The Origins of Modern Attacks on Biblical Authority -- By: Samuel T. Logan, Jr.
Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987)
Article: The Origins of Modern Attacks on Biblical Authority
Author: Samuel T. Logan, Jr.
WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987) p. 119
The Origins of Modern Attacks on Biblical Authority*
The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World by Henning Graf Reventlow is a massive book. It is massive in its scope, in its erudition, and, most of all, in the depths of the insights which it offers into English theological developments between 1550 and 1750 and the relationship between those developments and modern critical views of the Bible. It is, in a word, massively important.
The Foreword, written by James Barr, summarizes well the intent and the argument of the volume:
People often suppose that biblical criticism is a German innovation or invention, and those in the English speaking world who are hostile to it have often cited its supposed German origin in order to frighten people away from it. It is more true, however, to say that the cradle of biblical criticism lay in the English-speaking world: only from near the end of the eighteenth century onward did Germany become the main center for its development. Before that time England was the chief locus in which new ideas of the nature and authority of the Bible were fostered. In these respects Graf Reventlow redresses the balance in a striking way. [P. xii]
For American readers, Barr offers special incentive to master Reventlow’s work: “But for the development here reviewed, after all, the Constitution of the United States, or the United States herself in the form in which she exists, could hardly have come into being” (p. xiii). Barr’s observation here, in light of the arguments developed by Reventlow, will be of particular significance for anyone concerned about the question of the religious roots of America or about the debate over whether America was, at the time of its “founding” in the second half of the eighteenth century, a “Christian” nation.
* Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. xx, 668. $42.95).
WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987) p. 120
Reventlow himself describes his purpose in the “Introduction” of the book:
In this study I have set myself the task of looking back at the beginnings of biblical criticism (in which the Old Testament plays an important part) to uncover the motives, the intellectual presuppositions, the philosophical assumptions, and last, but not least, the developments in church politics, which have led to the conclusions at which it arrived. [P. 2]
Still in the “Introduction,” Reventlow argues that we must think in terms of two reformations with the latter being the reformation of “Humanism” which, he believes, must be ...
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