Dr. Kirkpatrick opens the first of these papers with words which sound well— “The aim of the Christian student is truth; and the aim of the Christian teacher is to bring that truth to bear upon human character and life. The Old Testament forms an integral part of the Bible. It was placed in the hands of the Christian Church by its Founder and His Apostles as the record of God's revelation of Himself to His chosen people and the manifold preparation for His own coming; as the source from which instruction in conduct was to be derived, and as the means by which the spiritual life was to be fed. We cannot therefore treat it as any other book: it is sacred ground; reverence is demanded of us as we approach it. But it is no true reverence which would exempt it from the fullest examination by all legitimate methods of criticism” (p. 3). Textual criticism as applied to Scripture has for its aim to set out the very words of the original, and the rejection of every intrusion, omission, or change through the copyist whether unintentional or designed. Such was the recognized task of the orthodox critic from the first; and the MSS., the Versions, and ancient citations furnished the materials which the critic employed to give, in his judgment, the most exact approach to the deposit of faith: a difficult and delicate work, which demanded spiritual discernment at least as much as patient research and multifarious learning. Such is the criticism alone considered “legitimate” till of late.
But this is not “The Higher Criticism,” which as a system is of comparatively recent date, and under cover of literary problems has raised fundamental doubts incompatible with divine inspiration in any real and honest sense. Individuals or parties may have indulged from early days in similar incredulity and on a small scale; but neology did not then spread, being reprobated by men of simpler faith, even if not very intelligent. Nor would Dr. K. dispute this, as one may gather from his page 5: “Now, what is the position of students and teachers of the Bible to-day? They are face to face with a treatment of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, which half, nay, a quarter of a century ago, would have seemed utterly irreverent, subversive of the foundations of the faith; and which still seems to many (and it is not to be wondered at) irreverent and mischievous.”
In a note to page 14 (his last), he acknowledges, not the energy of the Holy Spirit acting on pious and prayerful souls distressed by the revived superstition and infidelity of our day, but “the influence of contemporary methods of study and modes of thought; and, in particular, how modern methods of examining literary and historical documents and the doctrine of development compel us to revise many of our traditional ideas in regard to the Old Testament.” Yes, there you have the impulse which has carried away in its skeptical current the crowd of literary speculators. It is not God's grace, but the spirit of the age, applying the fashionable craze of development without faith or even fear of God in owning His word, but boasting of present-day methods of criticism, where we have no authentic history save what He has given by His servants the prophets, whose limbs they would rend into the galvanized factors of their unbridled imagination. Did not the Lord of glory, the “before Abram came into being I am,” know all the truth about the Bible? Did not the inspiring Holy Spirit? If both declare and sanction the common faith of God's elect against the revolutionary scheme, where and what are the new critics?
The real position of the party represented by these two distinguished leaders in Cambridge and Oxford is, on their own showing, presumptuous to the last degree. It is a conspiracy against the confession of all the Christian martyrs and saints who have lived and suffered for righteousness and the Lord's name for some 1800 years. It is rebellion against the plain yet profound and divinely inspired revelation, which the church of God received admittedly from its Founder, the Truth itself, and through Apostles, assured by Himself of the Holy Spirit's power to guide them into all the truth. During many centuries were prophets of old raised up by God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, children of no faith, but perseveringly addicted to idolatry. They warned Israel from the beginning of their national history; even the greatest of them before they entered on the promised land predicted their ruin for a while, His hiding His face from them because of their abominations, and also His moving them to jealousy with a no-people, and provoking them to jealousy with a foolish people (Deut. 32). And we Christians have the greatest of apostles interpreting these words in Rom. 10:19, as that which Moses said of the rejection of Israel and the present call of the Gentiles; yet looking onward in chap. 11 both to the Gentiles cut off because of their unbelief, and to the restoration of Israel in sovereign mercy, by an everlasting covenant never again to rebel nor be defiled, when Jehovah's sanctuary shall be in their midst for evermore.
It is too evident that these sponsors for the revolt against the Bible, as the Lord and His apostles undoubtedly taught, and the faithful in their measure have accepted with all confidence in Him and them (the foundation on which the church is built), have in no way profited either by the prophecy of Israel's ruin or by the brightness of their glorious recovery, when Christendom falls under the unsparing, judgment of its unbelief in yet richer privilege. But there is another warning still closer and more serious. The same Lord and His apostles solemnly assure us, that the Christian testimony would be corrupted as certainly as the Jewish one had been; that the evil was at work even in the apostolic days, and that so far from being extirpated, it would surely work up to a head of entire revolt from God, the apostasy and the man of sin, the full and foul contrast of the righteous Man who never did but the will of God.
