Project Canterbury

Original Essays

Liberalism and the Anglo-Catholic Resistance: A Documentary History

In The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism, Dominican Aidan Nichols devotes an entire chapter to "Liberal Catholicism", by which he means the post-Tractarian movement within the Church of England launched in 1889 by Charles Gore’s publication of Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. Actually, the seeds of Liberal Catholicism go back at least as far as the Essays and Reviews published in 1860 under the leadership of arch-liberal Benjamin Jowett. The essence of Liberal Catholicism is an acceptance of the methods and conclusions of German Higher Criticism applied to the Bible, combined with a curious insistence on maintaining historic creedal orthodoxy and High Church principles. Charles Gore himself, although a champion of Higher Criticism, emerged as an opponent of those who quite predictably sought to apply the methods of the new criticism to the truths of the Creed. But the Lux Mundi men had unleashed forces beyond their control: the great majority of ordinary Christians could not follow the intricate nuances of Oxford scholars, and to them it seemed that the whole faith had come undone. In The Reconstruction of Belief (1924), Gore describes the confusion which followed in the wake of Liberalism’s triumph:

And contemporaneously with the great scientific movement, of which Darwin is the central figure, there emerged within the horizons of the religious world, which had been building its spiritual fabric upon the infallibility of Scripture, the  startling conclusions of literary and historical criticism … It rapidly converted the scholars; but it was very revolutionary. And it presented itself to the ordinary man as the discovery that the Bible is not true – woman was not really made of a rib taken from the side of man; the Garden of Eden was a myth; mankind was not saved from a universal deluge in the persons of Noah’s family in an ark; the Tower of Babel was not a true account of the origin of languages; many things written in the Bible did not actually happen – could not indeed have happened as is  described: the Bible had been proved not to be true.

But the Anglo-Catholics believed that if the Church of England has taught that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation", it assumes that Holy Scripture as a whole is reliable and authoritative. This study is intended to document the views of those whose efforts to revive the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism were never meant to be at the expense of Holy Scripture. While Protestantism pitted the Church against the Bible at the expense of the former, Liberal Catholicism threatened to do the same at the expense of the latter. For the Anglo-Catholics, however, neither approach had anything to do with the Truth.

This writer is a first-year seminarian with no background in this subject and very little time for extensive research: undoubtedly there is a great deal of history and literature of which he is yet unaware. The reader is asked to forgive what are sure to be salient omissions. However, one thing is clear: the voices of Anglo-Catholic opposition to modern biblical criticism are so seldom heard today that many will be surprised to learn they exist at all. Yet their warnings were in many ways prophetic, and their influence continues among a sturdy remnant in our times. At minimum, then, let this small effort help bring to remembrance that Great Tradition for which they labored.

The much beloved John Keble was born in 1792 and ordained a priest in 1816. He is best known for his poetry and his preaching of the sermon on "National Apostasy" in 1833. He subsequently contributed to the "Tracts for the Times" and worked closely with Newman and Pusey in the Oxford Movement, and is therefore revered by contemporary Anglo-Catholics as a father in the Faith.

This writer was unable to find any writings of Keble on the subject of biblical criticism other than quotes from a relatively late biography, although he is frequently mentioned as an intractable opponent of the new school. He died in 1866, twenty-three years before Lux Mundi and the avalanche that followed. However, German rationalism was already in the air, and in 1860 there was published the Essays and Reviews – largely regarded as a daring precursor to Lux Mundi – which challenged the doctrines of the inspiration of Scripture and the eternity of Hell. The reaction to Essays and Reviews was strong and forceful: legal action was taken against two of the essayists; the book as a whole was synodically condemned; the Archbishop of Canterbury issued an encyclical against it; and 11,000 clergymen signed a protest declaring their belief in the doctrines under question. But still, something had changed. The views reflected by the prominent essayists were obviously gaining in popularity or else the book would not have been written, and Keble was greatly disturbed. He wrote in a personal letter:

I am much obliged by the loan of this book, which would be instructive if one knew how to profit by it. But how it makes one’s heart ache!  Especially the last and first essays, the only ones, to my feeling, which have any heart in them. It fills one with uneasiness to think how very  sure a man who writes and teaches in that tone is to make his way with warm young hearts, and I wish more than ever that it were possible to censure and expose the doctrines without any personal attack.

Keble’s biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, summarizes his views thus:

The modern Anglo-Catholic party has identified itself completely with a school of Biblical criticism which Keble himself considered dangerous and subversive, so dangerous that, referring to the spread of the ‘new criticism’ at Oxford, he could write that the real question was ‘whether the University of Oxford now is, and means to be hereafter, a believer in the Bible or no?’

