Scientific methodology, which changed the understanding of natural processes, was soon applied to other areas of learning in the nineteenth century. Theologians, specifically, began employing the same principles of investigation to certain accepted convictions to try and arrive at conclusions that were based on evidence rather than on tradition, the authority of the church, or the Bible. The principles of historical criticism which were worked out and applied to religious as well as secular history were that human events occur in the midst of a specific physical and social environment and any institution, even the Church, must be studied as a product of that environment. Historical criticism had its home in Germany. It was the outgrowth of German rationalism, which appeared as an intellectual movement in the universities where the clergy were trained and then in church circles. The German rationalists took pride in their enlightenment and their intellectual processes. They embraced a natural religion, as did the English deists, but they deemed a religion of revelation unnecessary and unreliable. Every miracle and every mystery was subjected to rational thought. Critics tried fitting Scripture into the environment in which it was born.
Impact: What happened, naturally, was that interpretations that did not fit into preconceived notions were deemed “unscientific” and were discarded. Some declared that most of the Bible was not intended for all periods of time. Others tried to show that basic morality was superior to a religion of revelation. Eventually, Genesis and certain New Testament writings were discarded, the miracles and the atonement were denied, Jesus Christ was declared nothing more than a man, and the Bible was simply a product of human minds. In Germany, and later in other parts of the world, sermons became essays on moral or civic duty. Christianity was taken out of the schools and the name of Christ from the hymnbooks. The Life of Jesus by David Strauss, published in 1835, took the position that the narratives of the Gospels were mythical and that the story of Jesus was mainly a product of the imagination. Other lives of Jesus continued to come from the presses of Germany, most of them critical of accepted dogma. By degrees, the conclusions of these men became recognized by most of the leading scholars of English and American theological circles, although they were strenuously opposed by conservatives and only slowly filtered through to the lay mind.