Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 92:366 (Apr 1935)
Article: A Modernist Tragedy
Author: Frank E. Gaebelein

BSac 92:366 (Apr 35) p. 219

A Modernist Tragedy

Frank E. Gaebelein

The last decades of the nineteenth and the first few years of the twentieth century witnessed a momentous trend in American Protestant scholarship. It had become the fashion of our theological students of conspicuous ability to complete their training by postgraduate work at foreign universities, particularly those of Germany. At that time the prestige of the theological faculties of Göttingen, Marburg, Tübingen, and Berlin was world-wide. And at that same time these theological faculties were sources of destructive criticism of the Bible. It came about in this way: The naturalistic bias that swayed English and French deism, first found influential expression in relation to the Bible through the theories of a French physician, Jean Astruc by name. Astruc was a pioneer in the criticism of Genesis, and as early as 1753 called attention to the different names for God used in the Hebrew of that book. It was not long before his views were taken up by German theologians like Eichhorn, De Wette, and Graf. That many of these scholars were men of learning is undeniable. But it is nevertheless true that their conjectures were false. The amazing thing about it all was the certainty with which the plausible theories of a biased research were accepted as “assured results of modern scholarship.” Beginning with Bishop Colenso, great names in England and Scotland like Canon Driver, Professor Cheyne, Marcus Dods, and George Adam Smith, fell in line with the trend, and it is not surprising that America followed suit. An interesting phase of the war hysteria of 1917–1918 was the violent attacks of patriotic fundamentalists against German biblical criticism as an additional crime of “the Hun.” But the saner reflection of later years shows that

BSac 92:366 (Apr 35) p. 220

English and other European University centers are not exempt from censure. They also had drunk deeply of the well of destructive criticism of God’s Word. The German scholars, with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness, had carried out to logical conclusions the implications of the higher critical premises.

So it came about that modernism was entrenched in practically every great university and nearly every outstanding theological seminary in America. By 1920 liberalism felt its power amid the growing reaction of those in the churches who had refused to bow to the negations of the destructive critics, and not long thereafter Doctor Fosdick threw down the gauntlet in his historic sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” We need not retrace the “War in the Churches” that ensued. Suffice it to say that the reply of modernism to the defenders of the faith has been persistent recourse to academic prestige, scholarship, and the authority of this...