The scholarly Edward Bouverie Pusey was born in 1800, ordained a priest in 1828, and he reposed in 1882. Pusey is best remembered for reluctantly assuming the leadership of the Oxford Movement after Newman’s departure to Rome, and for his involvement in the subsequent "ritualist" controversies. He revived the practice of auricular confession, and he began the first order of nuns that England had known in 300 years. His sanctity is legendary, and his influence upon the history of Anglo-Catholicism is second to none. Like his dear friend Keble and Tractarianism in general, Pusey was hostile to the German Rationalism of Eichhorn, Ewald, Graf, Strauss, Baur, and Wellhausen – which he determined was a reaction to a dead Lutheran orthodoxy lacking in spiritual vitality – and to the opinions promulgated in Essays and Reviews, which he believed to have been influenced by the same rationalist theology. His distress over Essays and Reviews is reflected in the following letters and speeches:

To Keble:

I used to maintain, and do maintain, that the Church must bear with much, for fear of worse evils. But she must not bear with this denial of our Lord the Atoner, and of God the Holy Ghost, who spake by the Prophets … I never felt so desponding as I do now, not at people’s attacks (these we must expect), but at the acquiescence in them on the part of religious men.

To the Times:

I cannot imagine anything more demoralizing than that clergymen should  profess their beliefs in great fundamental truths, and assert the contrary; that they should affirm to God, as the mouthpiece of the congregation in  prayer, what they should contradict in their sermons or their writings.

To the Hebdomadal Council:

We are at the beginning of a deepening and widening struggle for life or death  for the life or death of the University as a place of religious learning; for the life or death of the Church of England as an instrument of God for the salvation  of souls.

To the Guardian:

The well known passage in the unbelieving Westminster Review states the extent to which the truth has been attacked. Look at the list. "Now, in all seriousness we would ask, what is the practical issue of all this?

Having made all these deductions from the popular belief, what remains as the residuum? In their ordinary, if not plain, sense, there has been discarded the  Word of God, the creation, the fall, the redemption, justification, regeneration and salvation, a day of judgment, creeds, liturgies and articles, the truth of Jewish history and the Gospel narrative; a sense of doubt thrown over even the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Ascension, the Divinity of the Second Person, and the Personality of the Third. It may be that this is a true view of Christianity, but we insist, in the name of common sense, that it is a new view." How can such an undigested heap of errors receive a systematic answer in brief space, or in any one treatise or volume? Or why should these be more answered than all the other attacks on the same subject, with which the unbelieving press has been for some time teeming? People seem to have transferred the natural panic at finding that such attacks on belief could be made by those bound to maintain it to the subjects themselves; as if the faith was jeopardized because it has been betrayed. With the exception of the still important science of geology, the Essays and Reviews contain nothing with which those acquainted with the writings of unbelievers in Germany have not been acquainted for thirty years.

Pusey was mystified by the phenomenon of priests who could pray the liturgical prayers of the Church of England, which assume the inspiration of Scripture and affirm classical Christian orthodoxy, while at the same time contradicting this theology in their sermons and writings without any scruples of conscience. The Liberals wanted to argue that it was still Christianity they were teaching, but if that were Christianity, what was it previously? What was the religion and theology of the liturgy? Even the unbelievers could see that what was proposed in Essays and Reviews was not development, but a revolution thoroughly inconsistent with the formal and liturgical profession of the English Church.

In a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, Pusey outlines the stages of unbelief. There were many in the Church of England who would not embrace the whole scheme of Liberalism as represented by the essayists, but nevertheless were influenced by it all. Rationalism first attacks those revealed facts that are seemingly irrelevant to the core of the Faith – especially, as was gaining ascendance in his day, Old Testament history and the creation narratives:

The first question as to any doctrine of the faith (such as the transmission of original sin), or any recorded fact of Holy Scripture, is the turning point, whether men will believe in any doctrine or any revelation of God … People busy themselves with the pettiest objections, which scarcely lie at the outskirts of revelation, and leave the central question, on which the whole turns; "Has God revealed Himself to His creatures? Was Nicodemus right, that Jesus Christ was ‘a Teacher come from God’? If so, what did He reveal?

