Having said all this, Hodge and Warfield can now turn to the issue of criticism, the section of the essay entitled “Critical Objections Tried.” After this essay, Warfield returned to the subject of critical objections and responses again and again. In summarizing his contributions here, a number of things can be noted. First, Warfield does not advocate a naive view of inspiration or of biblical studies and scholarship. Warfield was well schooled in the difficulties and problems the text presents to biblical scholars. He was well aware of discrepancies in the biblical narrative, be they the different numbers given in Old Testament accounts or problems of harmonizing the Synoptic Gospels. He was well aware of the problems of textual criticism. Scholars sometimes refer to this as “lower criticism,” the challenge of the differences between manuscripts of the Bible in the original documents. Warfield wrote a book on textual criticism and was so bold as to publish an article showing why the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20) is inauthentic and should be discarded. He even admits that this means “we have an incomplete document in Mark’s Gospel.” What’s more, Warfield published this article in the very conservative and very fundamentalist Sunday School Times. Moisés Silva, himself a rather prominent New Testament scholar, has come to the conclusion that Warfield has espoused anything but a naive view of inspiration, adding, “The contemporary debate regarding inerrancy appears hopelessly vitiated by the failure—in both conservative and nonconservative camps—to mark how carefully nuanced were Warfield’s formulations.”¹⁰

Warfield offers a succinct treatment of the challenges raised by higher criticism in his 1894 article in The Presbyterian Review, “The Divine and Human in the Bible.” The Bible is fully and entirely human and fully and entirely divine continuously and harmoniously. This again is Warfield’s doctrine of concursus. Warfield puts it this way: the Bible is “a divine-human book in which every word is at once divine and human.” Ignoring this in either direction, Warfield observes, ends in disaster.

From the end of the Civil War until the turn of the twentieth century, American attitudes toward the Bible had changed. And in the midst of all the flux, the Princetonians were simply not ready to give up on the authority of the Bible without an argument. They offered a carefully nuanced but firm doctrine of inspiration, that of verbal, plenary inspiration. But, as to be expected, not all saw it the same way.

The Shekinah from the Shrine

While Charles Briggs disagreed with Hodge and Warfield, he certainly did not go as far in his disagreement with them as would Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick had a wide following, preaching in large churches, speaking to massive audiences on the radio, and writing best-selling books. Behind all of that popular speaking and writing was a well-trained and very clever mind. While the fundamentalists were digging in their heels and looking at best outdated and at worst mean-spirited, Fosdick finessed his audiences, and they, by the tens of thousands, listened. To win them over, he proposed what amounted to a new religion, one that had the skeleton of Christianity but with a fresh face and body acceptable to moderns. He knew the power of words and used those words to proffer a new view of the Bible and a new Christianity.

Fosdick could turn a phrase; so he spoke of “the Shekinah distinguished from the shrine.” He wanted the “Gospel freed from its entanglements.” On the surface this may sound good, but digging a little deeper reveals that the shrine and entanglements that Fosdick refers to are nothing else but the Bible. The Bible in its form is the shrine, but inside it, if we get past the particulars, we are led to the abiding truths. The words are historic, but underlying those words is the abiding sense. The beauty of liberalism and modern sensibilities, Fosdick argues, is that they offer “intellectual liberation from an old literalism” and consequently “incalculable spiritual enrichment” for moderns. Fosdick, who retooled Scripture so it could better speak to human needs, transformed the sermon into therapy.¹¹