The Bible and the ages

Front matter

SS SS ae pao Se eS SS

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AN OF PRINCE) ae Ye 30 1930

Contents

INTRODUCTION .

AGE OF CREATION ANTEDILUVIAN AGE .

POSTDILUVIAN AGE .

Introduction

HE truth and appositeness of the canonical Scriptures are absolute values of revelation; but mere eulogies passed upon the Book are little to the point of validating its claims or verifying its statements. Reverent, but courageous and painstaking, methods must be employed in Bible study; and especially so since in our day criticism, which is a legitimate science, and Bible interpretation, which is the means of appropriating specific doctrines and teachings, have been plagued by a species of modernism bold in asseveration, and by a type of fundamentalism reckless to the point of presumption. The one, in its effort to unduly appraise the results of science, has betrayed the superior claims of religion; while the other, in mistaken zeal for the letter of religion, has rejected scientific conclusions which are of the nature of Christian evidences.

These extremes of discussion and interpretation do not account wholly for the tenets of the schools sponsoring them. Degrees of soundness are to be found with both; but the student constantly must have in mind the nearness of each extreme. To handle, in any form, the religious literature of today is to meet the phrasings and fallacies of familiar antagonisms. On the one hand, the party cry is insistent for literalism in interpretation; while on the other, scholastic alignment is often arrogant and arbitrary. Conservatism must seek a middle ground for the going of its feet. Its recourse must be to the repositories of testimony; for not only is there found in the oracles of revelation abundant proof of trustworthiness; but the Giver of the oracles Himself has provided a transcript of them at the hands of the ages. Next to the Word itself, this transcript challenges attention. Herein befalls the double quest for truth.

Revelation thus not only makes appeal to its own phenomena; but, likewise, to contemporaneous records and to the certifications of science. A burden is . put upon reason to test these out. In all ages, theology has been the first and finest of the sciences; it was never more so than in our own day. In all the schools of Christendom theology takes precedence in discussion. Perhaps it is the mastery of the theological ideal that has begotten the critical confusion of more recent decades. Mechanically, oftentimes, men have responded to the impulsions of their theme, affecting novelty and adventure within those awful pales where angels fear to tread. Indeed, careful inquiry probably would show that the critical debacles of the past hundred years, especially those which have vexed the realm of Bible proof, came about through the experimentations of men who felt compelled to write books to maintain their professorial individuality. Thus the letter and spirit of revelation have been embarrassed by a smear of printer’s ink.

Nor can the mantle of charity be made to cover the charge of insincerity brought against a large section of this school. From within comes the accusation that some modernists, in their desire to appear rationalistic, have left off being religious. Between the ethical and spiritual apathies that spring from this source, and opposing diversions of uncorrected enthusiasm, the religious thought of the time is largely without centrality or objective. “Adventurous ” is the word which sundry pragmatists have appropriated to themselves and their cause. Conservatism might profitably concentrate against this boldness; but there is a better, because a more effective, way, which is appeal to the Book itself, and to a concurrent testimony whose records multiply with the suns.

The phrase, “ Back to Christ,” variously has been made a party cry by adventurous theologians. Under pretext of conformity, the entire miraculous and revelatory antecedency of the Old Testament has been discarded; and thus despite has been done to the New. Any effort to return to Christ that ignores or discounts the Old Testament canon is either lacking in sincerity, or will encounter insurmountable obstacles in the way of its going. The Scriptures are a unit; and as those of whom they earliest treat were not made perfect without us, so also we are complete only with them. There is one body in which one Spirit has dwelt since the beginning. If the Old Testament fails, then the New Testament becomes impotent, impossible.

A chief cause of defection from Gospel faith has been a discrediting criticism against the Old Testament. The stories of world origins in Genesis, the creation of woman, the serpent and the fall, the flood, Jonah, and else, have been made stumbling-blocks over which thousands have fallen into the slough of despond. Deliverance can come only through a return to the facts and doctrines of the evangel as a whole. The appeal must be from faith disturbed to faith composed; from science suborned and misapplied to science - emancipated and made reverent. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a continuity which ramifies the revelation of both the Old and the New Testament. Until this continuity has secured recognition through its proof tests, providentially assigned to reason, faith must continue to be exposed to the onsets of an alien criticism.

