions aroused, by covert assumptions of the mythical character of the sacred narrative, in works professing to deal chiefly, or entirely with profane subjects."²⁹

      It is more than thirty years since these admissions were made; since then the German works complained of have been more generally translated and widely read than before. Besides, since then, Renan has given his "Origins of Christianity"³⁰ to the world, and by his great learning, but more especially by the power and irresistible charm of his treatment of the subject, has popularized the conceptions of the Rationalists, until now the virus of their infidelity may be said to be poisoning all Protestant Christendom.

      What must ever be an occasion for chagrin, not to say humiliation, to orthodox Christendom, is, its inability to meet in any effectual way the assaults of this new criticism. In Germany they complain against Strauss for having written his "Life of Jesus" in the German language. If he must write such a book, so full of unbelief in the orthodox conception of Jesus, he ought at least to have had the grace to have written it in Latin!³¹

      For his rationalism Renan is driven out of the Church of Rome; but this only gives notoriety to his views, creates a desire to read his books and spreads abroad his unbelief. When the Presbyterian Church takes to task one of its most brilliant scholars³² for accepting the results of the new criticism, he is sustained by the powerful Presbyterian Synod of New York and acquitted; and when an appeal is taken to the general assembly of the church and he is finally condemned, he is able to retort that while he was condemned by the general assembly, it was by numbers and not by intelligence that he was overcome; it was the less intelligent Presbyteries of the rural district that gave the necessary strength to his opponents. The better informed members—members from the cities and centers of education and enlightenment—were with him.³³ The defense commonly made for orthodox Christianity is an appeal to its antiquity and its past victories. Its defenders point with pride to the failure of the proud boast of Voltaire, who was foolish enough to say: "In twenty years Christianity will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took twelve apostles to rear." "Some years after his death," say the orthodox, "his very printing press was employed in printing New Testaments, and thus spreading abroad the gospel." Gibbon with solemn sneer devoted his gorgeous history³⁴ to sarcasm upon Christ and his followers. "His estate," say the orthodox, "is now in the hands of one who devotes large sums to the propagation of the very truth Gibbon labored to sap."³⁵

      All this may be very well, but even in their day these men of the eighteenth century had a large following, and did much damage to orthodox belief. In fact, it is not inconsistent to claim that, in an indirect way, they were the forerunners of our new school of criticism; for many Christian scholars not satisfied with the answers made to the infidel writers of the eighteenth century have accepted the results of this new criticism as a solution of the difficulties urged against christianity by the infidels of the eighteenth century.

      It is time now to pause and summarize what has been thus far discussed:

      First, the divided state of Christendom of itself argues something wrong; for nearly every page of holy scripture urges the unity of Christ's Church. "Is Christ divided?"³⁶ is the ringing question that the apostle of the Gentiles asks the schismatically inclined church at Corinth. "I beseech you, brethren," says he, "by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no division among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment."³⁷ He then proceeds to tell them that they are utterly at fault in one saying that he was of Paul; another that he was of Apollos, and another that he was of Cephas.³⁸ What he would say of divided, not to say warring Christendom of today, one may not conjecture, further than to say that if the incipient divisions in Corinth provoked his condemnation, the open rupture and conflicting creeds of the Christianity of the nineteenth century would merit still harsher reproof.

      Second, the failure of Christianity to evangelize the world in nineteen centuries, sixteen of which, to all human judgment, appear to have been especially favorable to that evangelization, since at the back of Christianity stood the powerful nations of Europe whose commerce and conquests opened СКАЧАТЬ