What is higher Critical Bible Study?

It is a method of studying the Bible that seeks to understand the text in its historical and cultural context by analyzing the language, history, and culture of the people at the time it was written.

Sounds pretty good at this point, but....

This approach assumes a secular perspective and rather than seeing the Bible as authoritative, uses the then present culture and history to be the authority above accepting the inspiration of Scripture. That means it's conclusions must be in harmony with a secular, non-supernatural worldview.

According to R.A.Torrey in "History of Higher Criticism"


A secular approach to interpreting a document that is "spiritually discerned" will not come to the right conclusions.
They will find answers in their higher criticism to downplay and explain away the wonder of God's wonderous works by making it all agree with natural conditions and circumstance.
Christians who hold to God?s existence will have no problems acknowledging the miraculous authorship of the Bible, or the workings of God's miraculous intervention, as truly supernatural glimpses of God's great power and love. The Christians are not limited by this strenuous requirement of secularism that is an unfounded filter put upon the Bible.

Higher and lower criticism started out in something like the 1700s in unison. One was looking at the different writing styles and the other was looking at the completed product. However, in the mid 1800s as evolution became popular, people began looking for evolution in everything. The evolutionists interpreted the different writing styles to reflect evolution. They developed a theory that instead of the names associated with the Bible playing some kind of role in the development of the book, they came up with alternative writers/authors that they set in a certain order which they saw as corresponding to human Darwinian evolution. They set the books in time periods years after the time that the Bible claims them to be.

In a reaction to what was being done, those who wanted to believe the Bible came up with a theory of inspiration that did away with the idea of any editing. They started to say that the Bible was as perfect as God is perfect, and thus the Bible Books came out perfect and totally complete the first time. (Except for some reason the book of Daniel still gets set in the later context).

Now, there was one pastor who was worried about both extremes, and he offered a third solution that had room for editing and mistakes, yet still seeing a real God, and real people who the Bible mentioned and connected to the time that the Bible sets. His one short fall was that he ended up putting more emphases on the subjective experience of the Bible writers than the objective experience. Sadly, his view became hated by both sides, and he lost his ministry when a woman claimed that she and this pastor were having an affair. Eventually she admitted that she was lying, that there was no affair, but it was a needed lie to protect the Bible from his horrible ideas.

Our ideas of historism shows it's Biblical foundation in the two very different writing styles found in the book of Amos. And our typical Ellen White studies use the original 1700s style as the pre Darwinian higher critics. But our leadership is discouraging any of this in our Bible studies, that we should use the style of lower criticism alone. In a book by Gerhard Hassel on how to study the Bible, he says that while the Bible gives indication of editing, that we need to pretend that they are not there and just study the text as if it's final form was it's original form.

What does EGW say about "higher Biblical Criticism"?


According to P. Gerard Damsteegt
Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 4/2 (1993):115-136.

"Popular theology is characterized by false interpretations of Scripture. The origin of many of these errors may be traced to the "ages of papal darkness, that is the Dark Ages." (See Testimonies, 5:710,711.)

"The nature of this theology is speculative. It exalts human theories based on philosophy and theology above the Word of God and stands in sharp contrast to the eternal truths taught by the Bible writers.17 Its presence is widespread. "To a large degree," Ellen White writes, "theology, as studied and taught, is but a record of human speculation." (See Counsels to Teachers, p. 380.)

"She strongly warns against the methods of higher criticism, also called historical criticism. It is the use of the historical-critical method for the study of the Bible. This approach she characterizes as "dissecting, conjecturing, reconstructing" the Scriptures. The result is the destruction of faith in Scripture as the Word of God. (Education, p. 227) She considered it to be one of Satan's tools of deception. Through its "pleasing sentiments," she says, "the enemy of righteousness is seeking to lead souls into forbidden paths." (Acts of the Apostles, p. 474). His other tools are "evolution, spiritualism, theosophy, and pantheism, ibid )

"The reason for her strong opposition to higher criticism is that it "is destroying faith in the Bible as a divine revelation; it is robbing God's word of power to control, uplift, and inspire human lives." (Education, p. 227) She compares its influence to the destructive effect of tradition and rabbinical teaching in Christ's days. (Ministry of Healing, p. 142.)

"In a sermon she ironically contrasts the higher critics, whom she identifies as "poor, finite man on probation," with the true Higher Critic, "the Lord God of the universe who has spread the canopy of the heavens above us, and has made the stars and called them forth in their order." (MS 43a, 1894)

From Ellen White Information Network:

"The vast majority of scholars today would disagree with (Ellen White's) position (to take the Bible as it reads, not finite man's opinions) . "Higher criticism" is the norm, which, according to Wikipedia, "is a branch of literary analysis that attempts to investigate the origins of a text, especially the text of the Bible. Higher criticism in particular focuses on the sources of a document and tries to determine the authorship, date, and place of composition of the text." Other definitions out there say that the higher critic is also trying to determine the meaning of the text.