How, to speak of facts, to which yet our Lord pledges His truth – how should the known world have been drowned by a flood, or Noah be saved in the ark, or Lot’s wife have become a pillar of salt, or Jonah have lived in the fish’s belly, or the men of Ninevah have repented at the preaching of one stranger, or mankind have sprung from one pair, or devils have possessed the bodies of men, or Sodom and Gomorrah have perished by that shower of fire and brimstone; or Israel have been fed with manna in the wilderness? I speak not of any true or probable interpretation of the facts, which our Lord so authenticates for us … It touches not faith, in what way Lot’s wife perished.

But the facts abide.

One could be forgiven for thinking the above sermon was preached by an American Bible-belt evangelical "fundamentalist". But these are the words of an English churchman of the highest culture and learning; a man with an abiding and generous catholicity; indeed, a Christian humanist in the tradition of Thomas More and Philip Melanchthon. To be a Christian was to believe the Scriptures: it had always been so, and for E.B. Pusey, it could not be otherwise.

The introduction to the above quoted volume of sermons by Pusey was written by a man named Walter Smith, who describes the effects of the new criticism on Oxford’s best students in the aftermath of "Essays and Reviews":

Oxford was insensibly filled with a school of thinkers, which had formerly been neutralized or converted, and which through their special mode of teaching led others, whither they themselves knew not, nor followed. It is not one of their opponents who has borne witness that an influential member of that school, "a most learned and amiable man exercised extraordinary influence over the education of the most advanced college in Oxford. He led his pupils quietly on to the negation of all positive Creeds; not because he was an unbeliever in the vulgar sense of the word, but because his peculiar mode of criticism cut the very sinews of belief. The effect of his peculiar teaching may be traced in many a ripened mind of the present day."

Ill-chosen text-books completed the work. Talented young men who came prepared for scepticism as considering it a mark of intellect, step by step parted with their faith. The foundations of faith had to be laid anew; the young had to be won, not to a completer faith, but to Christianity, or to its most central truths.

Here is described a phenomenon which we will explore later in greater depth. While it is possible, intellectually, to maintain the faith of Creed while denying the truth and reliability of the Scriptures, nevertheless that faith is an unnatural compartmentalization that is evident to nearly everyone. The effects of this compartmentalization on evangelism and religious instruction can be disastrous.

Pusey’s chief biographer was the widely-traveled and influential Harry Parry Liddon, Canon of St. Paul’s and a powerful preacher who attracted large audiences. Born in 1829, H. P. Liddon lived through the Oxford Movement, "Essays and Reviews", and "Lux Mundi" – the latter said to have been so personally traumatic that it hastened his death one year later in 1890. His enduring legacy seems to have been his Bampton lectures on the divinity of Christ. For Liddon, the attacks on the Old Testament – for instance the denial of the Mosaic origin and authority of the Pentateuch – were a heretical attack on the infallibility of Christ Himself (considering the references to Moses recorded in the Gospels). For Liddon, every attack on the Faith was ultimately an attack on the Incarnation. He writes thus:

Now the argument in question assumes that Christ our Lord, when teaching religious truth, was not merely fallible, but actually in serious error. If indeed  our Lord had believed Himself to be ignorant of the authorship or true characterof the Book of Deuteronomy, we may presume that He would not have fallen below the natural level of ordinary heathen honesty, by speaking with authority upon a subject with which He was consciously unacquainted. It is admitted that He spoke as believing Himself to be teaching truth. But was He, in point of fact,  not teaching truth? Was that which He believed to be knowledge nothing better than a servile echo of contemporary ignorance? Was His knowledge really limited on a subject matter, where He Himself was unsuspicious of the existence of a limitation? Was He then not merely deficient in information, but fallible; not merely fallible, but actually in error? And has it been reserved for the criticism of the nineteenth century to set Him right?

The Liberals wanted not the whole Jesus, but part of Him. They wanted to retain His moral and ethical teachings most especially. But Liddon points out that it is not possible to so divide the Christ of the Gospels, for as Christ Himself declares, "If I have told you earthy things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" (St. John 3:12). Liddon explains the relationship:

The denial of our Lord’s infallibility, in the form in which it has come before us of late years, involves an unfavorable judgment, not merely of His intellectual claims, but of the penetration and delicacy of His moral sense. This is the more observable because it is fatal to a distinction which has been projected, between our Lord’s authority as a teacher of spiritual or moral truth, and His authority when dealing with those questions which enter into the province of historical criticism. If in the latter sphere He is said to have been liable and subject to error, in the former,  we are sometimes told, His instinct was invariably unerring. But is this the case, if our Lord was really deceived in His estimate of the book of Deuteronomy, and if further the account of the origin and composition of that book which is put forth by His censors be accepted as satisfactory? Our Lord quotes Deuteronomy as a work of the highest authority on the subject of man’s relations and duties to God. Yet we are assured that in point of fact this book was nothing better  than a pious forgery of the age of Jeremiah, if indeed it was not the work of that prophet, in which he employed the name of Moses as a restraint upon the increasing polytheism of the later years of king Josiah.

