Section V

antagonistic criticism in its dialectic dealings

An interest in Christianity is an interest in reality itself, and therefore one with the spirit of truth. True Christianity knows nothing of partiality. The history of the apostles gives repeated instances of this Christian elevation of mind; e.g., in the narratives of the ruin of Judas, the fall of Peter, the deceit of Ananias. The cause of Christianity is therefore never served by deceitful arguments. But neither can it be with truth attacked continually from opposite stand-points. One distortion may contend with another for ages; inhuman Christianity and unchristian humanity, monkery and philanthropy—phenomena which contain their own refutation—may for a long time contend with each other, but one aspect of pure truth cannot oppose another. Consequently, when Christianity, as realized truth, as incarnate ideality, meets with a consistent negative criticism of its records, it may be expected that the fallacy of the antagonistic principle will soon develop in a secret tissue of fallacy in the execution. Modern antagonistic criticism cannot conceal this feature. An unprejudiced criticism of this criticism cannot but more and more bring to light the thread of special pleading, running through all its operations. Such a method of proceeding has indeed been frequently provoked by the equally morbid partiality, with which Church theology has endeavoured to reconcile the discrepancies of the four Gospels. When Church notions pursued their course without opposition, the doctrine of inspiration was carried to such an extreme, that not only the whole Bible, but every letter of the Bible, was made a Christ of. The infallibility of the four Gospels was viewed as excluding every uncertainty and inaccuracy in each single narration. One result of this false assumption was the so-called harmony, i.e., an attempt to bring all the Gospels into perfect agreement with each other, even in minute details. But harmony shot beyond the mark. The false assumption led to a false execution, to artifices in exposition which were carried to the extremes of special pleading. Church theology, however, was punished for the faults committed by this well-meant harmony, by a three times more powerful antagonistic harmony. The presumption, that as the commemorative saying is repeated in lyric poetry, so what is most important in history may also be exactly repeated, as, e.g., the cure of the blind at Jericho, the purification of the temple, may always be pleaded in favour of the former harmony. Antagonistic harmony, on the other hand, has laid down terrible canons.¹ The Gospel narrative must, above all things, be in harmony with ordinary reality. If the fact it relates has a glimmer of ideality, if it inclines to the miraculous,² if it is pervious to the ideal, and thus symbolical, it is therefore suspicious.³ This applies especially to the ethic sublimity, the moral and religious dignity, with which the Gospel history exhibits its facts.⁴ It is the superiority of the Gospel history to the ordinary reality of common life which, according to antagonistic criticism, makes its historic truth suspicious. Facts consequently increase in improbability, in proportion as they surpass the circle of the empirically natural, the real, and the commonplace. The second harmony which this criticism requires, is the agreement of the several Gospel reporters in the details of their narrative. The Gospel records are to bear the impress of lawyer-like exactness, and to prove themselves to be protocols, stating the external facts of circumstances, with perfect care as to the reception of detail. And in proportion as they want the qualities of protocols, as they fail to give to matters the form of a judicial process, are they to be regarded as untrustworthy.⁵

The first of these requisitions fundamentally denies the very principle which makes the Gospels, gospels. For they have not to relate facts which can be easily fitted into the empiricism of the Adamic æon, but the facts of that new principle of ideal-real humanity, whereby the miraculous breaks through the old sphere of nature, the eternal and spiritual light shines through human corporeity and reality, the majesty of perfect righteousness appears in the reality of a human life-a life surrounded by a retinue of moral heroes whom it calls into being, contending with the demoniacal powers which oppose it, and savingly and judicially pervading the old and sinful human nature with its effects. If the weak mind, giddy and stunned by such an announcement, betakes itself to crossing and blessing before this principle and the heroes it produces, it is at liberty to do so; but when it finds fault with the details of that which is so miraculous, symbolical, and holy, it is committing itself to the criticism of the principle, while deluding itself with the idea that it is but criticising the accounts of its operations. This critical requisition for the agreement of the Gospel narratives with the old empirical reality, the true critic will, as a Christian, feel bound to reject.

