The Effects of Modernism on Christianity
What is Modernism?
Modernism is the philosophy that elevates humans to the apex of authority. Postmodernism, its successor, suggests that objective truth cannot be determined. Modernism (also referred to as the Enlightenment) believed it could rescue civilization from dark superstition and Christianity by stripping away all sources of authority except that of humans.
Modernists hold that reality is limited to the physical world, eliminating all possibility of God intervening in history. There are no miracles, no opening of the Red Sea, healing of the lame, or the resurrection from the dead. As scientist Carl Sagan memorably declared, “The cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be” (4). Modernists suggest that humans were nothing more than especially well evolved animals whose value differs little from that of the other animals sharing the planet. Modernists believe that humans are inherently good, and that human progress is inevitable. Such progress seemed feasible for much of the nineteenth century, when medicines began to control diseases and technology eased lifestyles. The phrase “science says” came to carry the authority once reserved for the words “the Bible says.” Many spoke of humanity becoming more noble and rational, and many attempted to develop utopian communities on Earth.
If this sounds over optimistic to modern readers, it is. The very term “Enlightenment” betrays their hubris. When World War I occurred, a chastened civilization declared this was “the war to end all wars.” Of course it was not, and two decades later the most civilized nations in the world were at it again in World War II. Racism, violence, and despotic rulers are still among the challenges faced by civilization today. In our day society is actually far less enamored with science. While acknowledging gains in technology and medicine, we are also painfully aware of a despoiled environment and depleted resources. Science has taken us a long way, but there has been a fearful cost.
The Effects of Higher Criticism on Biblical Studies
Johann Phillipp Gabler (1753-1826) was the earliest Enlightenment scholar to begin the prolonged task of picking at the integrity of Scripture. He drew a distinction between what he called Biblical Theology, which he defined as historical in origin and Dogmatic Theology, which was didactic in origin i.e. teaching. Dogmatic Theology did not change, he declared, for it was not subject to historical investigation. Such things as the moral teachings of Jesus would always prove wise, but Biblical Theology was subject to change because it might prove historically inaccurate. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had his baleful effect on this movement. If his evolutionary theory held true for instance, then the literal interpretation of the Genesis account could not be believed. George Friederich Hegel (1770-1831) proposed the theory of an evolutionary development of human understanding of God. In his hypothesis, the Mosaic Law represented a primitive conception of a divinity who was vengeful and demanded mere legal obedience to the law. By the time of the 8th century prophets (i.e. Amos, Joel), Israel had developed to the point where she understood that mere ritual was inadequate in God’s eyes, instead a lifestyle of living for God was desired. By the time of Jesus, we see a further development of thinking about God in the life of Jesus Christ. There are obvious problems with Hegel’s evolutionary theory of spiritual understanding, however. He does not take revelation into account, where God progressively reveals His will to humans in Scripture. Early Israelite writers were not less sophisticated than their successors, as Hegel thought, but as is true in any relationship, the two personalities (God and humans) began to reveal their nature over time. Second, if humans continually developed their thinking up to the day of Jesus, what was to stop them from developing in their thinking still further today? Can we justifiably claim modern thinking more advanced than that of Jesus? Who is to say that we are progressing in our understanding at all? Perhaps we are regressing! Who gets to decide what progress is?
Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) wrote an influential study entitled Prolegomena in the History of Ancient Israel (1878) in which he presumed a series of sources that lay behind the text of the Old Testament. One source he called “J” because it was written by an Israelite who referred to God as Jahweh, another he called “D” for the Deuteronomist, a writer who reimaged the Torah from the perspective of 8th century Israel. A third he identified as “E,” an author who referred to God as Elohim. The fourth he designated “P” for Priestly. The latter was interested in priestly matters, the temple, ritual, and so on. Wellhausen’s theory also has weaknesses. Where does it all end? It was not long after Wellhausen’s ideas that scholars found all kinds of sources behind the Old Testament text. Inevitably one female scholar proposed “W,” a female writer particularly interested in women’s concerns. Can we state the obvious here? There is no manuscript evidence for any of these sources. Out of tens of thousands of manuscripts in our possession, none bears any evidence of such a fractured text. The Old Testament was intact from beginning to end. Finally, how did ancient scribes achieve such a complex process? They did not have laptops where they could copy and paste “D’s” writings in the middle of an “E” section and insert “J” material in the middle of “P’s” writings.
Predictably, scholars began to deal with the New Testament in the same way. B. H. Streeter (1874-1937) in his work The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (1926) suggested that lying behind the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) lay other sources. He proposed a “Proto-Mark,” a source that was the basis of parts of Mark and Matthew, that Matthew and Luke copied Mark in extended sections, and that there was an additional source (never actually discovered) that he termed Quella (meaning source).
Another notable example of this attitude toward Scripture lies in the way scholars have assigned authorship to Paul’s Epistles. While many will allow that Paul was behind the books of Romans and Ephesians, because they articulate the Pauline themes of justification by faith, they doubt that Paul was responsible for the so-called Pastoral Epistles. One scholar observes “most other scholars now take it almost as an unquestioned assumption that the Pastoral Epistles are not the work of Paul.” He goes on to suggest that for many scholars these epistles “were written to deceive readers into believing that they contain the actual wording and teaching of Paul” (Marshall 58). It would be extremely difficult to maintain much respect for the biblical documents if one believed these things about Scripture.
