By the time Pius XII released his encyclical in 1943, the influence of the sciences on society was very great. From the Copernican revolution, to the Enlightenment's use of rationalism and reason, to the Darwinian tenets of evolution, to Freud's teaching on the human psyche, to Einstein's teaching on cosmogony, the arts and sciences were a virtual juggernaut of intellectual power that was sweeping through every area of life. Since the Church, the guardian of truth, could not appear as if she was against the very tools which claimed to uncover the "real" truth of life, there was little which would have stopped these scientific pursuits eventually becoming part of Catholic biblical studies.

At that time (the 1940s) most everyone was very enthusiastic about Historical Criticism. The feeling among the more liberal theologians of the Church (and there were a lot of them in that day) was that Catholicism was finally getting out of the "stone age of medieval scholasticism" and into the modern age where one could discover the rational and scientific reason for everything that occurred in life. Their Protestant counterparts had been using these scientific tools on the Bible for more than a century or two prior, and were way ahead of the game. Catholics needed to catch up. To make a long story short, the Catholics did catch up, and, in fact, superceded the Protestants, but it wasn't in the way that had originally been anticipated by Pius XII. Something went wrong, terribly wrong. In fact, it went so wrong that I dare say that most of our present problems in the post-conciliar church are a direct result of the damage which occurred once the train of Historical Criticism went off the tracks.

In order to see this, we need to go back to the years immediately following Luther's "Reformation." As most know, the Reformation occurred around the same time as the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an "intellectual awakening" of man's consciousness of himself and of the world around him. To express this new-found feeling, men were creating art and architecture like never before. They were discovering all kinds of interesting things about the intricacies of nature. Nothing was taken for granted. Everything was "studied" to see what made it tick. Spanning over a few centuries, the Renaissance led to the High-Renaissance and to the Enlightenment.

As with anything in life, there were good and bad points to this "awakening." Evil always has a way of awakening whenever good awakens. Men can use their new-found intelligence for getting closer to God and for the betterment of mankind, or for the destruction of both. Unfortunately, there was as much destruction as their was progress, perhaps even more. By pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, as it were, many a man began to distance himself from God. Who needs God when you can explain everything naturally? Releasing oneself from the shackles of medievalism meant, among other things, that even religion was now free from the constraints of the past.

Without the anchor of the Church's authority and tradition, religion was basically up for grabs in Europe during this time. In addition, with the competition Christendom was now receiving from the arts and sciences, many a man's religion was a mixture of his own likes and dislikes, guided by the latest scientific advances - advances which were on a direct course to take as much "religious superstition" out of human thinking as possible. Although Luther, Calvin and their immediate followers had strong religious convictions, nevertheless, when their brand of Christian individualism spread throughout Europe, it was only a matter of time before those who did not share the same spiritual ideals would begin to have their own revolt. Science was becoming the be-all and end-all. Faith was static. You either believed in God or your didn't. If you did, you still found yourself trying to explain God and His workings in scientific terms. A good example of the product of these times was Deism, the religious belief of many of the founding fathers of America. Deism held that God indeed created the world, but after he did so, he went away and left it totally to man, never to appear again.

Inevitably, the Bible fell into this mixture, or shall we say, became a victim of it. In the Post-Reformation period, men began to use the sciences in order to study, or what may better be described as "dissect," the Bible. Beginning with Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who was heavily influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (i.e., a philosophy of no absolutes outside of yourself; everything is in your head), Protestants of the intellectual variety (university types) proposed that religion is merely a natural activity of man, and is at best an intuitive grasp of the unknown, but is more an emotional response. This set the stage for reexamining the very thing that gave man religion - the Bible. Thomas Jefferson showed he was a man of his age by cutting out all the references to Jesus' miracles from the New Testament.

Following the groundwork laid by Schleiermacher, Ferdinand Baur, professor of theology at Tübingen, Germany from 1826-1860, came on the scene. This was, more or less, the birth of Historical Criticism. Baur, heavily influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, claimed the Bible was merely a product of a "thesis" (e.g., the philosophy of Jesus, which was geared toward Jews) meeting an "antithesis" (e.g., the philosophy of Paul, which was geared toward Gentiles), which resulted in the "synthesis" of first century Christianity (i.e., the multiethnic Church). Upon this Procrustean bed all the writings of the New Testament authors would be forced to lie.

