DR.. HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK is one of the leading exponents of Modernism in America today. He has been outspoken in his attacks upon the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. In a volume, entitled "The Modern Use of the Bible," he made it very clear that he was not a believer in the plenary and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. A recent sermon, "The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism," may be partially responsible for an impression which some seem to have that Dr. Fosdick is returning to the Christian faith. The present book, however, is sufficient evidence that the author, far from drawing nearer to Christianity, is, if anything, removing farther from it in his thinking.
The Bible of Destructive Criticism
The volume which forms the subject of our review is called “A Guide to Understanding the Bible." But even a cursory perusal of the book reveals the fact that the Bible which Dr. Fosdick is seeking to help his readers understand is not the Holy Bible. Rather, it is a Bible which we may well call "The Bible of Destructive Criticism." It is a Bible that has been pruned and plucked and redressed to suit the desires of certain men. It is a Bible that is full of error and, far from being the inerrant Word of God, is but the product of blundering human beings. This fact should be remembered in order that we may correctly understand Dr. Fosdick's “Guide."
One point at which this "Bible of Destructive Criticism" differs from the Holy Bible is in the order of arrangement of its books. As is well known, the Holy Bible begins with the book of Genesis. It answers our questions about the origin of all things by presenting to us a clear and robust theism. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," it tells us, and in this lofty doctrine of creation we have the ultimate answer to all our questions. But Dr. Fosdick dismisses this as being the “confident monotheism" of a later age (p. 1). The Bible to which his volume would act as guide does not begin with Genesis. Rather, it most probably begins with songs and lyrics such as the song of the well (Numbers 21:17,18), as well as with sayings and oracles, some "records of ancestral traditions" and "notations of legal custom," all of which were composed before the time of David.1 Such is the beginning of the Bible which our author would guide us in understanding.
Destructive Criticism
To understand the reason why this strange arrangement is adopted by Dr. Fosdick, we must consider a movement in history which is often popularly called the "Higher Criticism.” We, however, prefer to call it "Destructive Criticism." The traditional Christian and Jewish view of Genesis is that Moses was its author. In 1753, however, there appeared a little book by a French physician of profligate life, Jean Astruc. In this work Astruc asserted that, in compiling Genesis, Moses had made use of 12 previously written documents. These he had woven together, and our book of Genesis was the result. Astruc believed that he was able to separate these documents, and this he did, labelling each with a letter of the alphabet, beginning with A.
This book of Astruc started the ball rolling, and other scholars took up the work which he had begun. It soon came to be fairly widely held that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) really consisted of three main documents, all written later than the time of Moses. These were, in the supposed order of composition, E (so named because it used the word God, which in Hebrew is Elohim), J (because it used the divine name Jehovah) and D ( Deuteronomy). But a change appeared when in 1853, just one hundred years after Astruc's work, it was asserted that the document E was in reality two documents El and E2. From this time on E was called P. So we had the order PJED.
A bombshell was thrown into the whole scheme, however, when, toward the close of the last century, the view which is commonly associated with the name of Wellhausen appeared. According to it, the document P, instead of being the first document of the Pentateuch to be written, was in reality the last, giving the order JEDP. The time of composition of J is now generally assigned to about 850 B.C., that of E to about 750, that of D to the reign of Josiah and that of P to the fourth century B.C.
It is approximately this scheme of things which Dr. Fosdick accepts. To call it revolutionary is to speak mildly. The reader can easily see that, if the Pentateuch be in reality a compilation of non-Mosaic documents, many other parts of the Old Testament are also affected thereby. And this is indeed the case. Furthermore, side by side with this scheme of documents there is very often presented an evolutionary theory of the development of the Bible's ideas and teachings.
It is this combination of the “documentary" and "evolutionary development” theories which lies at the basis of Dr. Fosdick's Bible. He apparently assumes that these tenets of destructive criticism are for the main part established facts (cf. p. ix). He is apparently unaware that these views have been subjected to the most painstaking and careful scrutiny and examination by believing Christian scholars and have been refuted in convincing fashion. Of the labors of these many Christian scholars he seems to be entirely ignorant for, in his bibliography of 97 volumes and articles, we cannot detect the mention of one book or article by a conservative author (pp. 303-307). By adopting this method of procedure—ignoring the labors of those who oppose the theories of destructive criticism—the author exhibits the prejudice and onesideness that so often characterize modernist writers.
The Idea of God
Having thus adopted such a view of the Old Testament, our author seeks in his "Guide" to trace in the Bible the development of six ideas, namely, the ideas of God, Man, Right and Wrong, Suffering, Fellowship with God and Immortality. The method which is employed will be amply illustrated if we notice how he traces the idea of God. He believes that Moses first found Yahweh at Mt. Sinai in the wilderness and introduced Yahweh to Israel. This Yahweh had probably once been the deity of the Kenites, and was at first “a storm god, dwelling on a mountain, whose major activity was war—such was the beginning of the development of the Jewish-Christian idea of God” (p.6).
With Israel's entrance into Canaan, according to our author, there came a change in her idea of God, for Yahweh became detached in her imagination from Sinai and was acknowledged as lord in Canaan. This was a change which may in part have been due to Israel's associating Yahweh’s presence with the Ark of the Covenant. With this change to territorial god of Canaan went the conception of Yahweh as an agricultural deity and the blending of Yahweh and the baals of Canaan. As the development in Israel's thought proceeded, Yahweh came to be considered as god of the sky and as one who could display his power outside the land of his people.
