The credulity of the incredulous is proverbial. When did inspiration enter this extravagant patchwork? Was it with the first or the last? or were all these cobblers inspired? He who cites gravely such speculations from another's scheme tells us that this critical apparatus goes up to the furthest limits as yet reached. He may be assured that so wild an appetite must grow without end. He speaks of the “enormous amount of labor which will be apt to seem wasted;” but such minds as leave God out of labor, “accurate” as they may think, must always waste it. Only he who does God's will abides for eternity; and was anything farther from God's will than this nothingarian quest? He magnifies His word above all His name, and will avenge the insult done to Scripture on all the guilty. He may warn those that add to or take from the things in one book, peculiarly the scorn of erudite unbelief; but His indignation is not limited to that book. It is deplorable to look to any specialists who trust in themselves and each other but not in the word and the Holy Spirit who imparts it, and alas! “our own scholars!” “to decide judiciously.” “Thus saith Jehovah; Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from Jehovah.” May the Christian profit by Israel's danger, a danger never more real than now. It is the precursor of the apostasy (2 Thess. 2:3).
Prophets wrote the O.T. books; prophets authenticated the original drafts, and added as they were led of the Spirit such confirmations at a later date as were called for in the days of the kings, and the still more factious time of the return from captivity when the Jews were subjected to the Persian, Greek, and Roman powers. But the crowning mercy was the presence of Messiah, the Son of God, not only to suffer for our sins but to give to believers understanding to know Him that is True. Hence the all-importance of His pronouncement on the O. T. and promise of the Holy Spirit for the apostles and prophets as to the final scriptures in the tongue of the Gentiles. No moment was so wise and necessary or auspicious. Never was the O. T. so verified and honored, as when the so-called N. T. was to follow, all given before the first century A. D. closed.
For the Lord did strikingly seal the truth of the law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms, not only in the days of His flesh but in His risen state (Luke 24:44). Even His own when raised shall be superior to the prejudice of time and sense and shall know as they are known. Both He and His inspired servants alike bear the testimony of divine authority to all, and particularly to Moses, David, Isaiah, and Daniel, the most assailed by vain and empty sciolists, the last men in the world to trust for origin, date, literary structure, character, or meaning of scripture, because their system does its worst to unsettle for themselves and the faithless world godly heed, and find pleasure in doubt. As a Christian student, I may be allowed to say that I have been tolerably familiar with the arguments of the new school long before these Professors of Oxford and Cambridge, and I fail to recall a single service of value any one of them has rendered to revealed truth. How could it be otherwise? since it is the essence of rationalism to deny God's authority and mind in scripture as a whole, not one of them can rightly estimate any of its parts. Is anything more “settled,” as the first article of their unbelief, than that there is not nor can be for most of them true miracle or prophecy? Yet every Christian knows that scripture itself is both miraculous and prophetic, to say nothing of the many miracles and prophecies it attests.
But the extraordinary and distracting phenomenon presents itself of a crowd of speculators who still claim the name of Christian and busy themselves, not on the Koran or the Hindu Vedas or the Parsee Avesta, but on the O. T., and represent “an enormous amount of labor, which will be apt to seem wasted” if on fabrications and priestly impostures. Does it not rather seem the homage which infidelity pays to the truth they dislike, dread, and fain would destroy, yet in vain and, alas to their own destruction, unless they repent? It is the more extraordinary that the people whom the critics despise as so prejudiced transmitted to us as sacred those very prophecies which denounced their disobedience, corruption, and idolatries, and predicted their consequently present anomalous state. “For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod and teraphim.” Who but an infidel can deny that Hos. 3:4 is fulfilled? Which of the new school believes that his ver. 5 will as surely be to the joy of all the earth? “Afterward shall the children of Israel [mark, Israel] return and seek Jehovah their God and David their king; and shall come with fear to Jehovah and to his goodness at the end of the days.” Blinded as the Jews are judicially, they are not so unbelieving as the neologists.
Let us now come to the earliest charge of “false science” in Gen. 1 laid by the Lady Margaret's Prof. of Divinity, Cambridge. “It was once as easy as it was natural to regard the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the way in which the universe was brought into being; now that we have read the records of the rocks, and learned some fragments of the mystery of the heavens, we know that it cannot be regarded as literal history” (p. 4). Dr. Driver (Regius Prof. of Hebrew, Oxford) is if possible more curt and peremptory (p. 52), and alludes to Gen. 1 as “this imperfect and in many respects false science.” Is such language becoming from professing Christian teachers about God's word? It is calm and deliberate, and therefore far more guilty than from an avowed enemy of revelation. Now I distinctly affirm that these two Professors do not understand the chapter. There is no collision whatever between it and the ascertained facts of geology. It is ignorance in both to affirm any such contradiction. Room is left for the geologic ages of science, with the strata and their fossils before the six days; but scripture is silent thereon. There is therefore no excuse for the evil insinuation, invented by infidel scientists, and repeated by these D.Ds.