What, we might well ask, lies behind these speculations regarding the supposed sources behind Scripture? What they imply is that the Scriptures are a human enterprise in their entirety, with literary and oral sources forming the basis of their composition rather than a God who reveals His will in its pages. How can we insist on returning to the Bible if the Bible is nothing more than the work of human beings? A restoration of biblical Christianity demands a high regard for Scripture as God’s word.
Is the Bible A Reliable Resource?
Augustine (354-440), an early church father, explained the basis upon which Christians can believe in Scripture: A child, he explained, cannot know with certainty who his father is unless he believes what his mother tells him (Divine Institutes, 5.19.23). Such information can only be known on the basis of the reliability of the spokesperson. Is my mother a reliable witness? Is she generally truthful? The same can be said of the Bible. Is it a truthful book? With regard to those facts that we can verify, can we say that the Bible is accurate? The story of archaeologist Sir William Ramsay (1851-1939) is instructive: The skeptical Scottish academic set out to prove that Luke was an inaccurate historian. He knew he could neither prove nor disprove miracle accounts, but he was certain that Luke had made up numerous individuals and locations. He scoured Asia Minor and Greece for signs of Luke’s “sloppy” historical work. Ramsay the skeptic returned to Great Britain a believer. Every one of Luke’s facts checked out. There were proconsuls in senatorial provinces just as Luke recorded, asiarchs in Ephesus and politarchs in Thessalonica, all specific and local terms for leaders in their part of the world. The title politarch in Acts 17:6 is striking because until Ramsay’s investigation, the term was unknown outside of Acts. Ramsay however found five inscriptions with the term in the city (Douglas and Comfort 580). What this demonstrates is that the Bible will withstand any investigation from those willing to honestly look at the evidence.
The Restoration of Respect for the Bible
Barton W. Stone urged that all Christians “take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven.” He reasoned it is better “to enter into life having one book, than having many to be cast into hell” (19). Thomas Campbell was equally convinced of the Bible’s authority, declaring that all should “practice that simple original form of Christianity, expressly exhibited upon the sacred page” (25). A striking instance of this regard for the Bible comes from Alexander Campbell’s search for infant baptism in Scripture. His search became acute when his first child, Jane, was born. The Brush Run congregation wondered whether Campbell would invite them to her christening. Campbell embarked on a deep search of the New Testament for uses of the verb baptidzo. He discovered no biblical examples of infants being subject to baptism. What he found instead were numerous references to adult immersion (cf. Foster, Blowers, Dunnavant, and Williams 57). The young Campbell’s study demonstrated sufficient courage to study teachings long assumed to be confirmed, and if not demonstrated to be true, the integrity to carry out whatever practice was found in Scripture. There would be no baptism for the infant Jane. What it demonstrated was Campbell’s utter faith in the integrity of Scripture.
Early Effects of Liberal Scholarship
The speculations of modernism, particularly what became known as Higher Criticism, led inexorably to the division between the restoration-minded Churches of Christ and the unity-minded Disciples of Christ. Their contrasting views of the Bible was the pivot around which separation occurred.
Although this division was acknowledged by Gospel Advocate editor David Lipscomb in 1906, it was a wound that had been open for some time. When Lipscomb responded to a United States Census inquiry regarding whether the restoration movement was now one, or two fellowships, he admitted, “There is a distinct people, taking the word of God as their only sufficient rule of faith, calling their churches ‘churches of Christ’ or ‘churches of God,’ distinct and separate in name, work, rule of faith, from all other bodies or people” (457). How had events come this far? What drove a wedge between the two fellowships? One factor was the acceptance by Disciples of Christ leaders of German Higher Criticism, the major proponent of modernism in that day. The influx of biblical Higher Criticism drove them away from the restoration ideal. The arrival of teachers such as William Rainey Harper from Yale at the University of Chicago in 1891 and the construction of the Disciples’ Divinity House at the same location meant that Disciples preachers training at that location began to accept the skeptical tenants of German Higher Criticism (cf. Hooper 27). It became increasingly difficult to approach the Bible from a restoration perspective for those leaders who emphasized only the human role in the production of Scripture, and no longer held to the inspiration and authority of the biblical documents.
A key moment occurred in 1889 when R. C. Cave delivered a sermon in the Central Church of St. Louis, articulating a rationalist philosophy. He claimed that both Abraham and Moses had been ignorant of God’s true character, denied the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. Aping his Higher Criticism heroes, he declared the Bible to have been produced by way of “an evolution, not a revelation” (DeGroot and Garrison 26).
