The Old Testament in the Jewish Church

CRITICISM AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION

I HAVE undertaken to deliver a course of lectures to you, not with a polemical purpose, but in answer to a request for information. I am not here to defend my private opinion on any disputed question, but to expound as well as I can the elements of a well-established department of historical study. Biblical criticism is a branch of historical science; and I hope to convince you as we proceed that it is a legitimate and necessary science, which must continue to draw the attention of all who go deep into the Bible and the religion of the Bible, if there is any Biblical science at all.

It would be affectation to ignore the fact that in saying so much I at once enter upon ground ol controversy. The science of Biblical Criticism has not escaped the fate of every science which takes topics of general human interest for its subject matter, and advances theories destructive of current views upon things with which every one is familiar and in which every one has some practical concern. It would argue indifference rather than enlightenment, if the great mass of Bible-readers, to whom scientific points of view for the study of Scripture are wholly unfamiliar, could adjust themselves to a new line of investigation into the history of the Bible without passing through a crisis of anxious thought not far removed from distress and alarm.