In presence of the many words of God pointing to this awful consummation before the present age ends, it were wise for the leaders and the followers of the new movement to weigh the Lord's question, “When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8.) He goes far beyond the Roman sack of Jerusalem and dispersion of the Jews, and the city trodden down by nations still later till times of nations are fulfilled, which is clearly not yet come. He tells us of signs of sun, moon, and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity, the roar of the sea and rolling waves, men ready to die through fear and expectation of what is coming on the inhabited earth, for the powers of the heavens shall he shaken; and then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. If the moral end for man was his iniquity in crucifying the Messiah, God's Son, He will come as the glorious Son of man to judge mankind and establish the world-kingdom of God which neither the gospel nor the church could do. He alone is competent and worthy (Rev. 11:15); but how overwhelming the judgments whereby the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness!
We know how little the new school cares for traditional views; and there in principle I cannot blame them. But no tradition-monger is so ignorant of prophecy as they. It is well then before they fall into the same destructive criticism as to the New Testament, that they should lay to heart that the Lord's approaching judgment of Christendom as well as of the world generally is the uniform testimony of the apostles and prophets. It is a day of Christ's manifest triumph for faith, but of ruin for unbelief in teacher or taught.
“The night is far spent and the day is at hand” (Rom. 13:12). “Waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:7). “For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not that we would be unclothed but clothed, that the mortal might be swallowed up of life” (2 Cor. 5:4). “For we through the Spirit by faith wait [not for righteousness, being already justified, but] for the hope of righteousness,” i.e. glory with Christ (Gal. 5:5). For God's purpose is to head or “sum up all things in the Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth—in Him in whom we also obtained inheritance,” we being not the heritage, but heirs of God and coheirs with Christ (Eph. 1:9-11). “For our citizenship is in [the] heavens, whence also we await the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior who shall transform” &c. (Phil. 3:20, 21). “When the Christ, our life, is manifested, then shall ye also be manifested with Him in glory” (Col. 3:4).
So we are told that from the very first the Thessalonian believers turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God, and to await from the heavens His Son, whom He raised from out of dead [men], Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath (1 Thess. 1:9, 10). If more were needed, much more could be added in proof, that as tradition has never known or kept up the true faith and hope, so none in Christendom could more thoroughly renounce revelation in this respect than this self, vaunting new party. Who ever heard of so much as one neologist absorbed, as all Christians ought to be, by “the blessed hope,” of any devoted as not of the world to the indisputably primitive and faithful attitude in awaiting Christ's coming as our constant hope? Who can tell us of one new critic separate from the world, enjoying grace, suffering from Christ's reproach and withal filled with joy?
But there is the dark and awful side which follows that hope, the day of the Lord's judging the inhabited earth (Acts 17:31). His day for the everlasting downfall of all man's worldly and fleshly glory (Isa. 2, 1 Thess. 5). It is grievous to say that the New Testament speaks unambiguously on the special guilt of false teachers in Christendom, whether sanctimonious like the traditionalists, or audacious and profane like most of the new pretenders to know the Scriptures better than the Lord and His inspired ambassadors, who in effect make Him and them to err in declaring, for instance, that Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel wrote what they did not write. It is nonsense to talk, as rationalists habitually do, of the superiority of their own day, of modern progress, of new modes of thought and more searching methods of literary and historical investigation; as if God's Word did not stand on ground peculiar to itself, and not therefore to be treated confessedly, “as any other work.”
Inspiration in any proper sense, and allowing for errors of copyists, etc., is essentially superior to the advances of knowledge in material things or in human experience. It is therefore unreasonable to expect that any increase of such knowledge should affect the truth committed to the church; so distinct are the things of man from those of God. As man's spirit knows the things of man, and of the lower creation set under man, so the things of God knows no man but the Spirit of God. Are the leaders of this new movement abroad or at home such as could uprightly say, “Now we received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is of God, that we might know [consciously know] the things freely given to us by God?” I do not allude to the willful disputers of this age, if men of this stamp ever were; but would the few reverent ones avow that they have the anointing Spirit abiding in them, which another apostle declares that the very babes of God's family received from the Holy One? If they would not (and I have sure ground for saying that they venture not), are these, whatever their ability or acquirement, entitled to the least weight where angels would fear to tread? They are as a class restrained by no such scruple; for they have never learned from God their own nothingness in His things; yea, if not renewed and indwelt by His Spirit, that they have only the mind of flesh which is enmity against God.