J. W. McGarvey, a Bible professor at the College of the Bible in Lexington, KY, responded with a series of articles in the Christian Standard, beginning in 1892 entitled “Biblical Criticism” where he sought to demonstrate the flaws in the methods of theological liberalism. Clearly at stake was their understanding of the inspiration of Scripture. Herbert L. Willitt, who became director of the Disciples of Christ house in Chicago held to a progressive, developing view of inspiration, where Jewish history represented an adolescent stage, and the New Testament a more mature development of that human understanding. In discussion with McGarvey, he wrote that “the Bible was inspired, not because of its superhuman accuracy and infallible authority, but because it introduced both the profoundest truths of religion and those personalities in human history who were most worthy of reverence” (qtd. in Tucker 52). How one determined what a “profound truth” of religion, “worthy of reverence” was, he did not say.
McGarvey held a much higher view of the Bible’s inspiration. “It makes me wonder,” he declared, how the terms “honest and unsophisticated are confined to those interpreters who think that the writings of such men as Luke and Mark are merely ‘on the whole, valuable and trustworthy digests of gospel history’” (4). Hooper observes that “liberal theology, as exhibited in German Higher Criticism invaded the Disciples movement in earnest in the 1890s.” Both McGarvey and Lipscomb expressed vigorous concerns. Although neither could peer into the future, “both saw enough to know that the ideas would eventually divide the Restoration Movement” (Hooper 29). Sadly, their intuition proved correct. At a fundamental level the motive for this move across the theological spectrum from restoration to liberal seems to have been a desire to “lift the brotherhood to a ‘dignified church’ in a world of denominationalism commanding at least some respect for these religious bodies” (West 250). As the church, particularly in the north, crossed the proverbial tracks and became more affluent, they also sought to appear more sophisticated to their religious neighbors.
Recent Struggles Over Scripture’s Authority
The church still faces the challenge of modernism today, that arrogant philosophy that places sinful humans in a place God alone should occupy. This manner of interpretation can be seen in the way some have approached the role of women in the church. “Just because Paul wanted the wives in Ephesus not to teach,” one opines, “it does not necessarily follow that he wanted all women in all places and all times to behave in exactly the same way” (Geer 300). This approach suggests that biblical instructions are just occasional, meaning that Paul was instructing the church at Ephesus specifically, and not all Christians in every era and in every location. Suddenly the Bible becomes a book where instructions given to Matthew’s readers, or Paul’s, might not be authoritative for today. It would be interesting to see how these scholars approach other topics. Were Paul’s instructions to the Ephesians to forgive each other also only “occasional” (Ephesians 5:32)? Is Peter’s command to submit intended only for his readers, or should we all humble ourselves before the “mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6)? It is always curious to see which biblical commands these scholars feel are suitable for today, and which ones are not. One also wonders what the criteria for these distinctions are.
The same writer reflects on the character of 1 Timothy’s author: “Paul . . . was as much a child of his own time as we all are,” he explains gently, “he simply had no concept of a world order in which women were in leadership positions equal, or almost equal to men” (Geer 301). The writer’s opinion that Scripture is of merely human origin is herein exposed. It may very well be that Paul was limited in some way to the ideas of his day and age, but where is the Divine in this process? Where is God’s revelation (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-21)? It dawns on us that in order to get rid of unwanted or unpopular Bible teaching, the modernist has to clip the Bible’s wings to the status of a book of mere human origin.
In a conversation between Jesus and the Sadducees regarding the reality of the resurrection of the dead Jesus responds with a powerful expression of God’s word: “You know neither the Scriptures,” He declared, “nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29, ESV). There is a direct correlation between our knowledge of God’s word and our knowledge of His power. Conversely, those who do not know God’s word do not know His power. When modernists chip away at the divine origin of Scripture, and respond to Scripture with embarrassment, they also rob themselves of God’s power. The church is sustained and will grow to the degree that we see Scripture as God’s word—our authority.
Works Cited
Campbell, Thomas. Declaration and Address. N.d. St. Louis: Mission Messenger, 1975.
DeGroot, A.T., W.E. Garrison. The Disciples of Christ: A History. 1889. St. Louis: Christian Board of Publication, 1948.
Douglas, J.D., and Phillip W. Comfort. Who’s Who in Church History. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1992.
Foster, Douglas, Paul Blowers, Anthony Dunnavant, and D. Newell Williams. Baptism. The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.
Geer, Thomas C. Jr., “Admonitions to Women in 1 Tim. 2:8-15.” Essays on Women in Earliest Christianity. Ed. Carroll D. Osborn. Vol. 1. Joplin: College, 1993. 2 vols.
Hooper, Robert E. A Distinct People. A History of the Churches of Christ in the 20th Century. West Monroe: Howard, 1993.
Lipscomb, David. Gospel Advocate. July 1907: 457.
Marshall, I. Howard. The Pastoral Epistles. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999.
McGarvey, J.W. Christian Standard. June 16, 1881.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random, 1980.
Stone, Barton W. The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery. N.d. St. Louis: Mission Messenger, 1975.
Tucker, William. “Higher Criticism and the Disciples.” Discipliana. 22 September 1962.
West, Earl Erwin. The Search for the Ancient Order of Things: A History of the Restoration Movement (1800-1918). Vol. 2. Indianapolis: Religious, 1950.