A third essayist, Henry Bristow Wilson, argued that neither the Scriptures nor the earliest patristic writings contain the doctrines set forth in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. The Church of England, Wilson claimed, leaves its devotees free to interpret Scripture literally or allegorically, as poetry or as parable, and to decide for themselves how to understand stories in which serpents tempt or asses speak.288
Some critics deemed Benjamin Jowett’s essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” the most damaging. As a noted scholar of classical Greek, Jowett could authoritatively address New Testament philology. Yet he argued that textual problems (e.g., questions of variations) were not the troubling issue; more frequently, problems stem from interpreters’ deployment of the text as a “weapon” for their party’s view, or attempt to make the Bible speak according to modern critical standards.289 As for recent scientific and historical discoveries, Jowett pointedly remarked, “the same fact cannot be true in religion when seen by the light of faith, and untrue in science when looked at through the medium of evidence or experiment.” He counseled readers to abandon “a losing battle” over the creation of the world or human origins; they imperil religion by resting it on false geological or philological views. How, he bluntly asked, can religious truths, so important to human life, depend on “the mere accident of an archaeological discovery”? “Interpret the Scripture like any other book,” he advised, and distinguish interpretation, the province of the few, from application, which even the uneducated can appropriate. He urged that study of the Scripture, just as of the classics, should be part of a liberal education. Unfortunately, ministerial students are mainly schooled to reconcile discrepancies or (in a jab at Tractarians) to adopt the “fancies and conjectures” of the Fathers—an unprofitable exercise, in Jowett’s view.290
Critics were hostile: Essays and Reviews was deemed “a radical subversion of the faith of the Church of England,” “infidelity made easy.”291 Critics veered precipitously between charging that the book’s ideas were “old” (so no cause for excitement) or “new” (thus very dangerous, especially to the young).292 Most commentators, whatever their line, accused the authors of adopting German historical and biblical criticism.
For example, the staunchly High-Anglican scholar Edward Pusey charged the authors with “random dogmatic skepticism” stemming from “foreign sources of unbelief,” namely, “German unbelievers” of thirty years ago.293 An editor (or contributor), writing in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review and signing himself “S.,” claimed that Essays and Reviews, a “manifesto,” had alarmed Anglicans more than any book since Strauss’s Life of Jesus a quarter-century earlier. The essays are not “English,” “S.” complained. Hanging “like a portentous cloud over the Anglican church, blackening her whole horizon,” the essays represent “the destructive theology of Germany, and the Hegelian philosophy on which the former rests.” They are “tainted with the school of Tübingen, which may be called the Medusa head that threatens to turn Oxford into stone.”294 The essays cannot even be called “Christian,” for the theory of development they contain lies “outside the pale of Christianity.” “S.” accused the essayists of jettisoning the truth of Scripture in favor of a (Hegelian) “ideal,” of endorsing Pantheism (the human race, not Christ alone, is deemed divine), and of implying that the doctrine of the Trinity is not biblical. These “hollow and arrogant speculations of Hegelianism,” “S.” observed, were a reaction to the Tractarian movement’s exaltation of the early church and “hoar [sic] antiquity.”295 In this latter claim, at least, “S.” appears correct.
Henry Smith reviewed the book (in its second American edition) in his American Theological Review. Although Smith treats the essayists’ arguments more fully than does “S.,” his assumptions and major criticisms are largely the same. For Smith, Christianity, whatever internal developments have shaped it,
has always aimed to be a specific, divine revelation, supernatural in its origin, announced in prophecy, attested by miracles, recorded in inspired Scriptures, centering in the person and work of the Godman, and having for its object the redemption of the world from sin. It presupposes a personal God, and anticipates a future state of reward and punishment.296
Like “S.,” Smith linked the essayists with Hegelianism, German thought, Tübingen, and Pantheism; they repay “the debt which German rationalism owed to that English deism, from which it received its impulse.” Yet while the essayists don German garb, they err in not pressing further, so as either to accept the radical conclusions of certain German authors or to discover how other German scholars had already answered their questions. The essayists had not worked through to a “positive position.”297 They had not, in effect, passed from thesis and antithesis to synthesis.
The Christian system, Smith argued, “as a supernatural and historic revelation,” requires miracles.298 The “philosophic unbeliever” (presumably like the essayists), by contrast,
resolves revelation into intuition, miracles into the course of nature plus myths, inspiration into genius, prophecy into sagacious historic conjectures, redemption into the victory of mind over matter, the incarnation into an ideal union of humanity with divinity realized in no one person, the Trinity into a world-process, and immortal life into the perpetuity of spirit bereft of personal subsistence.299
Especially disturbing to Smith was the essayists’ claim that the Bible should be “interpreted just like any other book,” for example, a work of classical literature. Thus Jowett’s essay, which Smith deemed the most “ingenious and subtle,” is the most insidious: in the guise of rescuing Scripture “from arbitrary and dogmatic interpretations,” Jowett “equally undermines all positive faith, not only in creeds, but also in the inspired authority of the sacred Scriptures.”300 Other essays (those by Temple and Pattison in particular) aim to show
that the external evidences of Christianity are insufficient; that its sacred books are not specifically inspired; that the histories contained in these Books are to be judged as we would any other histories, and in many parts are incredible; and that the doctrines of historic Christianity are to be resolved into more general truths, into more philosophic and rational formulas.301
Smith also emphasized the tendentious relation between the essayists and the Oxford Movement. This book, he (correctly) claimed, represents a different Oxford from that “most opposed to Protestantism and Rationalism,” that is, Tractarianism. Much of the “force and influence” of the essays “are found in their constant opposition to the revival of patristic, and even mediaeval authority in the teachings of this [Oxford] university.… Reason revenges itself for the degradation, which tradition would fain impose upon her.”302 Smith concluded,
We must go forward with the church, or outside of it. We must press through the diversity to a higher unity.… For he who believes in a personal God cannot doubt the possibility of revelation, inspiration, incarnation and redemption, in their specific Christian import: he cannot believe that natural law is all, and that supernaturalism is a fiction.303
Smith’s American Theological Review printed assessments—largely negative—of the Essays and Reviews with seeming enthusiasm. First announcing the work in February 1860, Smith tracked the discussion over the next years.304 As his own lengthy review makes evident, his biblical conservatism could only minimally incorporate the Higher Criticism. Yet Smith cleverly turned Hegelian principles against the authors of Essays and Reviews: if they had pushed on through “negativity,” they could have reached a higher synthesis.
Conclusion