Higher Criticism is Soft Murder of the Bible and Christian Faith
THE IDEOLOGY OF ANTI-BIBLE-ISM HAS DISGUISED AND MANIFESTED AS HIGHER CRITICISM AND LIBERAL THEOLOGY IN THE CHURCH. The rationalistic, and anti-supernaturalistic intellectual projects of Higher criticism and liberal theology are ultimately anti-God, anti-Bible and anti-Jewish atheistic projects of the devil to defame and destroy the Christian faith. The strategies of the evil Biblical criticism include the JEDP documentary hypothesis, changing dates of the books of the Bible, killing the authorship and destroying the Bible. The anti-supernaturalism of the liberals will only throw them into the supernaturalism of the devil. The critics are also anti-historical and anti-archaelogical and anti-God. They are anti-truth and anti-everything and just pro-devil. Their academic methods are full of relativistic and subjectivistic errors. They are against the objectivity of the truth. They try their best to deconstruct, reconstruct and thus destroy the Bible at any cost. They are really the cowards. They are the friends of the Enemy of God, the devil. They are a curse to the church and to the world. Thus liberal theology and higher criticism are not at all the display of genius but a supreme display of stupidity in academic wrapper, a crude demonic deception. Read on and conquer the deception.
HIGHER CRITICISM IS THE ANTI-BIBLE THEOLOGICAL PROJECT TO DESTROY THE ENTIRE BIBLE. Higher criticism and liberal theology have an anti-Jewish mind bent on criticizing the Bible. Basic proof of their error is that they all started with the anti-Jew, anti-Bible, anti-God presumption and went on expanding it. Theirs was not a valid inductive method. Anti-Semitism takes different shapes from time to time. It can be physical attacks against the people of God, like that of Hitler and holocaust, or philosophical or theological like that of liberal theology.
METHODS OF HIGHER CRITICISM HAVE PRESUPPOSITIONS WHICH ARE DETERMINED TO DESTROY THE CREDIBILITY OF THE BIBLE. The liberal theologians have a NON-BIBLICAL PRESUPPOSITIONAL PLATFORM, which forms the basis of their theology. They do not consider the Bible as the ultimate source of authority in their hermeneutical process. They do not base their theology on the Biblical worldview, but on their own philosophy. THEY TRY TO DECIDE UPON THE REAL INTENTION OF THE TEXT WITH THE HELP OF THEIR OWN PRESUPPOSITIONS, PRINCIPLES AND GUESS WORK UNFOUNDED ON THE BIBLICAL TEXT. Thus the interpreter is generating a hermeneutical principle based on his own philosophical presuppositions and imposes it on the biblical text. With the help of various interpretative theologies they try to PUSH THEIR OWN PHILOSOPHY INTO THE BIBLE. Everything that does not fit into their world view is rejected as figurative, symbolic and mythical. They find disagreeables in the Bible because of their non-biblical worldview, not because Bible is fallible. Their method of study is predetermined to prove what they want to prove. They introduce THEIR OWN HERMENEUTICAL SYSTEMS which if applied would definitely filter out the truth of the Bible and silence the real message of the Bible. Since they do not first accept the Bible as the Word of God, but JUST SCREEN THE BIBLICAL MESSAGE THROUGH THE LENSES OF THEIR OWN PRESUPPOSITIONS, they miss the reality and power of the revelation of the Word of God. They use the Biblical criticism as a weapon to demean the Scripture and drive the people away from the faith in Jesus Christ as God.
THE LIBERALS HAVE THE MENTALITY OF “BIBLE AND JESUS NOT ENOUGH”. They commit this mistake due to their FAILURE TO RECOGNIZE JESUS CHRIST AS THE FULL TRUTH. They were fascinated by the philosophies, ideologies and the academic formalities of the world and depend on them and sideline Jesus Christ. They are just accepting the intellectual output of the secular thinkers, and then idealize and idolize it. They have greater APPRECIATION TO THE WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE AND METHODOLOGIES OF THE WORLD THAN THE BIBLICAL TRUTH. This is the root cause of their theological failures. LIBERALS DESTROYED THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT TO LIBERATE MAN FROM DIVINE AUTHORITY. The dispute over the origin of the text of the Torah is a battle between "divine authority" and "human autonomy." Modernity, starting with Spinoza, was looking for ways through which it could liberate itself from the biblical worldview and its far-reaching divine demands. Since it was this biblical text that made man submissive to divine authority, it was necessary to start an assault on the biblical text itself and strip it of its divine nature.
THE ASSURED RESULT OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM IS TO DESTROY THE BIBLE. Biblical criticism is a jumble of mere hypotheses, imaginings and assertions without any proof and certainty. The higher criticism attacks the Bible and decrees that the Bible is simply a human production. They accuse it to be full of errors, many of its books to be spurious, written by unknown men at later dates than those assigned, etc., etc. The major tenets of their arguments could be summarized as follows.
- The patriarchs of Jewish history are not historic persons.
- The records connected with Moses and the giving of the law on Sinai are unhistorical.
- The story of the tabernacle in the wilderness is a fabricated history of the time of the Exile.
- The prophets cannot be relied on in their references to the ancient history of their own people, or in their predictions of the future
- The writers of the New Testament, who assuredly believed in the records of the Old Testament, were mistaken in the historical value they assigned to those records.
- Our Lord Himself, in His repeated references to the Scriptures of His own nation, and in His assumption of the Divine authority of those Scriptures, and of the reality of the great names they record, was only thinking and speaking as an ordinary Jew of His day, and was as liable to error in matters of history and of criticism as any of them were.
