Dialogues on the Essays and Reviews

John Nelson Darby's Dialogues on the Essays and Reviews is a response to Essays and Reviews, the 1860 volume in which seven Anglican writers, most of them clergymen, applied the methods of German historical criticism to Scripture and to the doctrines of the Church of England. The book caused a storm in England, drew condemnations from the bishops, and led to ecclesiastical prosecutions. Darby, the Irish-born former Anglican curate who had become the leading voice among the Brethren, took up the controversy in 1863. He chose a dialogue form, setting out the contributors' arguments through conversation between speakers rather than answering them in a continuous essay.

Darby's central contention is that the Essayists' method defeats itself. If Scripture is to be tested at the bar of human reason and measured against the assumptions of the age, then reason, not God, becomes the final authority, and revelation survives only in whatever form reason permits. Against this he argues that the Scriptures carry their own authority and that the believer receives them as the word of God by faith, not as a conclusion reached by inquiry. He presses the point on the Essayists' handling of inspiration, miracle, and prophecy, and he contends that what remains once these are explained away is a religion with no need of a Savior who actually came, died, and rose. He also turns his attention to the Church of England itself, arguing that a national establishment which could house such writers within its ministry had shown how far an organized, mixed communion had drifted from the truth it professed. That ecclesiological argument belongs to Darby's wider conviction that the visible church had fallen into ruin, and the controversy gave him fresh occasion to press it.

The book has lasting value as a period document and as a clear instance of the conservative evangelical reply to Victorian criticism. It shows how the questions of biblical authority and the place of reason in faith were first fought out in English, in terms that later debates over higher criticism and modernism would repeat. Readers will also find in it the characteristic features of Darby's thought, including his sharp dependence on Scripture, his suspicion of ecclesiastical institutions, and his insistence that Christ, not human inquiry, is the ground of certainty.

Who should read this: Students of nineteenth-century religious controversy, readers interested in Darby and the early Brethren, and anyone studying how conservative Protestants answered biblical criticism will find it useful. It is not for readers seeking a measured introduction to the Essayists' own arguments, nor for those wanting a devotional work; the style is dense, polemical, and tied closely to a dispute that most readers will need some background to follow.