That hypothesis has been discussed elsewhere and by others on its own critical merits. Here it may suffice to observe, that if it could have been seriously entertained it would involve our Lord in something more than intellectual fallibility. If Deuteronomy  is indeed a forgery, Jesus Christ was not merely ignorant of a fact of literary history.

His moral perceptions were at fault. They were not sufficiently fine to miss the consistency, the ring of truth, in a document which professed to have come from the great Lawgiver with a Divine authority; while, according to modern writers, it was only the ‘pious’ fiction of a later age, and its falsehood had only not been admitted by its  author, lest its ‘effect’ should be counteracted.

In a reply to two of his critics following his Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Christ, Dr. Liddon explains that an essential premise of any theological controversy is the trustworthiness of Revelation. In essence, then, Higher Criticism is the "controversy to end all controversies", for once it is accepted, there is no basis for further discussion. Either all parties believe the Bible is unreliable, or some believe it is and others do not, or some believe this part is unreliable and others believe that part is unreliable. In any case, the discussion is moved back from the meaning of Revelation to if and where Revelation exists at all:

Now our Lord’s Divinity is a truth which we must learn by Revelation, if we are to learn it at all. Nature, measured by experience, and interpreted by conscience and reason, has nothing to say to it. The first question then is, whether a Revelation  has been really given, and the second where it is to be found. And if it is agreed that God has really spoken in the Jewish and Christian Revelations, and that the Bible tells us what He has said, a further question arises as to the trustworthiness of the record. Unless this trustworthiness is also recognized, it is impossible to  discuss the contents of Revelation with any hope of arriving at solid results. For any statement containing matter which is, for whatever reason, unwelcome to either party, may be at once challenged on a priori grounds, and rejected; and  disputants may thus find themselves as little in possession of a common premise, as if they had not agreed that a Revelation of God had been made, or recorded at all.

This then is the issue, as between the Lecturer and his present critics. He does, and   they do not, believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible. They believe, no doubt, in the trustworthiness of certain parts of it – such parts of it as are in agreement with  opinions which, for independent reasons, they accept. But they do not treat the Bible as a trustworthy whole; they accept or reject its statements at pleasure, or for reasons which appear to them to be sufficient; and, as a consequence, it is not enough for them if a doctrine is contained in the Bible, unless it be contained in those parts of the Bible which they think it right to accept.

Let it then be admitted, then, that the spirit of Tractarianism and the Tractarians themselves – (Newman also shared the views of Keble and Pusey, predicting the coming revolution: "The Heads of Houses may crush Tractarianism, and then they will have to do with Germanism.") – resisted the emergence of modern biblical criticism as something foreign to Anglicanism and destructive of the orthodox faith.

Charles Chapman Grafton was born in 1830, and according to his memoirs was influenced by both Pusey and Liddon, even attending Liddon’s Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Christ. He was an open sympathizer with Tractarian principles, and became especially known for his growing devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. At some point he was made Bishop of a diocese in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin. His council addresses indicate that he was willing to allow a certain amount of Higher Criticism so long as it did not affect the essential truths of biblical history, but as will be seen, that all but precludes the most important claims of the critics:

Concerning the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament Scriptures; there has  been much study concerning its formation, just as there has been concerning the formation of the material world. In regard to the Scriptures, it is immaterial whether the early chapters of Genesis are historical or allegorical. It is immaterial whether there was one Isaiah or two; whether the Pentateuch was written by  Moses alone, or by the aid of several others. What as Christians we reject is any theory that casts doubt on the validity and truth of Our Master’s teaching. we cannot, for instance, accept the theory that the Patriarchs were fictitious beings when Our Blessed Lord based His argument of the immortality of the soul on the real existence of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We cannot believe that the accounts in Deuteronomy of the establishment of a Tabernacle in the  Wilderness was a fiction written up after the return to Babylon. We believe on Our Lord’s authority that there was an actual Deluge, that David was the author of the 110^th Psalm, and that, through Moses, God revealed the Law.