Hence, because they know not God by His teaching, they shrink from claiming life eternal as a present possession, and have never faced their sins before God so as to know themselves become His righteousness in Christ They talk of His revelation as progressive. Now, the revelation of God is itself, and does not admit of that progress which man boasts. Take the grand intimation of deliverance from the serpent's malicious and deadly power in man's fall. Expressly was it not to be through the merit or virtue of fallen man; it stood in Another. And in this first announcement after sin and death entered, we cannot but see, unless we be blind, that the Deliverer is human because He is the woman's seed, and that He is divine, for He will utterly crush the mighty angelic rebel, the liar and murderer from the beginning. If the Oxford and Cambridge Professors know of a revelation in the O. T. progressive beyond this, who would not hail the discovery with joy?
There was a very different revelation of divine wrath, recorded early in the same book of Genesis, which swept away all mankind, save eight persons, the family of Noah, whom grace preserved for the righteous man's sake who believed. Do they count this progressive as compared with God's announcement of the bruised Deliverer from the coming wrath? It is hard to conceive that any could so reckon who know God or themselves. Again, we have the self-centering pride of man judged at Babel, and the hitherto united race confounded by the difference of languages and nations, but as we learn from Josh. 24 serving other gods. And the God of glory appears to call Abram to Himself from the strange gods of which we then first hear (a call of grace so absolute as to separate him from country, kin, and father's house), the depositary of promise for a seed both fleshly and spiritual (see Rom., Gal., and Heb.), the grand result for heaven and earth being not yet seen. But can even that or its repetition to Isaac and Jacob be rightly deemed progress on the woman's Seed and, after suffering, His triumph over the power of the wicked one?
Then long after, the lawgiving at Sinai, so awe-inspiring and terrific as to make Moses its mediator “exceedingly fear and quake,” was a revelation of God to all Israel which every true Christian accepts literally as recorded in Ex. 19; 20. Is it the fact that the new school are as incredulous of the display at Sinai as of the creation recorded in Gen. 1; 2? Are not their German leaders as scoffingly infidel in regard to both as the French Encyclopædists, T. Paine and C. Bradlaugh? Do the best of the British guides differ at heart, or is it only in decency of tone, whilst equally unbelieving? But as to progressive revelation, was the law at Sinai an advance on the woman's Seed? or even on the promises to Abraham and to his seed? On these the apostle argues with care and energy to show their precedence by 430 years, and the unconditional grace they held out to the believers, in contrast with the law which was added for the sake (not of sins, but) of transgressions until the Seed came to whom the promise was made. Does not the apostle Paul thereby refute this progressive theory? The promises assuredly were the support of faith through the ages; as the law, right, wise and needed in God's ways with man, could only condemn the guilty and destroy all hopes of a standing or escape on that ground.
It is needless to enumerate the divine interventions that studded the history of the chosen nation, which equally refute the progressive assumption. God had taken care that grace on His part should precede law, not only from the lost paradise of Eden but in the world that now is from the call of Abram; and whatever was vouchsafed in fresh revelations only confirmed both the one and the other which met in Christ. Then when the people were ruined and driven out of His land for their idolatry, and the unbelief of the returned remnant to still greater sins and severer punishment rejected His and their Messiah, it was not only revelations from God but God Himself revealed in His Son Jesus our Lord, in His person, His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension to God's right hand and throne in heaven.
This, no doubt, is beyond comparison. It is not promise merely but accomplishment, the ground of God's glad tidings of grace and of Christ's glory, the soul's redemption secured to God's glory, the church united by the Spirit to the Head, in readiness to save the last member of the body for Christ's coming and His subsequent revelation before the universe manifestly put under Him. Does the new school truly believe in this glorious issue as God reveals it? Does it accept in God-fearing simplicity any one of these revelations past, present, or future? To think of progress, since the fullness of the Godhead dwelt and dwells in Christ, is such presumptuous unbelief as to be no less than blasphemy against the necessarily complete and final revelation of God in His person. May they be preserved at least from that revolt! what can one think of any one so deceived by the enemy? Christ is not a divine dealing or a doctrine merely, but a divine person fully revealed for life eternal, redemption, and glory.
Some, we know, speak of their faith in inspiration; and personally one may have clung to hope against fear that the faith might be living under the wretched incubus of their complicated cobweb on cobweb, woven by the brains of Teutonic legend-mongers, without a single solid fact. A most amiable apologist puts it thus—Jehovist¹, J², J³; Elohist¹, E²; J E combination of Jehovistic with Elohistic; D Dh Dp, the author of the Urdeuteronomium with two later redactors; J E D, combination of J E with Deuteronomy; P P¹ P² P³ Px, the author of the priestly code with its later editions (Px=P3 P4 P5 &c.); Rj, the editor who combines J and E; Rd Rd², two authors or editors, the first of whom combines J E with P, contributes to Joshua and Judges, and writes most of Kings, while the second is a later redactor of that work; Rp, the editor who combines J E D with P.