I think one can learn a lot that's useful from modern "criticism" and all the various bullsgeschichtes they offer.
But, and it's, you should excuse the expression, a Big But, if you waver for an instant from thinking that God directed, guided, chivvied along, the process from the first story told around a campfire in Padanaram to the closing of the canon at Trent, then you start coming up with your own, new and improved, mo' better version of Scripture. And you rapidly go barking crazy.
I would look at some passage, and my looking would be assisted or encumbered -- hard to tell which -- by all the stuff I learned in Seminary. But I always ended up with, "This here before my eyes is what God, through the Church, gave me as Sacred Scripture. This here, in the context of the Church (as I then understood Church) is where I must look for the Truth, and where I must hope the Truth will show Himself to me and give me what He wants me to preach to His people."
I see now that my thinking that when I was an Episcopalian was one of the hooks God used to lead me finally to think that as a Catholic.
So I would say of your pastor, may God have mercy on Him, that what threatens his soul is not scholarship and criticism but pride, and maybe a little desire to be accepted by the gang he runs with, the gang of scholars. The so-called Higher Criticism provided the tinder, but the fire was lit by the spark of prideful disobedience.
Wow! Just another way God saved my arrogant butt! Alleluia!
I certainly have nothing against scholarship and there is much interesting and illuminating Biblical criticism. But the fundamental view of that particular school, Higher Biblical Criticism and its offshoots (originally a Protestant invention, btw), was that the Scriptures were rather quaint documents that had been systematically either linguistically misunderstood or twisted over the centuries and were really only significant as cultural/historical artifacts. Much of this was actually aimed specifically at cutting apart the Church and the Scriptures, since Protestants had a vested interest in undermining the claims of the Church as the authoritative interpreter of Scripture and, furthermore, in rejecting historical interpretations that showed the Scriptures and the Church as inextricably entwined.
The practical impact of dynamic equivalency in translation, furthermore, was essentially to put even the literal text at the mercy of the “scholars,” many of them with an agenda, who then decided exactly what the “equivalent” (but actually different) text was going to be, based on subjective and even political concerns.
Why this approach became so popular among Catholics in the 60’s is probably related to Vatican II, or at any rate to some of the unfortunate Protestantizing, secularizing “Spirit of Vatican II.” Vatican II itself was the product of certain intellectual currents that were not bad in themselves, but were easily manipulated when the authority of the Church was rejected. And the “Spirit of Vatican II” was all about rejecting the authority of the Church, in every area ranging from doctrine to liturgy to Biblical scholarship.