When it came to the New Testament, we see that the good Bishop could find virtually no place for the most significant conclusions of modern criticism, and furthermore, we see that he was hostile to its very foundations:

In respect of the New Testament, the tradition and consciousness of the Catholic Church bears witness to the authorship of the Gospels and the truthfulness of their record. The Holy Ghost dwells in the Church, and we must censure those, who, rejecting its traditions, seek to learn the teaching of Christ, from persons living outside the sphere of the Church’s Divine illumination. The Holy Scriptures can only be rightly understood by those  who are living members of the Holy Body in which the Holy Spirit dwells, who is the author of those Holy Writings. It is only by the saints the writings of the saints are comprehended. Thus there are two kinds of biblical scholars – the merely intellectual, who criticize the Bible like any other book, and the spiritually illuminated, who know it to be the awful and profound Word of God. Only the  latter are true scholars; the opinions of the others are of no value.

And so it is clear that Grafton’s view of the Bible is the Catholic view, that the Bible belongs to the Church and to God’s people alone: a sort of family history -- a pearl not to be cast before swine and trampled upon. For Bishop Grafton there is only one way for the Christian to approach the Sacred Scriptures: as the "awful and profound Word of God". He has more to say on the four Gospels, their historicity, and their enemies:

Concerning Our Lord’s life; it could not be written after the fashion of modern historical research. His life was divine, marvelous, sublime. There could be no data given, by mere record of eyewitnesses, which would enable any person unassisted by the Holy Ghost to write it. For the Holy Gospels are no less than the life of God upon the earth, written by His Holy Spirit. St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, being divinely illuminated and controlled, set forth, unconsciously to themselves, the kingly, prophetical, and priestly offices of Christ. They wrote of Christ, but Christ by His   Spirit wrote through them. They declared His Messianic offices, His public and the official side of His life. St. John reveals the awfulness of His Godhead and His relation to His Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel has necessarily a peculiar and special training and enlightenment, and could have been none other than the disciple who leaned on Jesus’ bosom and to whom was revealed Christ in glory.

The Fourth Gospel was necessary to complete the Revelation of the Incarnate Son of God, of whom no mortal could by earthly wisdom reveal the height or breadth or length.

O Marvelous Mind of Infinite Love. O wonderful revelation of Infinite Holiness. O Burning Bush of Divine Wisdom. Put we our shoes off our feet and bow we down to Christ in the Gospel. Far away be the disputing of the unilluminated and unspiritual. Silent be the din of controversy and novelties of these latter and evil days. Hushed be the sounds of Earth, the babblings of the schools, the noise of all passing and fleeting things. Hushed be all the rebellions of mind and heart, that we may as children listen to the Word of God that abideth forever.

Alfred J. Mortimer, the rector of St. Mark’s in Philadelphia, published Catholic Faith and Practice: A Manual of Theology in 1898. This splendid two-volume work amounts to something between a simple catechism for laymen and a dogmatic treatise for seminarians. (Three copies are on the shelves of St. Joseph’s seminary library.) It is thoroughly orthodox and unapologetic in its Anglo-Catholicism. Forty-six pages are devoted to the subject of the Holy Scriptures, and of these pages, twenty-three – fully one-half – are devoted to the subject of Higher Criticism. Mortimer’s critique of Higher Criticism is the most comprehensive and technical of any so far discussed. Aware of the new criticism’s origin "in a land which since the days of Luther has been the birthplace of almost every heresy that has disturbed Christendom", he begins by asking from whence and from whom the Church ought to derive her teaching:

Is it conceivable that the Holy Ghost, Whose office it is to guide the Church into all truth, has given to schismatics and rationalists a new revelation which contradicts in so many points the teaching of the Church, and that the Church has, therefore, for at least fourteen hundred years been in error? Is this consistent with our Lord’s promises that the gates of Hell should not prevail against the Church, and that the Spirit of Truth should guide the Church into all truth? And further, on this hypothesis that the Church has erred for so many centuries and has needed to be enlightened by schismatics who are outside her unity and reject her doctrine, may it not be asked by some whether there is left any real basis of Christianity, any serious reason for believing that Christianity is the full revelation of God in Christ Jesus?

After a somewhat lengthy (and well worth reading) explanation of the Church’s doctrine of the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture, Mortimer turns to the critics:

In the present day, however, we find another and very different account of Holy Scripture, which comes to us on the authority of a body of men known as the "higher critics". They disregard the conclusions on this subject which the Church has reached under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and starting from the opposite pole of investigation, under the guidance of unaided human reason, reach results which in many respects seem to be diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Church.

