I have been taking Old Testament Introduction, a class that deals with the inspiration, inerrancy, canonicity, and textual criticism of the Old Testament.
For my class project, I decided to study and write on Julius Wellhausen, as many call him, "the father of Old Testament Liberalism."
Here is a sampling:
Julius Wellhausen was born into a Christian home, his father was a Lutheran Cleric that was part of a movement that opposed theological liberalism. By the time that he went to the University of Gottingen, he was already corrupted in his thinking. At Gottingen he studied under famed OT scholar Heinrich Augustus Ewald. As he continued to study he became familiar with Karl Heinrich Graf's theory of Documentary Hypothesis, he writes about this experience:
“It my not be out of place here to refer to a personal experience. In my early student days I was attracted by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourses of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament. Thanks to such aids as were accessible to me, I even consider that I understood tolerably, but at the same time was troubled with a bad conscience, as if I were beginning with the roof instead of the foundation; for I had no though acquaintance with the Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the bsis and postulate of the whole literature. At last I took courage and made my way though Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and even though Knoble’s Commentary to these books. But it was in vain that I look for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetical books. On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the law; it did not bring them any nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing. At last, in the course of a casual visit in Göttingen in the summer of 1867, I learned through Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the Law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledge to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah.”
(Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, (Glouchester, Mass.: Meridian Books, 1973), 4)
Wellhausen opposed the supernatural, he could not and would not believe in the stories of the OT.
Wellhausen, who believes that the first few chapters of Genesis were myth, he writes, “A true myth is never invented; it is handed down. It is not true, but it is honest.” (Prolegomena, 314) On the patriachical history of Israel, he commented, “The materials here are not mythical but national, and therefore more transparent, and in a certain sense more historical.” (Prolegomena, 315)
Wellhausen is the face of OT liberalism, his views on the Documentary Hypothesis, although having sustained much revisions, still are held by many scholars. Yet the damage done by his discrediting of Scripture lives on. However, one cannot but to think about his bias and conviction that lead him through that path.
