It's Friday, November 7, 2025.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Modern liberal approaches to Scripture really are very modern.

Most of them are dated back to the 19th century. A recent headlines affords

us the opportunity to remind ourselves of what happened, why it matters, and what's at stake.

Modern liberal approaches to scripture really did emerge in Germany in the 19th century,

especially in the context of the German university. Modern biblical criticism, as it was known,

was based upon the critique or understanding of scripture that was claimed to come from a scientific

perspective, not a believer perspective, not a confessional perspective, not a perspective that saw

the Bible as the word of God, but rather in the name of science, a new approach to

scripture that looked to the text of Scripture, both the Old and New Testament, simply as a

human text. And what happened from that, of course, was that early liberal approaches to

Scripture particularly undermined the integrity of the Old Testament. And of course, you see this

beginning in the creation accounts that are found in Genesis.

Those were taken apart. The Old Testament was subjected, particularly the Pentateuch,

to a multi-source theory with J.E., P. and D.

The Vellhausen thesis, as it was known, the approach was to turn the scripture into a human book that could be read

just like any other human artifact and taken apart the same way that you would take apart any other human

text. And of course, this was also tied to liberal theology, which arose in the same place,

at the same time, gaining momentum. So you have Rulov Boutman, for instance, fame New Testament

scholar, very liberal. His program was demythologization. And you could just hear that. And by the way,

Germans love compound words. Demothologization. He meant reading the New Testament with the lens

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