While it would be quite impossible in this chapter to give an adequate account of Higher Criticism, or to treat its principles with any fulness, it may nevertheless be well to point out, as briefly as possible, some reasons why its conclusions carry but little weight.

In the first place, when we contrast the processes by which the Church and the higher critics arrive at their respective positions, we observe that while the Church’s method may lead to absolute truth, that of the critics cannot possibly do so. For the Church’s teaching hypothetically rests on the conclusions reached by a body not  only specially trained to consider the subject, but under the promised guidance of  the Spirit of Truth; and these teachings, as we should have expected, are always one and the same. The Higher Criticism, on the other hand, represents the opinons of a very much smaller number of independent investigators, who, trusting only to human reason, and making no claim whatever to supernatural guidance, cannot be expected to reach any uniform conclusion; nor, as a matter of fact, have they done so. In other words, if the Church be infallible, its teachings in regard to Holy Scripture must be absolutely true. But since the opinions of a number of individuals have not the slightest claim to infallibility, the probability that they should reach absolute truth is extremely small; and inasmuch as they do not agree in the results reached by their method, it is evident that those results are not absolute truth.

From here Mortimer launches into a more technical argument concerning the specific assumptions, methods, and conclusions of Higher Criticism as applied to certain biblical questions. After reviewing some of the technical weaknesses of the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch with respect to subsequent discoveries and developments (such as the discovery of writing in the time of Moses), one is left with the feeling that Wellhausen’s theory is an answer in search of a question. He concludes with some exasperation:

A Mosaic authorship, therefore, would seem to be the most probable and natural under the circumstances; but this is sufficient to condemn it in  the eyes of the higher critics.

Furthermore, says Mortimer, the method used to differentiate the J-E-D-P sources is tautological and fallacious:

But this method, notwithstanding its seeming plausibility, and the apparent   scientific caution and accuracy with which it is applied, is essentially a fallacy –a vicious circle; for the differences are first created and then argued from. The documents are first affirmed to correspond with certain assumed  characteristic differences, and then their correspondence with these characteristics is urged as proof of their objective reality. All paragraphs, clauses, etc., in which certain criteria occur, are systematically assigned to one document, and those having another class of criteria are with like  regularity assigned to another document; and when the process is complete all the criteria in one class are in one document, and those of another class are in another, simply because the critic has put them there. The documents agree with the hypothesis, because they have been created by the hypothesis.

It is admitted that the theory seems attractive and plausible, but that is because so few are able to penetrate the surface. Beneath its apparent simplicity lies a tangle of contradictions and dead ends:

Here we may perhaps point out two causes why many people accept the  conclusions of Higher Criticism. First, because the theory, as applied to the  beginning of Genesis, seems so simple. The start is made with the two names of God, "Jehovah" and "Elohim", and without any labour a mere novice is able to understand it. The other reason is that before the middle of the Pentateuch is reached the theory has become so complex that very few master it. Because the beginning is simple they suppose that the full theory can be explained; but when they come to the tangle (say, of the book of Joshua) they simply take it  for granted that the masters of the system have penetrated the labyrinth and have come out all right, and they do not venture in themselves.

The theory, as we have observed, seems quite simple at the beginning of Genesis; but it is only of a very few chapters that this can be said, for soon we find P using J, and E doing the same, while J uses E. We fly to a higher critic for an explanation, and the answer is that this is the work of a bungling redactor, R. For where facts are at variance with the hypothesis (as they frequently are), the facts, and not the hypothesis, are generally corrected by the higher critics.

The chapter moves on to analyze Cicero’s Orations, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the parable of the Prodigal Son from the perspective of Higher Criticism. The results are, well, surprising. Mortimer concludes thus:

To sum up, we may observe: first, that an examination of the method of Higher Criticism shows that it is inherently vicious, and therefore that its conclusions are not trustworthy. Secondly, that an examination of the conclusions derived from it leads to the same result. We find that its supporters disagree on many points; and, as we look back upon the history of the system during the past hundred years, we again and again see positions, once deemed impregnable, abandoned or overthrown by succeeding schools. Indeed, as some of the more candid higher critics admit, there is every reason to suppose that its present conclusions will not last ...

Surely Catholics cannot be charged with mere bigotry and prejudice because they prefer the Church’s theory in regard to Holy Scripture to the conclusions reached by a method so inherently vicious that whether it be applied in secular or sacred literature, almost any results (excepting those that are certain) may be obtained.