The result? The Historical Criticism of the Tübingen school concluded the following new "insights": Paul wrote only four of the thirteen epistles attributed to him. The other epistles, and the book of Acts, since they were "conciliatory" in tone, were judged as post-apostolic writings (i.e., not written by those apostles who claimed to write them), since by then the "synthesis" was rapidly unfolding. Matthew was said to be the product of the earliest "Jewish" position, and thus close to Jesus' view, but was, nevertheless, the result of several redactions of some unidentified source. Luke was the best example of the pre-Pauline "antithesis" to Jesus. Mark, however, was a great ecumenist, and thus combined elements of Matthew and Luke. The gospel of John, since its material was judged to be synthetic, was said to be written by some Jewish scribe in the second century when harmony between Matthew and Luke had been accomplished. As a result, John was judged worthless in regards to "historical" value. Baur further stipulated that in the writings of Clement, the apostle Paul was disguised as Simon Magnus who was in constant conflict with his arch rival, Peter, and the conflict between Paul and Peter had its own thesis-antithesis-synthesis of development. Since the book of the Apocalypse (which is traditionally understood to be written by John) was also hostile to Paul's way of thinking, it was judged as primitive and thus the earliest and more "Jewish" of all New Testament books.

Outside of the New Testament, Historical Criticism also made a big impact. Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), another German Protestant, was the heir-apparent to the Historical Critical school, but more in the direction of Old Testament studies. He proposed that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses (the traditional view) but by several unknown individuals and at various times in history. The effects of this theory are manifold, but I will cite one example. Wellhausen's view, better known as the Documentary Hypothesis, proposed that Genesis 1 was written by a different person and at a different time than Genesis 2. Genesis 2 was said to be written very early in Israel's history, while Genesis 1 was said to be written by the "Priestly" group of writers just after the Babylonian captivity (587-517 B.C.). Why? Because in coming back to their homeland after being punished for 70 years in Babylon, the Jews needed a remembrance of how great God was, as well as a fresh start in life, and there was no better way to do this than to write a spectacular story of God's power, especially since the Babylonian god Marduk, who had a similar creation story, needed to be excised from the Jewish mind.

Incidentally, this view of Genesis 1 fit like a glove with the burgeoning field Darwinian evolution. If through "historical criticism" it could be shown that Genesis 1 was not a literal and detailed account of an actual creation, but merely a literary device designed for sixth century Jews in order to reestablish their roots, then there would be no recourse to use Genesis 1 as a historical document, and science, once again, would provide the "real" answer how the world began. (Catholic theologian Fr. Stanley Jaki, who is an avowed evolutionist and presently on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, ascribes to this very idea, as do most of the other 87 members of the PAS, many of whom are not Catholic).

As one can see, this "science" of Historical Criticism leads in many and varied directions, most of which were diametrically opposed to the traditional teaching handed down in the Church. The appeal of this method, aside from the fact that it was "scientific" and devoid of relying on "superstition," was the need of the investigator to get "behind the scenes." One couldn't just take things at face value. There always had to be an "underlying story" behind the apparent story. This was natural for science. Louis Pasteur found the "underlying story" behind why old milk made people sick. Antoine Lavoisier (1774) found the "underlying story" why things burned (because they combine with oxygen). John Dalton (1803) found the "underlying story" of what made up matter (tiny atoms). After the Renaissance and Enlightenment, life was full of finding out the "why" and "how" of everything, and men now had the tools to do the investigation. They were no longer bogged down by ignorance and superstition, at least so they thought.

One of the major planks of religious belief that was destined to be the victim of the new science of Historical Criticism was the supernatural. There was little room left, if any, for belief in what was disdainfully regarded as the "magical" world of Scripture. Those days were gone with alchemy. One of the ways the Historical Critical school introduced this new vision of Scripture to the world was through "The Quest for the Historical Jesus." Using their critical tools, the plan was to strip away every vestige of the supernatural from the Gospels so that only the "real" Jesus of history would be left - the "real" man who had to deal with life on an ordinary basis, just like we do. Underlying this "quest," however, was the premise that the supernatural can be stripped away because, in fact, there was no supernatural. "Science" purported to have already proved that the supernatural did not exist.