But the second requisition he will reject as a historian; for it would either drive every genuine historian to despair by its results, or, on the other hand, hinder him by its absurdity. This demand ignores from the very first the fact that the Evangelists are relating history, and therefore a series of facts, which, having been already reflected in the subjective spiritual life of the narrators, can no longer be had in the form of an abstract chronicle, nor converted into one. It falls into the further error of forgetting that the Evangelists relate religious history; a history which they did not compose and arrange with a view to the requirements of the scientific, but of the religious interest, nor propagate for the furtherance of a partial scientific knowledge, but rather for the purpose of communicating to others, or at least of increasing in them, that same life which they had themselves found in these facts.⁶ Finally, this requisition misconceives that which is most important, viz., that these narrators relate Christian history, and therefore facts which in their very nature could not but assume a fresh aspect in each mind according to its individuality, while they yet remain the same, because they are the facts which are to transform the general life in the individual, as well as the individual in the general. The historian must not fail duly to appreciate the co-operation of the historical spirit, especially of the religious spirit, nor finally of the Christian spirit; first, in the original facts of the history; and secondly, in the manner of its narration. He must not be condemned to write merely the history of nations, when he is chiefly concerned with heroes, and even with the greatest heroes; and if he is to understand the circumference of history, he must be allowed to grasp its centre, and to contemplate it from this point. The sway exercised by this false premiss over the works of antagonistic criticism is expressed in a mass of separate sophistries, whose connection therewith does not always at first strike the eye. Arguments are often pleaded before the bar of Gospel criticism which would not pass uncensured, much less prevail, in any civil court. Some practices have already become standing figures. Among them, for instance, is the plan of considering the Evangelists stupid, by understanding their words in the most literal manner, and assuming that they were incapable of intentionally narrating anything paradoxical, imaginative, or symbolically significant. Thus it is asserted that Luke, the disciple of Paul, makes the Lord, in an Ebionite sense, declare the blessedness of the poor, as simply poor;⁷ that John puts a false word into Andrew’s mouth, when the latter says, ‘We have found the Christ,’ since he did not purpose to seek the very person of the Messiah;⁸ that the Synoptists make the Redeemer give a hint to the Pharisees not to regard Him as the descendant of David, by asking them the question, how David could call the Messiah his Lord (Psa 110:1) if He were his son (Mat 22:42; Mar 12:36; Luk 20:41).⁹ This plan is, however, reversed as occasion requires, and now it is the critic who undertakes the part which the Evangelists have just been made to play: now he cannot form a notion of their meaning, can often find no connection in their compositions, or finally, only some lexical connection, i.e., a word in one Gospel saying reminds the Evangelist of a similar word in another Gospel saying, and induces him to report it. Thus the lexical, apropos, the worst of all, is said to be the reason of many of those transitions in the Scriptures which have for many centuries appeared to the Christian mind the most subtle product of inspired thought during the apostolic age.¹⁰ At length, however, antagonistic criticism comes boldly forward with its pretensions to an infinite superiority to the Evangelists. One is praised-he is said to be highly poetical; a second and a third are censured-their words strike the critic as strange; a fourth is branded as a designing, glaring, unholy writer, a coarse falsifier of what is sacred, and condemned as a criminal. It is in the latter position that St John stands with respect to the critic Bruno Bauer.¹¹ Thus does antagonistic criticism, which seemed to begin its task in so cool and tranquil a disposition, and with such entire freedom from assumptions, finish by taking up its genuine position, and exhibiting that passionate moral and religious abhorrence, in which it takes a final leave of the Gospels. Such a termination manifests the nature of its origin and progress, and exposes the moral vein running through the whole process,-the antagonism of its principle to the personal incarnation of God, and its holy results. Bold and direct assertions and coarse accusations form the appropriate climax of its procedure; for a false principle ever follows up its other practices with effrontery sufficient to complete their work.

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Notes

1. A collection of examples illustrating the sophistical dealings of antagonistic criticism might here be adduced, to complete the proofs already given. We would, however, refer to the principal works in which such examples are plentifully given and fully examined, and to the numerous examinations of them. Tholuck, in his often cited treatise, has repeatedly pointed out the sophistry of Strauss’s work. With regard to the special treatment of the history of Christ’s childhood, examples of the kind in question are brought forward in my essay, Ueber den geschichtlichen Charakter der kanonischen Evangelien. The most striking specimens must, however, be sought in the criticism ‘which goes beyond’ Strauss. Certainly ‘criticism,’ in its last stage, has become the partie honteuse of modern science.

