Historical-critical Method - Controversy of Critical Methods - Views On Higher-criticism

Views On Higher-criticism

Higher criticism was recognized to varying extents, by Orthodox Jews and many traditional Christians, yet they often found that higher critics gave unsatisfactory or even heretical interpretations. In particular, religious conservatives object to the rationalistic and naturalistic presuppositions of a large number of practitioners of higher criticism, which lead to conclusions that conservative scholars find unscientific.

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) condemned secular biblical scholarship in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus while affirming the need for a balanced historical study of the Scriptures. However, in 1943 Pope Pius XII gave license to the new scholarship in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: "extual criticism ... quite rightly employed in the case of the Sacred Books ... Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed." The current Pope Benedict XVI has debated influential critical theorist Jürgen Habermas.

Today, many Evangelical Protestants oppose the methods of the higher criticism, and hold that the Bible is divinely inspired and incapable of error, at least in its original form. Within academia, the new hermeneutics inspired by critical theory has eclipsed earlier critical approaches such as higher criticism.