The chapter starts with the grand truth of creation, of which many geologists really are as ignorant now as the ancient philosophers of every age and school: a truth which idolatry of old as willingly ignored as modern science in its desire to forget and exclude God. From neither was it learned. “By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear.”
Thus it was, even before Moses wrote, known from Adam downward among the faithful. And from Rom. 1:19, 20 it appears that creation was not doubted for a long while afterward. For we do not hear of idolatry till after the deluge. But when Moses wrote by God's inspiration, details were added of the deepest import, far beyond the general truth. What was the testimony on which faith rested? Mainly and literally on these opening words of the Bible: a truth subversive of heathenism and immeasurably nobler, higher, deeper, and more spiritually instructive than all the discoveries of astronomy, geology, and other sciences put together.
No science, ancient or modern, ever taught this great truth, any more than later Gentile tradition. The heathen oracles assumed and gave out falsehood on eternal matter which issued in atheism and pantheism, or what Gibbon, ever heartless, called the “elegant mythologies of Greece and Rome,” the basest and most demoralizing of all, reducing their divinities to very wicked males and females like themselves. Here the oracles of all science are dumb now as ever. For science as science knows nothing beyond its own subject matter and cannot speak aright of God. Hence men the most disposed to cry up the triumphs of science are compelled to allow its total failure in this respect. J S Mill (Logic, 8th ed., 398), owns that “we can give no account of the origin of the permanent causes themselves” [such as the earth's rotation]. So H. Spencer says of science, “It conducts us to a blank wall by a method which is wholly powerless to penetrate the mystery which lies behind.” How strange that the professedly Christian teachers should not acknowledge where geology and every other science failed! Moses was inspired to communicate this fundamental revelation, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth": a sublime truth, stated in as noble simplicity, to begin the Bible, as God alone knew and made it known through His servant by the Holy Spirit.
Ver. 2 is most important in its way: for it reveals without limitation of date, yet as a subsequent fact, that the earth was made waste and empty, with darkness upon the face of the deep. Not only does the expression of the Hebrew verb in the first clause lend itself to this (for so is it used often even in this chapter as elsewhere); but Isaiah 45:18 is to my mind decisive in its favor. “For thus saith Jehovah that created the heavens; He is God; that formed the earth and made it; He established it, He created it not a waste; He formed it to be inhabited.” He did not create it in the chaotic state, but for good and wise reasons threw it into that state. We can readily understand that only so could man when it was inhabited get at the coal, the marbles, and the metals, etc., so useful afterward. For as the chapter itself shows that acts of creating followed the origination, so there may have been of destructive and temporary breakup as the strata sufficiently indicate to the geologist. It is here that the geologic times would come in, but this could be no matter of revelation. That science like others was left for man. But room is left for it, before the days of getting ready the earth as it was to be for Adam and his race. These begin with ver. 3; and “the evening and the morning” point to literal days, so suited to and connected with man on the earth, not with the vast periods when other conditions prevailed, and man was not. And this is corroborated by the sabbath that followed man's creation, which a prolonged geologic age would not.
Is it not plain that this is the genuine meaning of Gen. 3? Does it not refute the hasty misinterpretation, not confined to mere men of science, but common among the theologians of Christendom who read this scripture without sufficient waiting on God to apprehend its comprehensive scope and the exact bearing of its distinct parts? Yet not a few have thus seen and taught for more than the half century of a modern Germanic) irruption, which may damage romancists, but is powerless against the word of God. British Darwinism, like the kindred metempsychosis of Lamarck, is no doubt set aside as an unbelieving dream by the distinct speeder. attributed to God's will in Gen. 1 to both the vegetable and the animal kingdoms with which the human race is conversant. Yet there are men of science apart from faith who refuse the fashionable craze which undermines the fixed laws that God has thus impressed, without which science could not be, with a decision which puts to shame these higher critics so ready to believe and not God. Development to that extent is absurd and would destroy science. What scheme more unworthy of God or even man ever was invented by his feverish brain?
