“Higher Criticism”—A Note to a Friend
What you said this morning from the pulpit about your unsatisfactory search for “higher criticism” caught my attention. On subjects like this, the internet tends to be a sticky mass of ignorance and imagination, which one finds one’s way through only with caution.
A Creature of Enlightenment
“Higher criticism” is a rather antique expression. These days, since the triumph of its partisans in the academic world, the same thing is characteristically called simply “biblical studies.” It was gestated primarily in Germany during the nineteenth century and describes (I will be blunt here) the method or approach to Scripture of advocates of the Enlightenment as described by Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?”—“What Is Enlightenment?” Here is an excerpt from the essay:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. This is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This minority is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude!) “Have the courage to use your own understanding” is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience [Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat (emphases added)], a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on—then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind—among them the entire fair sex—should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. . . .
This is probably the best short definition I know. There is a sense in which it is entirely correct and unexceptionable, for laziness and cowardliness of soul are deadly sins indeed, and you will not be misled if you consider what Kant says in that light. You can see, however, how Enlightenment, by his obvious intention, rejects all Christian authority, which is essentially that of “pastors” who set themselves up to usurp and control their followers’ critical faculties. If you use your intelligence properly, he says, you will set yourself above such purported authority.
The Christian faith, on the contrary, is based upon obedience not to one’s own independent (Kant says “mature”) will and the opinions that follow it, but to Christ through the witness of his apostles and necessarily, then, of “pastors” who rely upon them. The believer uses his critical powers to discover who they are and validate their claims (St. Paul praised the Bereans for their skepticism), but their directions are to be voluntarily followed, believed, and obeyed, an attitude Kant thinks befits women and domestic animals.
Kant does not regard human beings to be, as do Plato or the Proverbs, or as Luke says of the young Jesus, subject by nature to intellectual growth through maeusis—teaching—nor does he see the seeking of such growth in one’s masters as not only a virtue, but a requirement of life both temporal and eternal. No, Kant’s mature man is a finished thing who does not need someone to care for his soul, or the words of many such bound into a book. He is the island that John Donne says that no man is, who does not come to himself through the words and care of others (Seelsorgen), but is the independent finality of Henley’s Invictus and the biblical account of Satan.
Higher Criticism Unclothed
We can go right from here to “higher and lower (biblical) criticism.” A higher critic is someone who has taken Kant’s advice and therefore allows himself to view everything in the Bible not according to some church tradition, but according to his own best lights. In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis has a bishop who was sent to hell for apostasy say, “When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter.”
That bishop, like so many of his kind, had taken Kant’s advice and criticized the Bible from a higher position than is possible for someone who believes Christian teaching from Christian teachers—that is, the Tradition. For some reason, the Resurrection no longer appealed to his critical faculties (God’s invention—so God’s fault), so he rejected it, and as a bishop, he taught the rejection to others and was rewarded by people like him with the title of “higher” critic—unlike the lower kind, who believe as they have been taught by their Book and by those who care for their souls.
The People Involved
The “lower critic” believes that God speaks through the very grammar of the Bible, but he does not attempt, like the higher, to solve intellectual problems that present themselves to him in study by stepping outside the pastoral tradition Kant despises. Rather, he attempts to discern and follow that tradition—by going, if possible, “higher up and deeper in” to the teaching itself, and letting things he does not understand go unresolved for the time being. This means he will not be welcome in the company of higher critics, for he thinks they have broken the rules in order to exercise “the critical faculties that God gave them” and have strayed from the path of understanding.
It has not been my experience that those who approach Christian teaching in the “higher” manner sport fangs or go about in a cloud of brimstone, but that they are usually genial and often lovable people with a very strong interest in defending the Christian faith, critically—that is, rightly—understood, and not according to some “fundamentalist” (as they call it) paradigm. They believe in “Christ,” improved according to their critical sensibilities, which means they have severe difficulties with the Gospels read as factual, and they seek without embarrassment vocations as religion professors in colleges and seminaries, and as bishops, priests, and pastors who want to prove Christianity, at least their version of it, as true and good. The greatest problem for the higher critic is doubtless the persistence of the Scriptures as they present themselves, to which his science, however imaginative, must finally return for criticism.
Share this article with non-subscribers:
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=38-06-048-c&readcode=
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
29.2—March/April 2016
The History of Family Strength in America May Reveal Good News by Allan C. Carlson
21.6—July/August 2008
Benedict XVI on the Crisis of Faith & Reason by Samuel Gregg
24.2—March/April 2011
Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