"That all may sound benign, but it should be understood that higher criticism is based on the assumption that the Bible is inaccurate. Thus, when a higher critic is trying to determine the authorship and date of Genesis and Exodus, he may conclude that these books, contrary to Jesus' claim in the New Testament, were not written by Moses at the time of the Exodus. Moreover, he may also conclude that the Creation account of Genesis 1 is just an allegory, and that there really wasn't an exodus from Egypt after all.

The above are all interpretations based on the opinions of the Higher Critical Bible scholars.
You see -- according to that method everything needs to be interpreted by natural means.

Miracles are denied.
God is restricted to what mankind sees as natural events. He is not allowed to act as the God of the Universe, but only as a god of nature.
Everything supernatural, the wonderous works of God, the poor finite higher critic will pull down and explain as a natural event, -- oh yes, they may say God can use it, but it's not a miracle as such.

The RED SEA CROSSING.

The higher critics place the Red Sea Crossing almost next door to Goshen where the Israelites lived in Egypt. Totally a wrong site, but they chose it even though it wasn't even the Red Sea proper, just a reed sea because it could be crossed naturally --
The Bible does not support the idea that the Israelites travelled only a few steps, staying nearly next door to their homes for several days, and weren't running across the desert to get away from Egypt.

No -- they left with haste!
They ate their last supper in Egypt standing up ready to run as soon as Pharaoh said "go", and in that 'self same day" they left. (Ex 12:33) and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.( 39). They travelled to a place where there were mountains on either side.

The place of crossing can be found and it shows significant evidence that it is the right place -- and it was not where the higher critics maintain it was.

https://www.holylandsite.com/exodus-redsea-sinai

I tried to reply to dedication's op but for some reason could not.

This is a very important topic as it explains much of what is going on in Christianity for the last 150-200 years or so. A Dutch Reformed minister, N. N. Whiting, who was also a Bible translator, joined the Millerite movement and although he never became an Adventist wrote a book on what he called neology that grew out of the French Revolution. Another name for it is rationalism. It denies inspiration as well as all supernatural events. His book can be found in the APL and downloaded from any site that makes those books available or read on line on the Ellen White site.

I just found this. I had read it several years ago but forgotten it. The quote is from F. C. Gilbert who was a Jew who had been converted to become an Adventist. He wrote several books published by the Review and Herald publishing assn.

This comment of his is on the Sadducees.

Historical-critical methods, are generally anti-supernatural interpretations of things we read in Biblical historical narratives. This became popular in the post-Enlightenment era, with the assumption that history follows reasonable patterns with no supernatural interference. History, then is in need to be explained by remaining evidence. Traditional meaning or understanding is not really its goal,

Historical Criticism tends to be a great way for the more liberal scholars to make the biblical text fit more to modern thinking . But how does looking at the historical culture lead to more modern thinking?
Could it be by linking to our emotional response to situations?
Could the nature of historical criticism be a psychological operation that is conducted on the mind to change our thinking and/or behavior?

A central concept of any psychological operation is to use accepted terms or words that we tend to understand to mean certain things, but to change their meaning to one that is decidedly different . This confusion of the meaning of words can infiltrate the mind with conflicting concepts and change how people think and understand the message.

British writer George Orwell warned of the manipulation of words and their meanings as an important key influencing how people think about things. Words are changed from their original meaning to create new ways of thinking. Double talk is another term.

I remember trying to talk to someone who believed everyone is eventually saved. The whole conversation was built on this principle of changing word meanings. Death didn't mean death, perish didn't mean perish, even the references of heaven didn't mean heaven. The home in heaven wasn't a "home" but was a new body. Every bible verse used, was explained away as not saying what it was saying.
And considering the on going debates on "There are three living persons" the word "persons" receives volumes of attempts to prove it doesn't mean "persons". By changing the meaning of words, one can adjust anything to match what they wish to promote.

One writer explained it thus:
"At its heart, historical criticism is neither "historical" or "critical" in the traditional sense of the term. It does not genuinely believe Biblical revelation contains history in the sense of what actually happened in a time-space continuum. Instead, historical criticism is post-modernistic that asserts all history is by nature a subjective interpretation of surviving traces of events."

This isn't just concerning Biblical history. The trend is turned on all history. In our modern times, rewriting history to fit modern movements has reached new heights.