LIBERAL THEOLOGY IS SPIRITUALLY MURDEROUS. German liberal theology of the pre-second world war period played the legitimizing role of killing the Jews. Adolf Hitler killed Jews physically. But the liberal theologians continue to kill Christians spiritually. THIS HATRED TO JEW AND BIBLE CONTINUES IN THE CHURCH AND BIBLE COLLEGES IN THE MEANS AND FORMS OF MODERN LIBERAL THEOLOGY. Liberals are the deceivers and betrayers within the Church. They pretend to be part of the church but they actively work against the Church in such a way ordinary church goers can never understand.
THE MOTIVE AND CONTEXT OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY IS ANTISEMITISM. HIGHER CRITICISM WAS HIGHER ANTI-SEMITISM. ANTISEMITISM IS AT THE ROOT OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY. Anti-Semitic tendencies became stronger in the immediate pre-Hitler days. So many scholars felt like using the Wellhausen kind of theories to give a final blow to the Jewish people, religion, and the Bible. ANTI-JEW THEOLOGY OF HITLER WAS DEVIL’S PLAN TO DESTROY THE PEOPLE OF THE BIBLE BY HOLOCAUST. Hitler was extremely anti-Jew and hence became anti-Bible. Church could not understand his philosophy in time and take a stand. Hence Church was either indifferent to his position or supported Hitler.
AS A WHOLE THERE IS A GREAT SHIFT AND DEVIATION FROM BIBLE. The suicidal attack on the Biblical theology in the 20th century was made by the Modernists using ammunition prepared by the critics of the faith in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many theologians tried to re-do the biblical revelation in the image of the 19th century worldview. For this they manipulated the Biblical text through many kinds of Biblical criticism like documentary criticism. They eliminated the miracles and made the Bible an evolved natural religion. But the First World War destroyed the evolutionary, progressivistic confidence of 19th century man and of his early 20th century Modernistic counterpart.
THROUGH LIBERAL THEOLOGY MANY BIBLE COLLEGES AND CHURCHES ARE UNDER CURSE. Moses had said that, if you forsake God, God will also forsake you. This curse is upon many Bible colleges and churches. Liberal theology denounced God and disobeyed his commandments and it is under curse. All such institutions are under curse. All the graduates are under curse. All institutions that employ such are under curse. Unless they repent and correct it, sanctify their syllabus, cast out the demons of liberal theology from the bible colleges, they will have no blessing. By his fight against the Christian faith, the modern theologian has only succeeded in killing himself, for he has eliminated the sole reason for his own existence.
THE ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF ANTI-JEW SENTIMENT OR ANITISEMITISM ALSO DID SPREAD TO THEOLOGY. Here we find the origins of liberal theology. Hatred to Jews led to the project of discrediting the Bible. This is what the liberal philosophers and theologians of Germany and elsewhere did. To malign the Jews it became necessary to discredit their Bible. Hatred of the Jews became the hatred to the Bible. This is the tragedy with the Liberal theology and Higher criticism.
LIBERAL THEOLOGY SECULARISED GOSPEL AND INTRODUCED SOCIAL GOSPEL. The industrial revolution and the resultant socio-economic exploitation of the common man, fueled by the liberal theology of those noted above, made it appear that the traditional Christian gospel had nothing to offer the hungry and homeless. "The Social Gospel was, as the name very clearly implies, an attempt to socialize the gospel, to give it a sociological frame of reference and purpose. The advocates of the Social Gospel were firmly convinced of the truth of the evolutionary theory of Darwin and they also believed that this theory held out to mankind a marvelous future. Sin and salvation are supra-individual. The church that does not seek to save society is not truly Christian. The focus of Christian ministry is not so much individual conversion but “to transform human society into the Kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconciling them in accordance with the will of God”
LIBERAL THEOLOGY IS ANTI-JEW, ANTI-BIBLE, PHILOSOPHY WITHIN THE CHURCH, TO DESTROY THE CHURCH. Political Nazism killed the Jews who were the physical children of Abraham. LIBERAL THEOLOGY WAS THE THEOLOGICAL ARM OF THE ANTISEMITIC NAZISM. The theological Nazism or liberal theology is spiritually killing the spiritual children of Abraham, who are the true Christians. Inherent in liberal theology and higher criticism is the Nazi spirit of arrogance and hatred to the truth of the Bible. Contemporary theologians have destroyed themselves by their unnecessary and unwarranted destruction of biblical revelation, on which all sound theology is based. The only hope for a resurrected theology lies in a recovery of confidence in the historical Christ and in the Scriptures He stamped with approval as God's Word. The Divine Christ of History Neither rejection of the historicity of a Divine Christ, nor the fear of negative consequences if the question of His Divinity is subjected to historical investigation, can in any sense be justified—though such attitudes have characterized all mainline Protestant theological positions in the 20th century. Contemporary theology has uncritically followed the 18th century dicta that history is too uncertain to ground faith, and that universal experience rules out the miraculous etc. The very existence of evidential claims for Christ's miracles shows that no alleged "universality of experience" can eliminate miracle claims a priori. No one legitimately depreciate history as the ground for religious faith, because history is past experience which produced empirical data. We should not use the indecent methods of the liberals that are rooted in discredited evolutionary presuppositions and subjectivistic analytical techniques.
DID ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH INTRODUCE HIGHER CRITICISM INTO PROTESTANTISM? It is quite possible that the Catholic Church was not pleased with the Protestant position that the Bible is the only authentic source of authority. The Church which burned the Bible and also those who read the Bible, might have introduced higher criticism into the anti-Semitic German soil. The German philosophers and theologians have been the excellent carriers of the cancer of higher criticism thereafter.