The whole issue of Bible criticism now becomes a matter of evidence. Speculation and hypotheses have lost their place in positive theology. Up to less than one hundred years ago, the evidences of Bible truth centred in literature and history. This testimony was collateral and comparative. The new evidence is scientific, being derived chiefly from the fields of geology and archeology, preponderantly from the latter; though during the past century and a half, a period particularly influenced by rational criticism, geology, strictly defined, has been brought to agreement with the cosmology of Genesis.

As an inspired history, and a body of revealed doctrines, the Bible has not remained unprofited from the criticism of the past. It is debtor to the learning of scholars, and to those critics of both the lower and the higher schools to whom criticism has been as another dispensation. But in withstanding the onsets of pragmatism, the Bible has had to wait through cycles of definition and controversy; while the evidential results coming to it through contemporaneous science have been instant and cumulative.

At the outset of this treatise, we are proceeding to translate the record of geology in support of the cosmology of Genesis; as also, within the lines of a continuous plan of Bible interpretation, we shall develop the voices of history and fact, with other relationships, old and new, especially those of the monuments and archeological remains in general. Neither scholars nor laymen have assessed the true value of geology as a proof of Scripture statement. Scholarship too often has shunned not only the implications of geology, but also the plain facts of its record; while the laity has feared and distrusted what geology might finally bring forth. The true “source” of the early sections of Genesis is to be looked for in the book of the rocks. This we have tried to show.

The sequences of history as being, in their turn, corroborative of Scriptural truth and statement are self-evident, and need no disquisition to set them in their office. This genius of history is illustrated in the reply made to Frederic the Great by his chaplain. “Herr Chaplain,” asked the king, “ will you give me a concrete proof of the truth of the Holy Scriptures? ” “The Jews, your Majesty, the Jews,” was the laconic and sufficient reply. But even history must be carefully assessed if it is to yield its best results in the way of testimony.

The significance of archeology as an instrument of criticism is enhanced in the all but inexhaustible possibilities of its output. Professor R. A. S. Macalister, former Director of the Palestine Exploration Fund, in his A Century of Excavations in Palestine, while revealing the glories of the task already accomplished, shows that the richest treasures of charismatic antiquity hid in the soil of the Holy Land remain to be uncovered. It is safe to predict that there is not a passage in the Old Testament carrying a relationship to history that, finally, will not be accounted for in a more or less effective approach of archeology. ‘The certitude of archeology already has overturned the bases of pragmatism, and has shown many of its boldest and most confident conclusions to rest upon falsely assumed premises.

The village ruins and sepulchres of the highlands of Judea and Ephraim, the habitats of the writing prophets, remain yet to be examined. Even the heaps about the holy places at Jerusalem still, for the most part, hold their ancient secrets. The Valley of Esdraelon, in whose heart lay the tragedy-scarred field of Armageddon, is flecked over with tells, ready to reward the well-directed pick and spade of the archeologist. The lower plain of Jordan, including the western borders of Moab and the region about the historic oasis of Engeddi invite investigation. Indeed, under Dr. Kyle, the plain of the Jordan and the shallow waters of the Dead Sea about the peninsula of Lizan, have been examined with satisfactory, even priceless, results.

Outside of Palestine, but carrying rich promise of ancient Bible evidence, is the whole region of middle and upper Syria, lying eastward, westward, northward and southward from the Amorite city of Aleppo. It is my belief that in the ruins of this region are to be retrieved certain proofs of a most ancient monotheism, in keeping with the:claims made in the antediluvian and early postdiluvian records of Genesis. Also here are hid the secrets of the earliest separate Semitic migrations. Here will be settled the relationship of the Babylonians to the general Semitic stock, a matter later to be reviewed in this volume. The results of unfinished work at Ur, in Mesopotamia, the birthland of Abraham, and at Shechem, the earliest Palestine residence of that patriarch, suggest that, eventually, we shall be in possession of astonishing information scarcely more than hinted at in the canonical Scriptures. In this way, archeology has travelled so fast that it has left higher criticism behind, to fall into a slow but enduring ruin after the generation of its present day anhangers have died of inanition.