Frank Weston, the Bishop of Zanzibar, was a devoted missionary of Christ to the inhabitants of an island nation off the east coast of Africa. Born in 1871, he was greatly grieved that the Church in his native England seemed to embrace without caution the theology of the new critical school. In a chapter titled "The Fight With Modernism", the bishop’s biographer records his deep sadness at the ascending Liberal theology which, in his view, seriously undermined the Church’s ability to evangelize the nations:

Save our converts in Africa from reading in books by Christians at home all those things which are calculated to make them doubt whether there be a God at all, and such a thing as Catholic Revelation.

The danger of modern biblical criticism was that it essentially agreed with all of those things that the enemies of the Church in foreign lands used against her. Weston’s biographer, H. Maynard Smith, summarizes the problem:

Imagine a Mohammedan speaking: "We have always maintained that your Scriptures are corrupt and interpolated, and lo! now your learned men tell you we are right. The Prophet told us that Jesus did not really die on the Cross and rise again, and your learned men agree that He only rose again in the imaginations of His disciples. We have been taught that Jesus was a prophet and not God, and your learned men say the same. We reject your doctrine of the Trinity and so do your learned men. The Prophet said that Jesus was born of a virgin and did many mighty works, but your learned men do not even believe that. They only need a little more reverence and faith before accepting our Prophet: and you, you should silence your learned men, before bringing your fraudulent Gospel to us."

How were missionaries to evangelize in the face of the rationalism pervading the Church at home? How could the Bible be explained to the native convert according to the faith-less principles of the critics and their ever-changing conclusions? Weston writes:

I do not hesitate to say that a Church which has two views in its highest ranks about the trustworthiness of the Bible, the authority of the Church, and the infallibility of the Christ has surrendered its chance of winning the Moslem; for his dependence on his Book, his tradition and his Prophet will not be broken by a debating society, but by the living, speaking Church of the Infallible Word  incarnate. So that the Ecclesia Anglicana needs at once to choose between the liberty of heresy and the duty of handing on the Faith as she received it. She  cannot have the one while she fulfills the other. And the sooner she chooses the better for her, the heathen and the Moslem.

The same could be said for winning to Catholicism the Lutheran, the Calvinist, and the evangelical Protestant, whose steady reliance upon the Bible can only be supplemented -- rather than replaced -- by the Catholic Church. Let converts from Protestantism retain that which the Catholic Church bestowed to them in the first place, and their conversion will be more a completion than a repudiation.

Liberal Catholicism may seem somewhat harmless to the devout Western churchgoer, who attends his Mass, recites his Creed, and goes home to his Offices without giving it much thought. Let every man make of the words whatsoever he will. However, in the realm of evangelism and missionary work, the whole Faith is at stake. Christ rose from the dead "according to the Scriptures": the Bible’s objective truthfulness and authority is forever enshrined in the Creed of the Church, which is taught to every convert and catechumen from the beginning. Of what use is a Bible whose facts are contrived, whose authorships are forged, whose miracles are imagined, and whose interpretation is dependent upon the latest "scholarship"? Such is not the faith of apostles and martyrs: no man will ever die a martyr to maintain the transient truths of Higher Criticism. This is an important point: modern biblical criticism makes the Bible virtually inaccessible to the ordinary layman or the mission-field convert: one must look to the latest scholarship, rather than to the Catholic Church, to know whether Moses really existed, whether Jesus did or did not fulfill the Law and the Prophets, etc. Smith writes:

Frank, who had been teaching Africans for sixteen years, knew that God intended His Revelation for the poor, the simple and for children, and not merely for scholars and critics living in academic seclusion.

It became fashionable for Liberals to say that, while the facts of the Bible may not be true, the ideas or "truths" they represent must remain. Hence the historical narratives

of the Bible became merely symbolic of "higher truths". In theory, then, one could still remain a Christian while denying the history but upholding the "truths" that Bible fiction symbolizes or represents, But the good bishop of Zanzibar begged to disagree:

In religion a fact is of far more vital importance than an idea. Ideas are always liable to particular interpretations, and quickly change their color, and alter their weight,

as they are accepted by this man or that; nor have they any permanence in their original shape. Whereas a fact is a concrete expression of an idea in time, and for all time; and carries its own power of correcting whatever false ideas may be based upon it. Therefore the Church has always chosen fact as the basis of her dogma; just as the world prefers ideas as more likely to produce that foggy atmosphere in which each system may hide its defects.