According to the Historical Critical school, when the writers of the Gospels portrayed Jesus performing miracles, they were merely adding fictional embellishments so as to give an other-worldly appeal to their narratives. The Tübingen school boasted that Christianity would have been an utter failure without these embellishments, since the Christian sect was more or less forced to create them because their savior had failed. For example, Tübingen scholars David Strauss (1835) and H. E. Paulus (1828) claimed that when the Gospel writers said that Jesus walked on water, he was merely walking in a very shallow pool, or near the shore line. Similarly, when he fed the five thousand, the people had already brought food for themselves, but the writers made it look like Jesus performed a miracle. Strauss convinced his students that Historical Criticism was necessary in order to find out the "real" story behind Jesus' miracles, since they must take as a "given" that miracles, following the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776) and the Enlightenment, simply did not occur, and that everything in life has a "natural" explanation.

The "quest for the historical Jesus" would lead Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976), with his extensive use of Form Criticism, to become so skeptical about the veracity of Scripture that he asserted we could know almost nothing about the "real" Jesus, or even the first century Church. Rather, he concluded that the New Testament was mythological. His most famous work, the 1941 book New Testament and Mythology, argued that Scripture contained what he called the "Kerygma" (the word of God) but we could never know the substance of that word, since there was always a difference in what the author meant as opposed to what he wrote. Here theology developed an acute schizophrenia wherein "religious truth" was now separate from historical truth, which soon resulted in the irrational leaps inherent in the existential theology of Sĝren Kierkegaard and his followers. Even Bultmann's students knew there was something fishy about his theories. On the last day of class they gave him an appropriate present to register their dismay. They presented a beautifully bound book to him with the title "Kerygma" on the front cover, but inside were hundreds of pages of blank paper.

To answer controversial issues in the New Testament, Bultmann claimed, for example, that John chapter 6 was certainly speaking of the Eucharist as the real body and blood of Jesus Christ (as Catholics claimed), but John was merely redacting his information from another source - the infamous "Q" source introduced by Otto Ritschl - a source which mistakenly believed in such superstitious things as bread becoming divine. Thus, John's writing could be taken at face value, but the person behind John, albeit unidentified, had simply made up the story.

Incidentally, the "Q" theory, or what is also known as the "two-source" theory, was proposed by historical critics in an effort to keep the Gospels from being understood as actual eye-witness accounts of what occurred in the life of Jesus, as they were traditionally understood. "Q" was vitally important to the liberals, because if the Gospels can be fashioned into nothing more than second or third generation redactions of a first generation oral tradition, then the incidence of foreign elements creeping into the narratives would be quite high, and thus make the final document historically unreliable. Accordingly, liberal critics teach that all the Gospels were written well after 70 AD, and most likely, well into the second century. Conversely, if they were to admit that the Gospels were written prior to 70 AD, then they would also have to admit of their historic reliability, and thus have no escape from the truths contained therein.

Meanwhile, the two-source theory and the quest for the historical Jesus would lead Emil Brunner to say that, yes, the resurrection of Christ definitely occurred, but only in the hearts of the apostles (i.e., if you had a TV camera at the tomb it would not have recorded anything except a dead body). It would lead Karl Barth, the premier Protestant theologian of the mid-twentieth century, to deny original sin (from which the notorious Hans Küng, by his own admission, obtained much of his theology). Barth claimed that man is now the way he always was, and that, because of this divinely-imposed condition, it is God's responsibility to save all mankind. It was from Barth's introduction of universal salvation that many leading Catholic liberals, such as Rahner, Küng, Schillebeeckx, and a host of others, would begin promoting the idea of the "anonymous Christian." Historical criticism would lead Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the famous humanitarian doctor of Africa, to say that when Jesus uttered the words "My, my God, why have you forsaken me," he finally realized that he was not God's son, and died in failure.

Many years and much ink went into these labors of finding the "historical Jesus." Books were produced by the dozens each year. But this quest eventually had a very rude awakening. The scholars found that no matter how hard they tried, the miraculous could not be separated from the Jesus of history. The history and the supernatural were so intertwined, and so meticulously detailed, interwoven and overlapped, that to subtract the miracles would be to erase the history. To their utter consternation, the Bible was written in such a way that if you eliminate the one you eliminate the other, and there simply was no escape from this reality. In short, the "quest" ended as a miserable failure. As one book put it: "The result is that N.T. scholarship now generally realizes that it is impossible to write a life of Jesus."⁴ Similarly, after having surveyed all the attempts of the previous hundred years, Albert Schweitzer concluded in his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus:

The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.

