Concerning presentism and biblical criticism

“Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power” (Col. 2:8-10).

Germany was an epicenter for esotericism and Enlightenment thought in the centuries after the Lutheran Reformation fractured Western Christendom. Lutheranism was rooted in ideal humanism, which emphasized the importance of individual thought and potential. This was a move away from the corporate form of worship and communal solidarity of the early Church. Not only that, but this began the shift that Schleiermacher would indeed further which placed the foci of experience within the individual, rather than the Bible.

Pietism would follow the Reformation and Counter-Reformation efforts, which emphasized personal experience and heartfelt devotion over dogmatic orthodoxy. Pietism laid the foundations for subjective interpretations of Scripture which would persist through the New Thought Movement and the spiritual modalities they inspired. Pietism may have been an element of inspiration for this hermeneutical tradition started by Schleiermacher, following in the footsteps of Romanticism and the German thinkers, Kant and Hegel who endeavored to reconcile reason and faith and metaphysics.

These thinkers would, perhaps not explicitly influence, but certainly inspire the Occult Revival in Germany which would coincide with the American New Thought Movement with the revitalized Rosicrucian tradition, Freemasonry, and Anthroposophy, a spiritual science based on Romanticism and German idealism, which would branch off from the Theosophical Society, that will be discussed later.

I mention all these fields and currents flowing into and out of Germany to provide a greater lens to see how ideas like biblical criticism could be developed in this crucible of revolutionary ideas. Germany was home to such a unique dynamism of philosophical and intellectual inquiry that the nineteenth century Russian theologian, St. Theophan the Recluse, commented,

“Inquisitiveness is the tickling of the mind. Truth is not dear to inquisitiveness, but news is, especially sensational news. That is why it is not satisfied with the truth itself but seeks something extraordinary in it. When it has contrived something extraordinary, it stops there and attracts other people to it. In our days, it is the German mind that does this. The Germans are obsessed with contriving things. They have covered the whole realm of God with their contrivances as with a fog. Take dogma, ethics, history, the word of God—all are so overloaded with contrivances that you cannot get to the truth of God.”[1]

In addition to this, St. Theophan comments on, specifically, this export of higher criticism by comparing the German theological tradition to the pharisaical sect of Christ’s day,

“Their prejudice [the Pharisees] pushed them onto a crooked path, and they then proved to be God-killers. It has always been this way, and it is this way now. The Germans, and our people who have followed after them and become Germanized in their mentality, immediately cry out whenever they come across a miracle in the Gospels, ‘Not true, not true; this didn’t happen and couldn’t happen, this needs to be crossed out […] Look through all the books of these clever men—in none of them will you find any indication as to why they believe what they believe… they only continue insisting that [what is written] could not be, and that is why they do not believe.”[2]

Such was the destructive force of higher criticism and Germany’s idealism and rationalism that it can be argued actually displaced the presuppositional lenses that the Western mind used when approaching and engaging texts, as well as the world around them. This is not to say that the early Christian presuppositions were not untouched in the fifteen hundred years between the founding of the Church of Christ and the Lutheran Reformation. However, these spiritual, intellectual, and esoteric currents have had such a resonant impact on the centuries that followed them that their influence on the contemporary mind cannot be understated. 

Notable examples of the profound impact of the eighteenth century German theological tradition’s contributions to higher criticism and scholarly discourse, beyond Hegel and Kant, that gradually led to the Schleiermacher’s shift in focus from external authority to individual religious experience begins with Reimarus.

Hermann Reimarus was a philosopher who was a Deist, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ and positioning his work as forerunning the academic effort to, essentially, discredit Jesus and His teachings. Reimarus was followed by Gotthold Lessing, a dramatist and philosopher, perhaps more sympathetic to the Christian and her religion, Lessing advocated an individual approach to religious truth, expressing a contrary view to Reimarus that the Deist’s views “need disturb no genuine Christian but only the theologian who insists that religious convictions must rest on learning, hypothesis, evidences, and demonstrations of truth through reliable facts.”[3] The two philosophers would prove to be influential on the skepticism and critique of the Bible to this day.

The philosophers, as is fitting, were followed by the Protestant theologian Eichhorn and Semler. Eichhorn would be instrumental in laying the groundwork for Scriptural skepticism, declaring that the books of the Old and New Testament were spurious. He followed in the footsteps of the rationalist philosopher Spinoza, who denied the authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses, rejected the messiahship of Christ, and—what do you know—promoted a pantheistic worldview which we will look at closer later. Johann Semler, a church historian raised in pietistic surroundings, would encourage a distinction made between the historical context of the Bible and its divine message, further supporting an inherent theological and historical presentism in relation to higher criticism of the Bible.

The rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would influence the way in which scholars, theologians, and the laity would regard and engage with Scripture due to the influence of these German thinkers. Schleiermacher did not invent higher criticism, but certainly shifted to the focus of Scriptural interpretation away from the Church’s exegetical lens to a latent pietistic eisegetical engagement.

