Theological Poetics of Jesus Amidst Nineteenth Century Higher Criticism

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Jeffrey F. Keuss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Higher Criticism

John Colquhoun

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-186
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
Good Resource

In the nineteenth century indifference toward the doctrine of works grew to outright rejection and hostility because of the influence of higher criticism and negative opinions of Reformed scholasticism. Critics of the doctrine argued that in order for the doctrine to be legitimate, there had to be an explicit biblical statement attesting to its existence. This was a change from earlier exegetical patterns of argumentation. Critics also characterized the covenant of works as an agreement between equals, which was an erroneous understanding of God’s dealings with Adam. Proponents of the doctrine, however, maintained earlier methodologies and commitments, saw Reformed scholastic theology as a good resource, and were careful to qualify their definitions of covenant to ensure that it was not construed as an agreement between equals. Theologians such as John Colquhoun promoted the doctrine.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH EGYPTOLOGY

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID GANGE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

Browning and Higher Criticism

PMLA ◽  
1929 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 590-621
Author(s):  
William O. Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Systematic Development ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Religious Problems ◽  
Victorian Age ◽  
Speculative Thought

Amid the shifting cross currents of religious controversy in England during the middle years of the nineteenth century, there are few points of view equal in freshness and interest to that of Browning. Nor among his brother poets of the Victorian age is there one whose work throws more light on the typical attitude of the English mind in relation to philosophy and religion. Individualism, subjectivity, lack of systematic development, absence of radicalism,—attributes which have been singled out as eminently characteristic of English speculative thought in the nineteenth century—are strikingly illustrated in Browning's representation of the religious problems of the mid-Victorian era.

Baptists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Randall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
George Fox

Early in the nineteenth century, British Quakers broke through a century-long hedge of Quietism which had gripped their Religious Society since the death of their founding prophet, George Fox. After 1800, the majority of Friends in England and Ireland gradually embraced the evangelical revival, based on the biblical principle of Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the effective source of salvation. This evangelical vision contradicted early Quakerism’s central religious principle, the saving quality of the Light of Christ Within (Inward Light) which led human beings from sinful darkness into saving Light. The subsequent, sometimes bitter struggles among British Quakers turned on the question of whether the infallible Bible or leadings from the Light should be the primary means for guiding Friends to eternal salvation. Three of the most significant upheavals originated in Manchester. In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a weighty Manchester Friend, published A Beacon to the Society of Friends which questioned the authority of the Inward Light and the entire content of traditional Quaker ministry as devoid of biblical truth. The ensuing row ended with Crewdson and his followers separating from the Friends. Following this Beacon Separation, however, British Quakerism was increasingly dominated by evangelical principles. Although influenced by J.S. Rowntree’s Quakerism, Past and Present, Friends agreed to modify their Discipline, a cautious compromise with the modern world. During the 1860s a new encounter with modernity brought a second upheaval in Manchester. An influential thinker as well as a Friend by marriage, David Duncan embraced, among other advanced ideas, higher criticism of biblical texts. Evangelical Friends were not pleased and Duncan was disowned by a special committee investigating his views. Duncan died suddenly before he could take his fight to London Yearly Meeting, but his message had been heard by younger British Friends. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of British Quakerism, presided over by evangelical leader J.B. Braithwaite, seemed to be steering Friends towards mainstream Protestantism. This tendency was challenged in a widely read tract entitled A Reasonable Faith, which replaced the angry God of the atonement with a kinder, gentler, more loving Deity. A clear sign of changing sentiments among British Friends was London Yearly Meeting’s rejection of the Richmond Declaration (1887), an American evangelical manifesto mainly written by J.B. Braithwaite. But the decisive blow against evangelical dominance among Friends was the Manchester Conference of 1895 during which John Wilhelm Rowntree emerged as leader of a Quaker Renaissance emphasizing the centrality of the Inward Light, the value of social action, and the revival of long-dormant Friends’ Peace Testimony. Before his premature death in 1905, J.W. Rowntree and his associates began a transformation of British Quakerism, opening its collective mind to modern religious, social, and scientific thought as the means of fulfilling Friends’ historic mission to work for the Kingdom of God on earth. During the course of the nineteenth century, British Quakerism was gradually transformed from a tiny, self-isolated body of peculiar people into a spiritually riven, socially active community of believers. This still Dissenting Society entered the twentieth century strongly liberal in its religious practices and passionately confident of its mission ‘to make all humanity a society of Friends’.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Damien B. Schlarb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Higher Criticism

This chapter explains the book’s central arguments, provides background, and theorizes its approach to literature. It shows how Old Testament wisdom philosophy informs Melville’s response to the manifold crises of modernity, specifically the loss of religious certainty and biblical authority. It explicates the book’s argument that Melville’s response can help us understand the dynamics at play in this crisis by providing historical and contextual background: first, it inscribes Melville into a transnational theological conversation about biblical interpretation that lasts from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century; second, it outlines the American reception of new analytical methods such as higher criticism, surveys America’s intellectual infrastructure, and discusses how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by theological scholarship. Finally, it defines “wisdom” and “religious skepticism” and explains its approach to literary criticism as informed by a hermeneutic theory of contemplation (theology) and by postsecular as well as postcritical approaches (literary studies).