Not alone the direct, but the indirect, testimony of archeology has been of surpassing value in building up Christian evidences. Indeed, even the indirect proof of archeology has been of more general value than most of the major evidences distrained from criticism, For instance, to continue with the patriarch Abraham, tablets retrieved from the general region between Babylon and Ur, and, circumstantially, of the twentieth century B. c., tell of an Abraham, who leased land, hired an ox, paid rent, and travelled in a wagon from Babylon to Palestine. This was not the patriarch Abraham, the son of Terah; but the tablet stories are convincingly suggestive of the value of the patriarchal history. In the same general neighbourhood, in the age allotted to the patriarch, there did live an Abraham, who was shepherd or farmer, and who travelled from the Euphrates to Palestine in the same manner, but not for the same reason, as did his more illustrious namesake.

_ At Shechem, in 1926, were uncovered two cuneiform clay tablets of the sixteenth century B. c., narrowly missing the period of Jacob’s residence there, which account for transfers of grain and possibly of sheep (one of the tablets is a fragment), both in line with the contract made by Jacob with Hamor, the father of Shechem, for an extensive land purchase, for one hundred pieces of silver, the valuation of one hundred lambs.

Direct archeological proofs of Scripture fact are numerous, and grow more numerous each year. In this line stands the black obelisk of Shalmaneser, which makes contact with Israelitish history in the reign of Jehu; the Moabite Stone, which connects with that history in the reign of Omri and Ahab; Sargon’s half-erased inscription touching the fall of Samaria; the Siloam inscription; the Tel el Amarna tablets; and probably now, the uncovered altar of Jacob (El-elohe- Israel) at Shechem.

Egypt is rich and promising in Bible contacts. There is little, if any, doubt in the minds of Egyptologists that the mummy of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, Rameses II., meets the gaze of every tourist who goes into the Bulac Museum at Cairo. The ruins of Tahpanes, the Egyptian castle referred to in Jeremiah 43:8 ff., was uncovered by Petrie in 1883-4. It was to this castle that Jeremiah became an unwilling refugee, when a remnant of his countrymen fled thither after the final fall of Jerusalem. The excavator was able to identify the very pavement on which Jeremiah placed stones, or tiles, in symbolizing the judgment of Jehovah which he was directed to denounce against the men of Judah.

Exodus 1:11 tells of the building by Pharaoh of the store cities of Raamses and Pithom. In 1883, the veteran Egyptologist, Edouard Naville, uncovered the sites of these ancient grain repositories, demonstrating that they were constructed of bricks of Nile clay or mud; and also that in some series they had been mixed with straw, while in others they were without such reinforcement; thus strongly corroborating the elemental facts of the Mosaic story. Naville also developed evidence that these cities were not for indwellers, but solely for the laying up of foodstuffs and the bringing together of the trophies of Asiatic wars. The sites were on the extreme northern border of the land. Numerous statues and other Pharonic tokens were found there. There is not a more conclusive testimony to antiquity than this. The Old Testament abides in verity.

But by no means do the proofs of archeology slight the letter of the New Testament. The identification of the synagogue at Nazareth; the uncovered fundaments of the one at Capernaum; the identified pool of Bethesda at Jerusalem; certainty as to the grot of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and as to the now generally accepted sites of Golgotha and Gethsemane, indicate the course that science is taking to make real the memory and knowledge of the Son of Man. The New Testament archezology of Palestine will be, when its record is fully recovered, the Fifth Gospel.