Take only the swamping of the human race with the brute in contrast with the affectingly solemn and self-evidently true place assigned to man, as the chief ruler of creation in Gen. 1, and in moral relation to God as well as the creature in Gen. 2 where we hear of Jehovah Elohim inbreathing his soul alone of all beings on the earth. Is this nothing? or is it “false science?” The fact is that it is not science at all; and the exactest science could not attest it. It is the revealed light of God, which is the truth, and immeasurably above all science. And one can only grieve over professing Christians beguiled by such dreams; but we must be indignant that they claim to be Christian ministers, Being that they slight the scriptures though divinely inspired, and bow to the passing delusions to which scientists are notoriously liable like others. Never has any savant of any land or tongue produced an account of creation to compare with Gen. 1, still less with its profound and necessary supplement in Gen. 2.
Gross ignorance of and positive fall from the light of Christianity appear on Dr. K.'s own showing: “Times of change must be times of trial, They call for faith, courage, patience, sympathy—for faith that God is still teaching His Church as He taught it of old, πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως, by divers portions and in divers manners' (Heb. 1:1); for courage to go forward trustfully, following the light of the reason which God has given us,” etc. (pp. 4, 5). Now the scripture cited contradicts the sense for which it is cited. Of old God spoke thus to the fathers in the prophets; at the end of these days He spoke to us in a Son. There had been revelations from God on a deliverer, on the deluge, on promise, on law, on a kingdom in Israel, on Gentile dominion; prophecies fully while Israel so existed; prophecies sufficiently when Israel was Lo-ammi. Now it is Himself revealed in the person and redemption work of His Son: a revelation absolutely perfect, of which it is not only false but blasphemous to think that it admits of development. Those who pretend to progress after this are apostates, even if they call themselves Christians. Nor is it the great apostle only who taught so, but the Gospel of John (1:18), and emphatically his First Epistle (2:24-27), as also 2 John 3. Equally does Dr. K. offend when he substitutes for the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit the characteristic power of the Christian and of the church, “following the reason which God has given us;” as if we were no better off in this respect than the most benighted heathen! Could any one ask clearer proof that Higher Criticism leads even its ablest guides into the ditch of infidelity?
Next we are told whereby these moderns trust to subvert not merely what the church has believed for many centuries, but what the Lord and the apostles taught of the scriptures. 1, Textual criticism, which is in no way their province. 2, Linguistic criticism, which surely belongs to competent Christian students. 3, Their pet “higher criticism,” the most visionary attempt to imagine a variety of interpolators instead of the alleged author. 4, Historical criticism, sought to be distinguished from the higher, it is hard to say why. 5, Archæology and comparative religion. In these and other ways they hope to revolutionize men's thoughts of the Bible, and urge the clergy to understand their methods, to estimate its results, and to consider how these affect their teaching.
Now in the face of this conspiracy of soi-disant experts to shake the O. T. to its center and cast the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets avowedly into a sea of uncertainty, we have the sure fact of infinite comfort to every believer that the incarnate Son of God ruled the divine authority of these very scriptures, and that, risen from the dead, when prejudices disappear from the weakest of saints, the Lord authenticated them as testimonies to Himself in the flattest contradiction of modern criticism. So did the Holy Spirit sent forth from heaven from Him glorified, and this both to such ecclesiastical rulers as Timothy and Titus, and with no less freedom and fullness to the mass of the faithful in the Epistles, remarkably anticipating the skeptical attacks on Moses and David, Isaiah and Daniel, by declaring each the writer of the books attributed to them, as for instance of the latter part of Isaiah no less than the former. “He [Moses] wrote of Me.”
To faith this is and ought to be the end of controversy. Splitting such investigation into higher and historical or others makes no difference worthy to speak of; nor does calling it “literary” mitigate the awful presumption of giving the lie to the Son of God, or of the unbelief that attributes ignorance of what must have been known to a divine person. Think of Him who is to judge quick and dead, and who searches the reins and heart of every child of man, not knowing who wrote the Pentateuch! Think of those who call themselves Christians and Christian teachers denying to His face that Moses wrote of Him, and seeking by all sorts of vain perversions to make it seem a patchwork, contributed by a rabble of nobody-knows who; and this last pretended largely to be Jehovah's words spoken to Moses for His people, yet designated as “the God-given record of God's special revelation of Himself through Israel in preparation for the Incarnation, and as such of permanent significance for the Christian Church” (p. 7)! Is not this to betray with a kiss?