Due to conflicting social and economic relationships between the Israelites and Amorites, the ideas that Yahweh demanded personal and social righteousness began to appear. With the great prophets a practical monotheism came upon the scene. It was they who gave impetus to the belief that Yahweh was indeed a moral judge who would reject Israel should she disobey his ethical standards. It was not, however, until the Exile that pure and genuine monotheism appeared, and this was in the teaching of the so-called Second Isaiah. Our author sums up the supposed development of the idea of God in the Old Testament by saying, “A mountain god of war and storm they [the prophets] left behind, to believe at last in a universal Spirit, everywhere available to the seeking soul, the one God of all mankind (p. 35).
The New Testament
But this was not the end of the development. According to Dr. Fosdick, the expulsion of Christianity from the synagogue produced a change in the "spiritual climate and scenery" (p. 38). God was conceived of as a universal Father, the God of all mankind and "no respecter of persons." The "major creative force" (p. 40) in achieving this change, however, was the personality of Jesus. Apparently, Dr. Fosdick conceives of Jesus as merely a human being "in the lineal succession of the great prophets—Hosea, Jeremiah, the Isaiah of the Exile" (p. 40). There is no indication given that Jesus is the eternal Son of God. Rather, He is apparently a man who took over the Jewish idea of God at its best, treated it with “thoroughgoing moral seriousness," and so achieved a revolutionary consequence. In this connection our author emphasizes two factors—the insight of Jesus into the "moral meanings of monotheism," and "the intense reality of God in the personal experience of Jesus" (p. 41).
The early Christians soon came to attribute deity to Jesus. In thinking of Him they were not using our categories of thought but their own and, by means of the concept of Messiahship, Jesus was, according to Dr. Fosdick, first brought into association with divinity. When the gospel was carried to the Gentiles, and the idea of the Messiahship lost its force, the title "Lord" was also applied to Jesus, and so another step in His deification took place. The climax came in the interpretation of Him as the Logos, the eternal Word of God. Thus, He had been deified.
Through the deification of Christ the concept of God, according to the present book, became Christianized. "God became Christlike" in Christian thinking (p. 46). With this went the belief that God cared for individuals, and His special care for sinners was stressed. Because of the saving work of Christ on their behalf, believers came to conceive of themselves as sons of God. The idea of the Fatherhood of God was made manifest most explicitly through the teaching of the Christian idea of sonship. The early Christians soon thought of “the Father as revealed in the Son and made immediately available to every believer by the indwelling Spirit.” "Quite without intending to start a development that would issue in the classic creeds, they [the early Christians] saw themselves, as a matter of fact, dealing with the Divine in three major ways—as cosmic Creator and Father, as the incarnate Saviour and Character, as the interior Spirit of power" (p. 52).
An Anti-Theistic View
We have presented Dr. Fosdick’s theory of the development of the idea of God at some length because it well illustrates the character of the book with which we are dealing. If one can bring himself to agree with the main points of this view, he will probably have little difficulty in agreeing with that which is presented in the subsequent chapters of the book. But if, on the other hand, he find himself in disagreement here, he will doubtless disagree with that which follows.
The views which are presented in this volume may be characterized as being based upon a naturalistic theory of evolution. By that we mean that the working of Almighty God in human history is practically excluded. There is not the slightest indication in the present volume that the author believes in the living and true God who is the Creator of all things. The development of the idea of God, as has been outlined above, is a development for which man alone, apparently, is to receive any credit that may be due. And certain phases of this development, such as the so-called emergence of pure monotheism during the Exile, seem to be due to nothing more than the reaction of an exceedingly penetrating mind (that is, that of the Great Unknown, the so-called Second Isaiah) to pressing circumstances.
The difficulties in this theory are many, but underlying the whole scheme is a radical anti-theism upon which all these difficulties are ultimately based. Dr. Fosdick, it would seem, is guilty of assuming unconsciously that the finite human mind, depraved by sin, can, unassisted by anything more than a reaction to circumstances and a long heritage of naturalistic religious development, produce the conception of “thoroughgoing monotheism" (p. 29). In reality this is the fundamental error underlying the whole book. To state the problem in a slightly different manner, "Can a finite being in its own strength attain to ultimate knowledge?” Apparently our author thinks that it can. But Calvin has presented the true state of the case when he says, "Their conceptions of him [that is, the conceptions which sinful men form of God] are formed, not according to the representations he gives of himself, but by the inventions of their own presumptuous imaginations.” And again, "they worship not him, but a figment of their own brains in his stead" (Institutes, Book I, Chapter IV, Section 1.)
Such in reality is the kind of Bible that our author would make more understandable. Very different, however, is the Holy Bible. It is not the work of unaided men, but is God’s own Holy Word. Such a book as this of Dr. Fosdick's will not aid anyone in understanding the Holy Bible, save as it may perhaps assist one to see what the Bible is not. The book is well written and in fairly faithful fashion portrays a certain type of viewpoint. We could wish, however, that it were in truth what it claims to be, "A Guide to Understanding the Bible.”