The Lion’s Den

These theological conservatives, especially when it came to the doctrine of Scripture, had found a home at Princeton and had a de facto leader in Benjamin B. Warfield, affectionately dubbed “The Lion of Princeton.” Born in the South in 1851, Warfield first began his academic career at Western Seminary near Pittsburgh before moving on to Princeton in 1887. He was returning to his alma mater, having studied there under Charles Hodge. Charles Hodge passed the mantle on to his son A. A. Hodge. After A. A. Hodge’s death in 1886, the mantle passed to Warfield. Warfield not only studied at Princeton, he also spent a year studying overseas in Europe. By 1887 he had already published a number of significant works and had quite a reputation. He was poised, in other words, to carry on Princeton’s role in defending and commending the authority of the Bible and its supernatural worldview.

Warfield’s role in the Bible’s defense actually predates his return to Princeton as a professor. In 1881 he and A. A. Hodge coauthored an article for The Presbyterian Review simply titled “Inspiration.” Charles Hodge had first written on the topic in 1857. Since then, however, new challenges to the doctrine had arisen. The new challenges orbited around higher criticism and those recent developments in philology mentioned in Thayer’s lecture. The activity of higher criticism analyzes the Bible in order to determine its authorship and historicity. This analysis consists of unraveling the various literary sources underlying the biblical books. Higher criticism can take the shape of “form criticism,” which looks for literary units marked off by a particular form or pattern. It can also take the shape of “tradition criticism,” which looks for literary units that adhere to a certain tradition or a certain set of beliefs and understanding.

Whichever approach, higher criticism starts with the presupposition that the Bible or even particular books of the Bible are composites, made up of various strands. From the perspective of higher criticism, authors of biblical books function more like editors who cleverly and creatively weave the strands, coming from a variety of sources, together. Advocates of higher criticism see their task as teasing the strands apart. The two main areas of the Bible that received a great deal of attention by higher critics in the nineteenth century were the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament ascribed to Moses, and the four New Testament Gospels. The upshot of this higher criticism, or to use a term by Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, “rationalist biblical criticism,” is to see the Bible and its books not as the product of divine agency but as the product of human endeavors.

Consider higher criticism and the Pentateuch. Various higher critics had identified four authorial strands: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronimist, and the Priestly strand. These strands were identified by the four initials J-E-D-P. Building on this, Julius Wellhausen argued in his History of Israel (1878) that much of the Pentateuch comes from the time after the exile and that Moses certainly was not the author. The Pentateuch is more about the beliefs of these four groups than it is an accurate and reliable revelation from God.

Similar attacks came against the Gospels. While higher criticism of the Gospels stretches back to the eighteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss took it to new heights (or depths?) with the publication of his Life of Jesus in 1835. This set off a virtual cottage industry of scholars on a quest for the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus, as this approach has it, lies buried somewhere in the texts of the Gospels, which were more concerned with the Jesus of faith, the fictitious Jesus who was a creation of various Christian communities who had attached names of the apostles to their own books. According to the scholars questing after Jesus, the Bible is viewed as a book of faith, not to be taken for granted as historically reliable. As with the Pentateuch, the Gospels are more about the beliefs of the communities that produced them than they are an accurate and reliable revelation of Christ from God.