2. There are many who, in the field of theological discussion, and especially of scientific criticism, entirely repudiate such a proceeding as ‘putting to their consciences’ the results of their inquiries. This strange decision, rightly understood, exhibits the intention of setting up a scientific priesthood whose dicta are by no means to be impugned. For the very essence of priestcraft consists in the separation between the moral character of the individual and the spiritual calling which he fills. The spiritual calling is thereby made a spiritual métier. The ecclesiastical priest declines having his discourses ‘put to his conscience;’ the scientific priest declines to have the result of his inquiries referred to the roots of his opinion, his moral principles. A consistent man, on the contrary, would feel it an offence if his scientific work were not regarded as the product of his mind, and in agreement with his conscience. He would look upon it as an honour, that the moral significance of his conclusions—their relations to the deepest interests of the heart, to the highest principles of the life, should be recognised, and that his works should be regarded as the acts of worship arising from his personal religion. According to the Christian principle, that the inner life must possess a unity of character (Mat 6:22; Jam 1:8), the Church must, once for all, repudiate the recognition of this priestly dualism, which would make the man of science as distinct from his works as the butcher is from the animal he slaughters. Even modern philosophy opposes this violent separation of the intellectual and the moral man. Kant rebuilds the whole world of knowledge, which he had destroyed as resting upon itself, upon the solid foundation of the conscience; Fichte makes the deciding Ego the very centre of gravity in the sphere of knowledge; Hegel finds everything, and especially religion and morality, in the reasoning power. With such premisses, how is it possible to protest against the relations of the reason to the conscience? It is only possible in the cowardly stage of antagonism. When the disease reaches the stage of effrontery, it openly avows the connection of its critical operations with its enmity to Christianity.

1) Compare Ebrard, Gospel History (Clark’s Tr.), p. 47, History of Harmony. Ebrard has well shown that Strauss proceeds upon the principles of an exaggerated harmony, antagonistic to the Gospel history.

2) ʻGod acts upon the world as a whole directly, but upon its several parts only by means of His agency upon other parts, i.c,, by the laws of nature.—The miracles which God wrought for and by Moses and Jesus, are not emanations from His direct agency upon the whole, but presuppose a direct action in particular cases, aud are, so far, in opposition to the ordinary type of divine agency in the world.’—Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 97.

3) Certainly truth must be the foundation of a universal anticipation and notion ; yet this truth will not consist of a single fact exactly corresponding to such a notion, but of an idea realized in a series of facts often very: dissimilar to such a notion.—Id. vol. i. p. 287.

4) As neither an individual in general, nor the commencing point in an historical series in particular, can be at the same time archetypal ; so, if Christ be regarded decidedly as man, the archetypal nature and development which Schleiermacher ascribes to Him, cannot be made to accord with the laws of human existence.—Id., vol. ii. p, 749. ,

5) Compare Tholuck’s Glaubwürdigheit der evang. Gesch. p. 438. The author is humorously enumerating the canons upon which Strauss’s Leben Jesu is founded.  The fifth is called ‘The Castor and Pollux canon—in which the one of two contradictory narratives by its very existence excludes the other, and is in its turn shaken by the rejection of the other.’ Even the agreement of two Evangelists is not to defend the credibility of their statements. Both Matthew and Luke affirm that Jesus was born at Bethlehem, and yet the critic, from the sum of their statements, obtains the ea eg Jesus was not born at Bethlehem, but most probably at Nazareth. Vol, i. 327.

6) ʻIt is well to observe that we have not before us a history of religion, but a religious history.”—Gelpke, die Jugendgeachichte des Herrn, p. 2.

7) Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 640.

8) Bauer, Kritik der evang. Geschichte des Johannes, p. 46.

9) Weisse, Evang. Geschichte, vol. i. p. 587. According to this view of the passage in question, Christ gave the Pharisees a clandestine intimation of His origin by giving them to understand that He was not descended from David. Such an intimation would assume a very intimate relation between Christ and the Pharisees ; it would further assume that the Pharisees already took Him for the Messiah, and also that He believed they would esteem Him to be the Messiah, even if they perceived from His intimation that He was not the son of David ; and finally, that the Messiah could not descend from David, because the spirit of prophecy had already repudiated this notion in the psalm. How can so many follies be put at once into the mouth of Him who ever spake that which was right, for the sake of making ‘an aperçu?’ The “aperçu’ is, however, quite good enough to slip into some half-dozen theological works.

10)  The proposition may be laid down as a principle, that in every production of criticism the critic is comparing his own standard with the subject to be measured, his sense with the sense to be estimated. All criticism is so far a contest, nay, a wager. The critic, in the pride of his intellectual power and authority, says, e. g., of such a passage in the Gospels: I do not understand this passage. In this case, either the Evangelist must be far below him, or he must be far below the Evangelist. But if at last he gives it as his decided judgment, This is only a lexical connection, what is this but uttering the exclamation, ra bane, with respect to the book criticised? The credit either of the book or of the critic, with respect to religious and moral intelligibility, is now destroyed.

11)  See Bauer’s Kritik der ev. Gesehiehte der Synoptiker und des Johannes, vol. iii. p. 185,