Hoax of Higher Criticism

The men who pioneered the "higher criticism" of the Bible did not believe that Jesus was who He sad He was: the promise Messiah, the incarnate Son of God. To transmit their unbelief to their intellectual peers, and from them to the general public, the higher critics did their best to remove people's faith in Moses. If they could prove that the Old Testament is unreliable, they could by implication demonstrate that Jesus was misinformed about Moses, and therefore that He was equally unreliable. The two most successful attacks on Christianity in the modern world have been biblical higher criticism and Darwinism. Both views stem from the same source: a view of man as a social creature who lives in an evolving society. Both views substitute a philosophy of autonomous historical process for the biblical philosophy of creation, fall, redemption, and final judgment. Biblical higher criticism affects men's choice of ethics. It especially affects their social ethics. What is seldom understood is that biblical higher criticism arose in England in the late seventeenth century as a reaction to the use of the Old Testament as a guide for civil law. Higher criticism was an important tool in the humanists' war against Christian civilization. They won that phase of the battle. It has taken three centuries for even a handful of Christians to return once again to the Old Testament in search of social guidelines. This quest necessitates a rejection of the techniques of biblical higher criticism. Until Christians abandon higher criticism and its evolutionary social presuppositions (disguised as conclusions), they will remain in cultural bondage.