The only reality the scholars were forced to face was how real the Bible is. And sadly, the other reality they painfully discovered was that their brand of critical theology not only didn't advance Christianity, but it actually emptied Protestant churches all over the world, and split the remaining ones in even more grossly than Reformers ever anticipated. Little did Luther and Calvin realize when they were promoting their cherished belief of Sola Scriptura that their most formidable foe would not be the Catholic Church, per se, but their great-grandchildren who would assert that God had little to do with the writing of Scripture.

The irony of this whole history is that the Protestants, after almost two centuries of using the historical-critical methodology, failed to produce a single verifiable truth from it. Time after time, they threw their hands up in frustration, realizing that, being quite finite in their intellect and very limited in their data, they simply could not determine with any accuracy what the "real" story was. Of course, in their pride they would never allow their failures to lead them into taking the biblical text at face value. Science had proven that you just couldn't stoop to that level of acceptance. No matter how many failures they experienced to get "behind the scenes," they would never admit that maybe, just maybe, God was really speaking to them through Scripture and that Scripture, because it was inerrant in all that it said, was meant to be interpreted precisely the way it was written.

By the 1940s, the Catholic liberal movement, which, having been spurred by the Protestants as early as the late 1800s, and which caused Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X to issue strong warnings and condemnations against it, was nevertheless gaining steam. With the rise of Teilhard de Chardin, George Tyrell, Karl Rahner and later Hans Kung, Eduard Schillebeeckx, Maurice Blondel and a few others, Catholic liberal theology was just busting at the seams, rattling its confines like a caged animal. It was their claim that for 1940 years Catholicism had been bottled up in the shackles of primitive patristic and medieval thought and it was now time for new horizons. They were anxious to try what the Protestants were doing with Scripture, and practically begged Pius XII to let them do so. Once Pius XII gave the go-ahead, the reaction was like an avalanche. By the 1950s and into the 1960s, liberal theology, with its new armament - Biblical Criticism - was well in place and in a short time had actually superceded where the Protestants left off. The Catholic liberals accomplished in about 25 years what it took the Protestant liberals about 200 years to do. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary (the leading liberal Protestant seminary and the professorial alma mater of Fr. Raymond Brown) stated: "...the leadership in theology, which even ten years ago lay with such Protestant giants as Barth, Brunner and Tillich, has now passed to Roman Catholic thinkers."⁵

Fortunately, the Catholic Church was not without critics of Historical Criticism. Fr. George Montague of the Catholic Biblical Association opined that historical critics were "more interested in defending their own scholarship than in comprehending the truth of the New Testament." Jesuit Dennis McCarthy of the Biblicum stated: "...the scholar finds his historical ground constantly shifting as he tires to use it as a platform for affirmation beyond the historical. He never knows what is historical."⁶ Martin Hengel, professor of New Testament from none other than Tübingen, stated that New Testament facts "are accessible to us only in a very limited way," and he opted for what he called the "unhistorica-uncritical method," i.e., take Scripture at face value since you cannot be sure of any other value.⁷ Walter Wink asserted that today's historical critical theories are "bankrupt," elaborating that "the historical critic's scientific determinism [i.e., we can dissect this and put it back together] results in more denial about the contents of the Bible than affirmations."⁸

But the war goes on. As I noted previously, a product and facilitator of Union Theological Seminary was Catholic priest Fr. Raymond Brown, the one man, after Karl Rahner, responsible for more unbridled liberal methodology being applied to Catholic Scripture study than any other single figure in Catholic history. Brown, knowing that he was in a virtual war against his conservative counterparts, boasted that his enemies were not the Protestants, for upon them he cut his theological teeth. No, even as Hans Küng felt a closer kinship with Protestant Karl Barth than he did with traditional Catholics, so Brown felt that his closest allies were the liberal Protestants from Union Theological Seminary and like-minded institutions, of which Protestantism, and now liberal Catholicism, was rife with adherents. Showing his comradery, Brown stated in the Jesuit magazine America (which by this time had become the mouthpiece for dissenting liberals) that he "heaved a sigh of relief" when in 1976 Hans Küng was not charged with heresy, Brown later advising Rome to "stop the heresy hunt."⁹ Not surprisingly, this is where most of the "ecumenical" activity takes place today - between the liberals of both Catholic and Protestant camps who have broken down their historical barriers by a mutual dilution of Scripture through Historical Criticism. The only other "ecumenical" activity of any significance is between the charismatics of both groups, since they share a desire for miraculous gifts (e.g., tongue-speaking, being slain-in-the-spirt, etc) and are, more or less, anti-theological. The real enemy says Brown is the "Catholic far-right," the "right-wing vigilantes," "arch-conservatives," "fundamentalists," and "those whose opinions have little or no scholarly respectability." He, of course, is referring to those who understand themselves as "traditionalists," and some "conservatives," of the Catholic Church. Ironically, since the rebellion of Luther we have come full circle, since Fr. Brown and his entourage of liberal comrades seem to have much more in common with Protestantism than they do with the historic Catholic faith.