The transition from external authoritative exegesis to personal, private revelation or criticism of Scripture would become exacerbated by the early nineteenth century with David Strauss’ Life of Jesus providing an innovate framework posing the Gospel story as myth expressing Truth,[4] not outright denying Jesus’ divinity, but making Him more unique to the individual. Strauss presented Christ as an ideal; a figure of myth and elevation by the early Christians, while not questioning the historical existence of such a figure.

Eichhorn’s hypothesis of the Pentateuch took shape under the eye of the German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen in the late nineteenth century. Wellhausen argued for the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources for the authorship of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Wellhausen’s ideas reshaped biblical criticism and the study of the evolution of the Ancient Hebrew peoples.

Along those lines the controversial Q-Gospel, two-source hypothesis emerged in these times, answering the Synoptic problem. The “answer” to this “problem” is an erroneous teaching that Mark and a hypothetical Q-gospel were of the first Gospel accounts written with Matthew and Luke using these sources for their own Gospel, positing an argument for skepticism against the Gospel accounts. I know less about recent scholarship concerning Eichhorn and Wellhausen’s hypothesis. However, recent scholarship has shown the two-point hypothesis as being shaky at best, with no source document in existence, it is a theory that seeks to answer a contrived question that was only asked because it could be asked, a tickling of the mind.

It is ironic that Dresser both acknowledges the destructive influence of higher criticism on Christianity in the West and demonstrates how the New Thought Movement itself emerged as a symptom of these broader intellectual currents. He continues, stating, “Devotees of the New Thought have freely interpreted the Bible for themselves.”[5] This free interpretation of the Bible within New Thought was spearheaded by the founder, Phineas Quimby.

 Quimby was a nineteenth century mesmerist, which was a German system of healing developed in the late eighteenth century by the doctor Franz Anton Mesmer.[6] Quimby noticed that the reason for the success of mesmerism was “the expectation of the patient,”[7] which would become the basis of New Thought’s promotion of positive thinking, one’s physical health was ultimately tied to their mental state. This was rooted in the metaphysical idea that reality is a manifestation of Mind, echoing Spinoza’s pantheism. Quimby’s doctrine of New Thought was originally presented as “Christian Science”, and it was here that the free interpretation of the Bible was put forth.

Quimby’s spiritual science of what William James deemed the “Mind-Cure” movement in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, uses for its doctrinal sources the four Gospels, transcendentalism, spiritism, and Hinduism.[8] James comments on the movement’s Christian veneer, “the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, [though] one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians. Their notion of man’s higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic.”[9]

Quimby embodies this divergent notion with the New Thought Movement’s use of the Scriptures to elucidate and recreate the “method of healing by which Jesus wrought, not his ‘miracles,’ but his highly intelligible works of healing. His work with the sick seemed to him to imply a spiritual science, a ‘science of life and happiness.’”[10] Jesus, to Quimby, influenced by the groundwork laid by the likes of Strauss and Semler, was not the Son of God, the Messiah, or the Incarnation, but a man who came to teach this science of “the Christ.”[11]

Just as higher criticism subjected Scripture to the individual’s interpretive lens, Quimby’s New Thought applied a similar principle to Christian doctrine, reducing Christ’s mission to a metaphysical science.

This eisegetical interpretation can be found in New Thought writer’s Warren Evans’ “The Divine Law of Cure” when he quotes Jesus, “The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works” (Jn. 14:10). Evans uses this to describe the method of self-healing. When one has aligned themselves with the creative energy of God which is possible due to the Christ within us (note the individual reality of the Christ), when our thoughts are in unison with the Divine then one can come into line with Him and be cured of their disease.[12]

This is what is called the law of correspondence in esoteric literature and here we can see how the New Thought movement extracted Jesus’ words to support this pseudo-Hermetic teaching when Jesus, within the context of His culture and historical period was really stating His sharing the same nature of the Father. However, due to the pantheistic lens used by New Thought, His words are alluding to their own philosophy that “we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace.”[13]

This is not only an example of theological and historical presentism but exemplifies the radical shift during this period from Biblical criticism and an individual relationship with God to God being an impersonal force that one has access to and by that access can manifest, scientifically, a better life and happiness.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ

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[1] St. Theophan the Recluse, Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, trans. Lisa Marie Baranov (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2022), 227.

[2] Ibid. 166.

[3] Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 115.

[4] Ibid. 113-114.

[5] Dresser, History of the New Thought Movement, 2.

[6] Leslie Shepard, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, vol. 2 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1984), 872.

[7] Ibid. 946.

[8] James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1958, 87-88.

[9] Ibid. 91-92.

[10] Dresser, History of the New Thought Movement, 15.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. 46.

[13] Ibid.