That the world hearkens to these men in our day, beyond the old Encyclopædists or individual freethinkers who preceded them, is true. They are, therefore, encouraged to dare greater things. Believers on the contrary are all the more distressed, both for the dishonor done to God's word, and for their guilt who are not only misled but misleaders. In 1 Tim. 4 the apostle referred to the ascetic and legend-loving spirit which early led some to apostatize from the faith; but in 2 Tim. 3 he speaks of a later and more prevalent departure from God, when men having a form of piety should deny its power, and advance in evil. In chap. 4 he says that the time shall be when they will not bear sound teaching, but according to their lusts will heap up to themselves teachers, having an itching ear; and they will turn away their ear from the truth, and will turn aside to fables. In fine, as he wrote in 2 Thess. 2:3, the apostasy will come, the rejection of Christian truth by Christendom itself. Can any means be conceived more suited to bring this about than the modern criticism? Their denial and despising of prophecy will blind them so much the more to the godless movement. For this is what will characterize the consummation of the present evil age, and bring on not only God's preparatory dealings in judgment, but the Son of man's appearing in the clouds of heaven to trample His enemies under His feet. The universal establishment of God's world-kingdom follows (Rev. 11:15; 19; 20).
In p. 10 Dr. K. admits that “The results of literary [or higher] criticism are at best only probable, though in many cases the probability amounts to practical certainty (!); but literary criticism has been pushed to the wildest extremes, as for instance when we are told that we have no genuine writings of the prophet Jeremiah except,” etc. Now this discloses in its confession what we know from the entire spirit and language and aim of the school, that, like Romanism, modern criticism has no divine faith. Its results are at best, only “probable.” The school of literary criticism comes to the same result in principle as the school of ecclesiastical tradition. The faith of both turns out to be without absolute truth to rest on. Such only is scripture, the word of God who cannot lie. This was what Cardinal Newman laid down in his Grammar of Assent when a full-blown Romanist, confounding the church probability men must act on with the certainty of a divine testimony to faith. As begotten of God I believe Him because He has written, and believe neither the church on the one hand (for how often has it erred?), nor these modern critics who believe in man's disproof of what the Son of God authenticates, as well as the apostles and prophets inspired by the Holy Spirit. If as a Christian I am bound to reject the church intervening between God and my soul as to His revelation, how much more to reject men who evince their unspirituality by their ignorance of His mind in scripture, and flee to Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and other heathen sources of the flimsiest kind for that external knowledge of which they never weary of boasting.
On his three points wherein modern criticism, he says, affects theology, we need not dwell now: the mode of revelation, the character of prophecy, and the nature of inspiration. The use of “revelation” is a blind; for, in the growth they contend for, God is really excluded, as really as in the imaginary development of creation with which it is compared. In both the believer owns divine design—in scripture, and even in creation defaced as it is by sin. But it is an utter mistake that the Lord taught us anything inconsistent with its divine authority. He was, as befitted His person, introducing the heaven's light with His Father's name for those destined to the Father's kingdom; but He insists in the plainest terms on its divine authority for God's end in it. “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to complete. For verily I say to you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass away till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments shall be called least in the kingdom of the heavens; but whosoever shall do and teach them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of the heavens” (Matt. 5:17-19). If God spoke in the scriptures, woe to those who say I must judge them first! His word will judge them at the last day. It is not so that any man was ever brought to God; he believes God and is blessed; as those who set up to first pronounce on all the canon are going the direct road to lose their own souls. The enemy lures these to hope that the way of “modern criticism” is to have “our theology” liberated, deepened, and strengthened. The more they seem to succeed in their blind glorying in man, the sooner will fall divine retribution on their inventions against the word which abides forever. You might challenge the entire multitude to produce a single truth of God which the higher criticism has rescued from the darkness of unbelief. What future can rationalism have but judgment for despising God's word and God's Son? Unbelief may destroy as far as God allows, but can produce nothing.
It seems bold to speak of “prophecy” as Dr. K. does; for he knows well that scarce any conclusion is more “settled” and accepted by the great majority of his school than that there is neither prophecy nor miracle in any real sense. A few like himself admit prediction to a small extent. But all reduce it more or less to what the apostle Peter stigmatizes as of “private interpretation” i.e. its own particular solution, instead of each one forming part of the divinely given scheme of predictive testimony to God's glory in Christ, which is to sum up in Him, the head, all creation in heaven and on earth (Eph. 1:10). Is any one of his company, even of those who shrink from applying the knife to the N. T. as they do to the O.T. really living with that divine purpose of glory for Christ before his soul as his living hope? Is one of them truly waiting for His coming again to reign over the universe heavenly and earthly to God's glory?
(Continued)