Although Catholic liberals were having a love-affair with Protestants of all shapes and sizes, there was one thing vastly different in the Catholic Church that was not true of most Protestant denominations. The Catholic Church put limits on just how far it was going to allow historical criticism to advance. Ironically, what Pius XII gave to the liberals in the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, he wisely took back in large measure in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis. In that encyclical, for example, he stated that, regardless of how a scholar might interpret the finer details of the creation account, he had to maintain that an actual man and woman were the first human pair, and that they both sinned against God, which resulted in the curse of Original Sin being forced upon the whole human race. This was a direct assault on Protestant Karl Barth's attempt to poison Catholic waters with his denial of Original Sin, as well as a flat negation of Teilhard de Chardin's and Karl Rahner's quest for a polygenistic origin to the human race.¹⁰ So whereas the mainline Protestants allowed historical criticism to penetrate the bedrock of salvation doctrine, the Vatican hierarchy was clear that those areas of dogma were definitely off-limits to modern hermeneutical science.

Hence, after 1950, Catholic modernists were more or less corralled by the Church, at least to a respectable degree. They were permitted to write about their speculations concerning Scripture, but they simply could not alter Catholic doctrine from its traditional moorings. But the liberals had a clever trick up their collective sleeves. Instead of being dogmatic about their heterodox beliefs, they began to put their reservations about Catholic dogma in the form of interrogatives. In this way, they couldn't be accused of rejecting Catholic teaching, but they could certainly put doubt in the minds of people by asking a lot of leading and provocative questions. They were hoping for a ground swell of popular support as they disseminated their historical-critical ideas in all the universities and seminaries of the world. Unfortunately, due to the unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, many in the Catholic Church were ripe to hear their message of dissent.

This brings us back to Fr. Raymond Brown. Brown had an uncanny way of forging his dissent by the use of interrogatives, all under the guise that Scripture was prone to error in its historical details. In one of his most famous and controversial works, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Brown, as did his Protestant counterparts Bultmann, Barth and Tillich before him, questioned whether the resurrection of Christ actually took place with these words: "Are we thereby perpetually committed to the notion held in times past of the biological how of that exaltation, namely a bodily resurrection?"¹¹ He also questioned papal infallibility with this provocative question: "If biblical criticism has qualified the notion of the inerrancy of the Bible, does modern historical study imply that the Roman Catholic notion of the infallibility of Church teaching also has to be qualified?"¹² Brown even questioned the legitimacy of the papacy itself, which he based on his "historical critical" conclusion that Matthew 16's narrative of the events at Caesarea Philippi never actually took place. In the same and other works he questioned the function and identity of apostles, bishops and priests; apostolic succession; the barring of women from ordination; the Eucharist as a sacrifice; the value and authority of Tradition, and Mary's perpetual virginity, all, of course, based on his "historical-critical" approach to Scripture.

Much of Brown's interrogation originated from his resolve that Scripture was prone to error. He writes:

In the last hundred years we have moved from an understanding wherein inspiration guaranteed that the Bible was totally inerrant to an understanding wherein inerrancy is limited to the Bible's teaching of "that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writing for the sake of our salvation."¹³

Brown further documented his belief in an errant Scripture in his book Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, and later summed them up in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, stating: "Scriptural teaching is truth without error to the extent that it conforms to the salvific purpose of God."¹⁴ In other words, if Scripture isn't talking specifically about salvation, it indeed may, and most likely does, contain errors. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, which fortunately was divested of its authority in 1970 by Pope Paul VI, became populated by the same modernistic mind-set as Brown and thus helped spread these new-fangled ideas far and wide.

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