LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM OF THE OLD' TESTAMENT.
go THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR." j SIR,—It is never without regret that I differ from the Spectator,. especially on subjects which—whether agreement with him is possible or not—he always handles with equitableness and reverence. And your article on Mr. Gladstone's paper in Good Words touches on one subject at any rate, so close to the very heart of Christianity, that I shrink from discussing it, even in your columns. But, for the sake of others, I must try, with your permission, to say a few words.
May I, then, observe that, when referring to the bearing of
our Lord's authority on questions of Old Testament criticism, you appear to me to confuse two matters which, as I submit, should be kept distinct P The first is the fact and the extent of a limitation of our Lord's knowledge, as Man. The second is the question whether he made statements upon subjects about which he was really ignorant,—statements which are now known to have been false.
(1.) Now, on the former of these points I have certainly ventured to say that we have no distinct assurance of any limitation of the knowledge possessed by our Lord's human soul, except on the subject of the date of the day of judgment. If his knowledge was limited in other directions, we can only guess at such limitations ; while the terms of the hypostatic union afford a presumption against them. Nor do the questions which he asked the doctors in the Temple, or his mother and his foster-father afterwards, point to a contrary conclusion. Surely these questions, like those of Socrates, were asked, not for his own information, but in order to give a direction to the thought and dispositions of his hearers ; while his conversation with the woman of Samaria exhibits his real intellectual relation to the human beings around him. " He needed not that any should testify of man ; for he knew what was in man."
No doubt at the approach of and during the Passion, there was a veiling of the Divinity which belonged to the tragical exigency of the occasion ; and this does not less explain the prayer in Gethsemane than the cry, " Why hast thou forsaken me ?" on the cross. Interpreters who, with whatever reason, would confine the application of Col. ii., 3, to our Lord's life in glory after his ascension, cannot doubt that St. John i., 14, applies to his life on earth.
(2.) But those who suppose that our Lord's knowledge as Man was even largely limited, might yet shrink from saying that he was ignorant of matters upon which he claimed to speak with decisive authority, and respecting which his words have always been regarded by Christians as a revelation of the divine mind. This is the most vital matter in the discussion. When teaching religion, did he teach erroneously P For it was as a teacher of religion, and not as a lecturer on philology or history, that he approached and handled the Old Testa- ment, and the question is whether his sanction of it as a whole or the use he made of particular parts of it, was unwarranted, as being based on ignorance.
Here it might appear that for the moment you have failed to observe how largely the destructive criticism assails the moral —as distinct from the historical—credit of the writers whose works our Lord recommended in the block. The theory, for in- -stance, that the Books of Chronicles were composed after the Exile, in the interests of a sacerdotal party, by a writer who pro- duced from the recesses of his pious imagination whatever he conceived to be wanting in the earlier records of Israel, is surely fatal to the moral worth of his book. And if we could suppose such a theory of the origin of the book to be true, does it not argue in our Lord—may He pardon me for writing this !—not merely a want of that sort of knowledge of the true state of the case which the destructive critics are assumed to possess, but also a lack of that moral intuition which would have detected the ring of falsehood in an un- principled work of fiction P And what is to be said of the -selection of Psalm cx. by our Lord to furnish an argument for the truth of his Divinity, if the Davidic authorship of the Psalm—the fact upon which his argument wholly depends for its force—is to be treated as it has been treated by recent criticism ?
May I add a word about the Book of Daniel ? You say that Hebraists tell you that the philological evidence is decisive against the view that the book dates from a period long before Antiochus Epiphanes. Nobody, so far as I know, would date it more than some four centuries before Antiochus, which, in the history of a language, may or may not be " long." But at any rate one Hebraist, who used to be considered a good scholar, has furnished in his "Lectures on Daniel" philological evidence -which at least deserves to be studied ; and when Dr. Pusey put that evidence together, he had his eye, so far as I know, on every work that had then been written on the destructive side. Nor does it appear that any very material addition has been made to the case against the trustworthiness of this portion of the Old Testament since Dr. Pasey's death.
His name reminds me of one who, like himself, attended Professor Freytag's Arabic classes at Bonn, and who, after a short but brilliant career, devoted, unhappily, to the Negative Criticism, died at a comparatively early age, I think, in 1840. It was Von Bohlen who, fifty-five years ago, suggested the parallel between the origin which he ascribed to portions of the Mosaic writings, and that of the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Both, he observed—I am quoting him from memory—originated in times of weakened respect for autho- rity, when pious minds saw no great harm in fictitious com- positions, having for their object an employment of the great names of a long-past generation, with a view to strengthening existing laws and institutions of which the owners of the names had never heard. The suggested parallel, it is needless to say, was not intended to revive respect for the false Decretals but those writers on the destructive side who still profess, I doubt not sincerely, respect for the Old Testament as a volume of religious value to mankind, are surely con- cerned to show that their theories about the origin of portions of it will not, if generally accepted, be fatal to any respect for it at all. Mr. Gladstone does not as yet appear to have touched on this serious aspect of his great subject. And we are, of course, all agreed that there is a very large field within which criticism may pursue its task, not only without sugges- tions injurious to the good name of the sacred writers, or any implied rejection of the supreme authority of our Lord, but with very great and increasing advantage to all serious students of the Bible.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Palm Sunday. H. P. LIDDON.
[We profoundly feel the difficulty to which Dr. Liddon refers of discussing subjects of this kind in a newspaper with adequate reverence, and often refrain on that account alone from saying what we might otherwise wish to say. But we may remark without impropriety on Dr. Liddon's first head that the statement appended in St. Luke's Gospel to the story of our Lord's childhood, appears to us to confirm very strongly the view which we took of it rather than the view which he takes " And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." Could such a statement have been appended to the story of our Lord's first visit to the Temple, unless the evangelist had supposed that that visit was an illustration of the means by which his human nature " in- creased in wisdom," and not, as those theologians who regard his human knowledge as all but unlimited, describe it, in mere human experience P Is not this school of theologians a little inclined towards the Monophysite error P (2.) It is, of course, very difficult to say how far spiritual and moral per- fection would go in enabling any human being to detect the spurious character of a book that professed to be written in one century and was really written much later; but we cannot believe that it would go very far, supposing the book to be as much penetrated with genuine religious fervour as the Book of Daniel. We do not profess to have any command of the merits of the special controversy ; but we cannot think it wise to encumber so very difficult a question as it appears to raise, with results so disproportionately momentous.—ED. Spectator.]
Previous page
