Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 13:2 (Spring 1970)
Article: A. J. Gordon And The Impact Of Biblical Criticism
Author: Bruce Shelley

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JETS 13:2 (Spring 1970) p. 109

A. J. Gordon And The Impact Of Biblical Criticism

Bruce Shelley, Ph.D.*

Christianity is a religion of the Book. Orthodox believers, at any rate, prior to the rise of Biblical criticism, always thought so. Their preaching amplified its texts. Their prayers claimed its promises. And their conduct reflected its precepts. That is why “the scientific study of the Bible” in the 1870s and 1880s filled many American pulpits with uncertainty and fear.

During the generation following the Civil War, a number of American churchmen sought to restate the message of the Bible in terms of the increasingly popular evolutionary theory and the new views of “scientific” history imported from Germany. Under the stimulus of several NEw England pastors—Theodore Munger at the United (Congregational) Church in New Haven;1 George A. Gordon at the Old South (Congregational) Church in Boston;2 Newman Smyth at the Center (Congregational) Church in New Haven;3 Washington Gladden, a transplanted New Englander, at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio4 —a “New Theology” emerged.

One of the hallmarks of this theology for the new age was a fresh understanding of the Bible. Professor William Arnold Stevens summarized this new attitude in 1891. Addressing the Rochester Theological Seminary he said,

If we admit that Christianity is a historical religion, that it bases its claims ultimately upon the actual occurrence in human history of certain visible and audible events, it is idle to deny the right and the duty of ascertaining just what those events were, not only from the Bible, but from all other sources … I will not demand from any critical scholar, who sets about testing the genuineness of a certain document of Scripture, first to believe that the document is the word of God; or if he seeks to ascertain the real nature of any fact related in Biblical history, first to believe in such and such a statement of it.5

*Professor of Church History, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

JETS 13:2 (Spring 1970) p. 110

Seldom did these nineteenth-century Biblical critics appreciate the influence their philosophical presuppositions had on the “assured results” of their “scientific” studies of Scripture. For example, the Hegelian distinction Between external ideas and temporary forms was widely employed without a credit line as to its source.6 A lat...

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