The Fundamentals (1910), Vol.1

118 The Fundamentals. tive views are no longer maintained by men with pretension to scholarship. The only people who oppose the Higher Critical views are the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the illiterate. (Briggs’ “Bible, Church and Reason,” pages 240-247.) This, too, is a matter that needs a little clearing up. In the first place it is not fair to assert that the upholders of what are called the old-fashioned or traditional views of the Bible are opposed to the pursuit of scientific Biblical investi­ gation. I t is equally unfair to imagine that their opposition to the views of the Continental school is based upon ignorance and prejudice. What the Conservative school oppose is not Biblical criti­ cism, but Biblical criticism by rationalists. They do not op­ pose the conclusions of We11hausen and Kuenen because they are experts and scholars; they oppose them because the Bib­ lical criticism of rationalists and unbelievers can be neither expert nor scientific. A criticism that is characterized by the most arbitrary conclusions from the most spurious assump­ tions has no right to the word scientific. And further. Their adhesion to the traditional views is not only conscientious but intelligent. They believe that the old-fashioned views are as scholarly as they are Scriptural. It is the fashion in some quarters to cite the imposing list of scholars on the side of the German school, and to sneeringly assert that there is not a scholar to stand up for the old views of the Bible. This is not the case. Hengstenberg of Basle and Berlin, was as profound a scholar as Eichhom, Vater or De Wette; and Keil or Kurtz, and Zahn and Rupprecht were competent to compete with Reuss and Kuenen. Wilhelm Moller, who confesses that he was once “immovably convinced of the irre­ futable correctness of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis,” has revised his former radical conclusions on the ground of reason and deeper research as a Higher Critic; and Profes­ sor Winckler, who has of late overturned the assured and settled results of the Higher Critics from the foundations, is,

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