This reflection suggests that, before turning to the main body of this discussion, I should advert to an influence which has become noteworthy in theological circles in this country, its chief centre being in the metropolis. So considerable has this influence become that it has assumed something of the importance of a school. As a system, its effect is to generally discredit the Scriptures. It particularly distresses faith in the New Testament, though it began by deleting the facts and doctrines of the Old. It is a left over, a transition from the older form of higher criticism. By it the Christology of the New Testament, evidenced and realized in the Virgin Birth, the Godhead testimony of the Galilean miracles, the Blood Atonement, the Bodily Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Eternal Session of Christ the Son at the Father’s right hand, has been reduced to a subjectivism, varying in nebulosity with the consciousness of the individual tester. Beaten on the field of both textual and historical criticism, this remnant, impressive, it must be allowed, has taken refuge in the dogma of human selfsufficiency, the apotheosis of scientific, social and behaviouristic law, which makes the world its own judge and saviour. The Gospels lie wrecked in its wake.

The interpretation of the call, “ Back to Christ,” sometimes sounded by this school, becomes a travesty of serious reasoning. Returned to the letter of the New Testament record, it crassly and instantly denies what is by far the most important articles of Christian belief, the Godhead of our Lord and the miraculous history and power of the evangel.

The call, “ Back to Christ,” if sincere, is to end in the letter of the Scriptures. It is susceptible of but one interpretation, namely, the acceptance of the doctrinal fulness and the Pentecostal experience of the evangel, “‘ the actual oneness of Christ with God, and, as a consequence of that oneness, His taking upon Himself the sins of humanity, and by His divine mediation washing them away.” This Christward return must embrace all that is written in the Gospels and the Epistles concerning the divine Birth, Personality and Godhood of Jesus the Christ, “in whom were hid the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.” But this metropolitan collusion has made the Gospels a hodge-podge of fondness and subjectivism, and turned the Galilean into a Know-nothing, a divine Nobody, an alien in the universe which He Himself created.

A manifesto of this influence which has gained recent notoriety puts into the mouth of the Son of God these words: ‘‘ This is indeed a great universe. We never imagined anything like it when I was here (in Galilee).” Then it adds: “ If we could keep the Master talking with us about metaphysical adjustment between religion and the new world view, we might make quite a modernist of Him.” How shall this be characterized? The civility of debate forbids the use of the merited word; but it is written in the Book. What becomes of “the record which God gave of His Son?” What becomes of “ Jesus that is called Christ? ” It is Anti-Christ.

This manifesto demands “ an intellectual endeavour to harmonize our religious thinking with the new world view that science has brought.” The answer to this is, that science has brought no new view of the world that already does not harmonize with religious thinking as sanely related to the Bible. Instead of accepting the great facts and teachings of Scripture, which history and science have validated, and which fall within their realm, the cry is raised against miracles, which belong to a realm of fact and potency of which science, in the nature of the case, has no knowledge and can never bring to issue. All that science knows, all that science can prove, finds an answer in the canonical Scriptures; but the higher course of revelation lies along levels forever out of the reach and sight of science, when even at the height of its most exact conclusions. If there be nothing transcendent in the realm of religious thought; if there be nothing that is miraculous; nothing that outrides the laws of physical force, then the tables of the Commandments are no more than the multiplication table, and our dreams of future felicity and immortality are but striations on brains that are not different in substance and output from lumps of radium; for, assuredly, these, immortality and a future felicity, are miracles of the highest and most enduring order. So also is the soul; and so the mind, in its last definition. Of these the Scriptures are the explication and the pledge.

But, again, this manifesto says: “A generation’s religion must make peace with its knowledge.” What knowledge? Whose knowledge? That of Einstein, H. G. Wells, or Voliva? The choice is open. But are not the Scriptures knowledge, and still the best and highest which has ever reached us? Whither shall we go? to whom shall we turn? Suppose the reformers of the sixteenth century, Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Myconius and the rest had made peace with the scientific knowledge of their day, as against their religion, where now would religion be? Indeed, where would science be? Science then was an admixture of alchemy, nominalism, relativities and neo-Platonism. St. Paul is justly esteemed the interpreter of Christianity to the ages. Suppose he had made peace with contemporaneous scientific knowledge; with Gnosticism; with the syncretisms of Ephesus, where would Christianity be? Again, where would science be? Where, indeed, would civilization be? In St. Paul’s day, there were as proud and confident pragmatists as today; but their conclusions were not knowledge in any true or dependable sense. Fifty years from now much of our science will seem as impossible to our posterity as the science of Abelard and Paracelsus now seems impossible to us. Long before the century shall have passed, the glamorous knowledge that now so obsesses this metropolitan group, and upon which it stakes its disregard of the written Scriptures, will dissolve and reintegrate into another form, and to another end.