Biblical Criticism in the Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 342-358
Author(s):  
William Johnstone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
William Robertson

Against the background of the Enlightenment and the weakening of the restrictions imposed by the Westminster Confession, this chapter seeks to trace the development of biblical interpretation in Scotland in the nineteenth century, in terms of the evolution of ‘lower criticism’ focusing on philological and textual evidence and of ‘higher criticism’ aiming to identify the social and historical contexts within which the biblical writers operated. The chapter begins with the pioneering work of Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) and considers Scottish participation in the culmination of ‘lower criticism’ in the production of the Revised Version (1870–95) and of ‘higher criticism’ in the work especially of William Robertson Smith (1846–94).

Strauss's English Propagandists and the Politics of Unitarianism, 1841–1845

1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie A. Dodd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
General Culture

In 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson stated boldly that the English “cannot interpret the German mind.” 1Although German higher criticism did not “merely attack the Scriptures” but rather “studied them in a new spirit,” it was to be censured, feared, ignored, or misunderstood in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.2 Such was not the case in the country which gave birth to the school of which David Friedrich Strauss is perhaps the most notorious and most distinguished representative. Eduard Zeller asserted that, in his own country, Strauss's work “had … a decided effect upon the philosophy and the general culture of our own day.”3

Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century

1955 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 295
Author(s):  
Floyd V. Filson ◽  
Willis B. Glover
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Higher Criticism

Quakers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The People ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Church Structures

Unitarianism and Presbyterian Dissent had a complex relationship in the nineteenth century. Neither English Unitarians nor their Presbyterian cousins grew much if at all in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere in the United Kingdom the picture was different. While Unitarians failed to prosper, Presbyterian Dissenting numbers held up in Wales and Ireland and increased in Scotland thanks to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Unitarians were never sure whether they would benefit from demarcating themselves from Presbyterians as a denomination. Though they formed the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, its critics preferred to style themselves ‘English Presbyterians’ and Presbyterian identities could be just as confused. In later nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, splinter Presbyterian churches eventually came together; in England, it took time before Presbyterians disentangled themselves from Scots to call themselves the Presbyterian Church of England. While Unitarians were tepid about foreign missions, preferring to seek allies in other confessions and religions rather than converts, Presbyterians eagerly spread their church structures in India and China and also felt called to convert Jews. Missions offered Presbyterian women a route to ministry which might otherwise have been denied them. Unitarians liked to think that what was distinctive in their theology was championship of a purified Bible, even though other Christians attacked them as a heterodox bunch of sceptics. Yet their openness to the German higher criticism of the New Testament caused them problems. Some Unitarians exposed to it, such as James Martineau, drifted into reverent scepticism about the historical Jesus, but they were checkmated by inveterate conservatives such as Robert Spears. Presbyterians saw their adherence to the Westminster Confession as a preservative against such disputes, yet the Confession was increasingly interpreted in ways that left latitude for higher criticism. Unitarians started the nineteenth century as radical subversives of a Trinitarian and Tory establishment and were also political leaders of Dissent. They forfeited that leadership over time, but also developed a sophisticated, interventionist attitude to the state, with leaders such as H.W. Crosskey and Joseph Chamberlain championing municipal socialism, while William Shaen and others were staunch defenders of women’s rights and advocates of female emancipation. Their covenanting roots meant that many Presbyterians were at best ‘quasi-Dissenters’, who were slower to embrace religious voluntaryism than many other evangelical Dissenters. Both Unitarians and Presbyterians anguished about how to reconcile industrial, urban capital with the gospel. Wealthy Unitarians from William Roscoe to Henry Tate invested heavily in art galleries and mechanics institutes for the people but were disappointed by the results. By the later nineteenth century they turned to more direct forms of social reform, such as domestic missions and temperance. Scottish Presbyterians also realized the importance of remoulding the urban fabric, with James Begg urging the need to tackle poor housing. Yet neither these initiatives nor the countervailing embrace of revivalism banished fears that Presbyterians were losing their grip on urban Britain. Only in Ireland, where Home Rule partially united the Protestant community in fears for its survival, did divisions of space and class seem a less pressing concern.

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