Christianity is an historical religion, and Christian theology is rooted in certain historical facts – facts about which both the missionary and the convert must have absolute conviction. The acceptance of critical methods threatened to undermine the conviction that was necessary for evangelization. For the new school of critics, everything was an open question. If the Gospel of Jesus Christ hadn’t quite been proven false today, well, it may be tomorrow. Some archaeologist may yet dig up His bones. But one doesn’t convert to a religion that hasn’t made up its mind about the facts. For the Bishop of Zanzibar, liberalism was deadly to the Great Commission and therefore to his whole life’s work. His biographer describes Frank Weston’s heartbreaking predicament:

No doubt, in an Oxford common room religion was an interesting subject for free discussion, but for him it was life. He had not sacrificed his career, home, country and friends because he "somehow felt" that certain speculative opinions might be true. People with such nice feelings proceed to an English deanery,  and not to a hut of sticks and mud in the wilds of Africa. For him our Lord’s  honor and the extension of His Kingdom were the only things in life that mattered; and for him his creed was as certain as the multiplication table. He had thought deeply about its implications and found it coherent and consistent with itself; he had worked it out in life and knew its fruits in experience. He was sure that this creed alone could save the African race; and what paralyzed him was the thought that the Church which had sent him to convert the heathen, was indifferent as to what was believed at home.

C. S. Lewis would probably not have referred to himself as an Anglo-Catholic -- but since he received the Holy Eucharist weekly, went to confession regularly, prayed for the dead, and believed in Purgatory, this writer feels no dishonesty in representing him as such. In spite of his broad appeal, his spiritual home was squarely within the tradition formed by the Caroline divines and the Oxford Movement. Lewis was neither a pastor nor a theologian, but rather a scholar of secular literature and a talented writer himself. He is best known for his works in Christian apologetics and his children’s stories.

As a convert from twentieth-century skepticism he was intensely interested in those issues which bedeviled twentieth-century skeptics: science, progress, and yes, modern biblical criticism. As a privileged insider to the academic cloister, he knew that what motivated the bulk of critical scholarship was a lack of faith. Perhaps the simplicity of the gospel narratives, the primitive miracle stories, and the expected credulity were an embarrassment to the critics’ sophisticated world. Lewis warned ordinary readers of the Bible to be on their guard:

When you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions,   beggings of the question … will meet you on every side – even from the pens of clergymen … In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not upon historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper.

As a writer of fiction, Lewis was himself the subject of modern literary criticism. Interestingly, the findings of the critics concerning his own writing had convinced him that the same methods were of no value in studying the Scriptures:

All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the text it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences – the whole Sitz im Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing. I think I should be convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm – the herb molly – against it. You must excuse me if I speak for a while of myself …

What forearms me against all these reconstructionists is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way …

Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash off such histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed the author’s mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him, what his overall intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why – and when – he  did everything … My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a  record of 100 percent failure.

For these reasons Lewis held that the preponderance of higher critics -- now theologians within the Church – were responsible for the greatest mischief:

The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of divines engaged in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in that  discipline is the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the Early Church, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Reformers, and even the nineteenth century.

Lewis was not dogmatic with respect to biblical inerrancy or any particular interpretation of the creation narratives in Genesis. But he was certain that, whatever the answers were to the vexing questions of the Bible, the faith-starved school of higher critics was incapable of arriving at them.

It is to be admitted that, today, there are several theological streams within what is broadly called Anglo-Catholicism. If only the most conservative and traditional of these is represented here, that is because it is the most neglected and forgotten among them. Furthermore -- in the opinion of this writer anyway – it is the most authentic and the most internally consistent. Considering that this stream carries with it the most influential and distinguished personalities of the Anglo-Catholic movement, the marginalization of their views is a most unfortunate irony.

A final argument shall take the form of an editorial note. Anglo-Catholicism with its Branch Theory has always been interested in ecumenism and the reunification of Christendom. It seems to this writer that, if the divided camps of Christendom are to be reunited on a common foundation, an essential component of that foundation is the doctrine of Holy Scripture. Roman Catholics and classical Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists), as well as most evangelical sects, have a formal doctrine of biblical infallibility; the same doctrine is implied, though not formalized, in the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox traditions. From this basis a significant amount of doctrinal unity is produced: Chalcedonian orthodoxy is confessed by Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox alike, and evangelical Protestants for the most part are in agreement. The doctrine of the inspiration, authority, and reliability of the Bible is therefore an important key to orthodox ecumenism, and, perhaps, ought to be jealously guarded for the sake of our separated brethren alone.

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