But equally destructive with the Christological heresies of the school referred to above is the very modern conclusion concerning sin. A representative statement of this conclusion is to the effect that the phrase, “ forgiveness of sins,” a thought which meant much to the people of a former generation, has lost its significance and relevancy in our times. Had this been a voice deploring what all, too sadly, must recognize as true, it had carried a force of conviction and correction. But it came as a silent, if not positive, endorsement of that which accounts for the canker of modernism at the heart of a wide section of the Church today. The ‘“ adventurous ” subjectivism which has stripped from the Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of God, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,’ finds it easy, nay, necessary, to eliminate: ‘‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” Self-controlled lips, indeed, may go on repeating the formula from Sabbath to Sabbath; but a lying will has counted the whole canon of Scripture to be but a “ scrap of paper,” and has given the universe of spiritual things over to bewildered minds and stumbling guides.

II

THE AGE OF CREATION r | “HE Bible is a purposeful identification of the origin and continuance of the material universe; as also of the spiritual power and

prescience attending and expounding the same. In the

earliest statements of Genesis, a dash of phraseology covers all cosmic time anterior to the beginning of terrestrial things. These phrasings illuminate chaos and discover the relationships of eternity. ‘‘In the beginning ... the Spirit of God moved... and there was light.” It is enough. Even the unaided eye of the intellect may drink the polarized rays of that light, back to a time when there was “ not anything made that was made.” ‘The terse majesty of this introduction contrasts destructively with the diffused details and grotesque climaxes of the creation literature of Babylon and other polytheistic nations.

Otherwise, also, for sanity and certitude, the Bible

stands unique and unapproached amongst the master-

pieces of antiquity.

That the Bible is not a scientific book has been too readily assumed by the secular mind, and too quickly allowed by religious teachers. ‘Technically speaking, it is not scientific; neither is any other form of pure history. ‘The Old Testament is the literature of a people whose main concern was the religious ideal; while the New Testament is wholly given to the realization of that ideal. Neither science nor history is the main concern of the canon; and yet there is no statement of Scripture, touching either history or science, that is not undergirded with fact and truth. The cosmogony of Genesis, upon a review of which we are about to enter, does not involve, for instance, questions of the manner of man’s creation, nor of the transmutation of species; but it does involve the question of the scientific integrity of the record, when that record enters into fact and detail. In this respect, Genesis is a scientifically correct book, originating in a time when its data could have come only through inspiration, or from a most extraordinarily authoritative human source. Redundancy well may be risked in saying that both knowledge and inspiration are evident throughout the canon; and nowhere more certainly than in Genesis.

Thirty-five years ago, William E. Gladstone and Professor Thomas H. Huxley, in England, and with the whole scientific world for an audience, controversially discussed the issue as to whether or not the then stated categories of geology agreed with the cosmological categories of Genesis. A world concensus seemed to testify to a drawn verdict; but, were the issue to be decided today, the verdict would be positive for Genesis. Geology has so corrected the results derived from its data of a century and a half that these results now approximate the record of Genesis. The old arrogance of monism having leached out of its earlier concepts, geology has become continually more tractable and accordant. Also, it faces the record of having changed, more than once, the bases of its interpretation, while Genesis has changed not so much as once. In essential facts, Genesis and geology agree. The cosmological section of Genesis, that is, the so-described Elohistic paragraphs of the first and second chapters, is, from a scientific viewpoint, the most challenging, the most surprising and the most compelling writing to be found in the libraries of the ages. As a psychological marvel, it has no parallel. Radical criticism has delighted to point out the likenesses between the Hebrew cosmology and that read from the -Sumerian-Babylonian tablets; but the critics have seldom tarried long enough to study the differences between these writings; and it is in their differences that the truth is established. The likenesses generally describe the unity of the Hebrew and other Semitic creation literatures in an original of most ancient standing; while the differences describe the fidelity of the Hebrew record to that ancient source, and the departure of the non-Hebrew from the same; and, therefore, stamp the latter as mythical. Familiarity with the cosmologies of the early Semitic peoples as, for instance, that in the summary of the Creation Tablets of Assurbanipal is the end of cavil against the account found in Genesis. In not a single case do the non-Hebrew creation stories rise to even a rudimentary resemblance to the categories of geology; and, without exception, they caricature creative power and shame the most childish ideal of human intelligence; while Genesis anticipates by more than three thousand years every essential point and relationship in the science of terrestrial creation. It is superfluous to ask what should be thought of this. To say that the cosmological knowledge exhibited in Genesis came in the ordinary way of investigation, test and deductive reasoning is to allow that, in very ancient times, there flourished a scientific school, or fellowship, whose records, and the results of whose inquiry, have perished, except for this Elohistic source (if so it must be named) in Genesis.

In supposing the existence of such a fellowship of scientific knowledge in early antiquity, no violence is done to intelligent thinking; for a community of primeval understanding of exact method and wide range becomes continually more probable. Eventually, it will be discovered that this hypothesis is the only one by which may be explained certain staring and startling facts left in the path of archzological uncovering. ‘The architecture, engineering and sanitation schemes accounted for in the remains of excavated Semitic cities, as Babylon, Ur and Shechem, not to speak of tablet writings and the records of astral knowledge, all point back to unannalled previous centuries in which study and advance were the order, describing a state of knowledge superior to that testified to by any monuments or remains yet uncovered.

But if this scientific knowledge be ruled out, then revelation through individual illumination becomes the one possible explanation of the cosmological phenomenon of Genesis. I have long held it to be self-proved that a very ancient traditional science, as also an equally ancient record-keeping art, coupled with individual illumination, were the source of the cosmology and the toledoths, or the patriarchal genealogies, of the book of Genesis. The grounds for this argument are neither fanciful nor fond; but it would require extended space fully to set them forth. When perfect sanity shall rule in the realm of scientific Bible criticism, this fact of an ancient scientific age not only will be apprehended; but will become the starting-point of a new and illuminating investigation into the intellectual status of primeval civilization. But science, in the main, is now too much obsessed with the idea of a brute beginning of the race to give heed to a theory so contradictory of its ruling hypothesis. As contradicting modern intellectual pride, and as giving challenge to a juster evaluation of antiquity, the cosmological record of Genesis becomes juridical and monumental.

The volume of Professor Huxley, Science and Hebrew Tradition, which I read in my study-years, and which has been re-read in recent months, impresses me as the utterance of a man impatient, prejudged and incapable of giving respectful study to the venerable literature which he so much decried; and this has been characteristic of his successors in criticism. But fifty years have passed since Professor Huxley wrote his petulant book; and Genesis continues to speak for itself. A hypothetical situation will help us better to understand this.

If there should be discovered today, in some demotic tell in Egypt, a papyrus manuscript which should be unquestionably identified as a lost section of the histories of Herodotus (which, by no means is impossible, as there are significant lacune in his writings) ; and should this manuscript carry a description, under aboriginal names, of the Amazon and its tributaries, with their littorals, as his extant writings do with the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates system, the cosmological situation in Genesis would be paralleled. Only two explanations of such Herodotian account would be possible; either that the Father of History, two thousand years before the voyage of Columbus, had secured his information from some intelligent native of, or visitor to, the Western continent; or else that it had been imparted to him through an oracle. The book of Genesis has remained unquestioned in its present form, at least, since the time of Ezra, two thousand years, and more, before the first speculations of Lamarck, the father of geology; and yet Genesis is a replica of “the record of the rocks,’ a complete prepositive statement of the main terms of modern cosmogony. To show this is our present business.