The rational test : Bible doctrine in the light of reason

Front matter

Ill

Class.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Rationale of Theism .... 9

II. The Plenary Inspiration of the Bible . . 24

II

Ever and anon an uncertain word is said or written relative to the infallible character of the Sacred Scriptures. Sometimes this doubtful sound comes from an unexpected quarter, and for that reason creates, all the more, a feeling of solicitude. If we do not to-day have a "sure word of prophecy/' we are certainly in a most deplorable condition, after all the centuries of proclaiming the gospel and founding churches thereon ; then, indeed, we feel like exclaiming, "There is nothing sure and reliable under the sun."

We desire to address ourself to the vital question of Biblical inspiration, not so much in the style of erudition as in a plain, matter-of-fact way, so that the layman as well as the trained and technical scholar can understand. Nor shall we quote a great deal from the theologians on this doctrine, but shall endeavor to elucidate it, as far as may be, in our own way and from our own point of view, our only purpose being to show how we have arrived at intellectual and spiritual composure, in the earnest hope that others may derive some help from the presentation.

It is sometimes said that men undertake to discuss such doctrines as the one under consideration, while they are not versed in philosophy and do not even know how to use philosophical terms correctly.

* This chapter deals rather with the rationalistic than the purely skeptical condition of mind. However, it is hoped that the skeptic will also find it of value in pointing him to the way of assurance.

Perhaps so! But to make this criticism is at least an assumption of superiority on the part of the critics that is hardly consistent with Christian humility; and thus, while it gives offense, it utterly fails to convince. Sometimes, too, the person who pretends to so much knowledge of philosophy and such refined nicety of discrimination himself, succeeds only in stirring up a cloud of dust when he undertakes to explain his position on profound and vital questions. Moreover, the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures has so many practical aspects that it were a pity if men must have vast erudition in order to have a right to form an opinion regarding it. We believe, therefore, that this doctrine may be so stated, and the arguments so presented, that persons of fair intelligence can at least understand what the writer means, even if every one cannot accept his conclusions.

Is a definition of Biblical inspiration possible? The negative is often maintained. We wonder whether it will be regarded as a piece of presumption should we attempt a definition. We do not hope to explain the mystery of inspiration, any more than we can explain any other mystery, but it does seem to us that a clear and concise statement of the doctrine may be made. Therefore, we would humbly submit the following:

Biblical inspiration is the act of God by which He so moved upon the minds of the writers of the Sacred Scriptures that they recorded precisely what He desired to have recorded.

We shall proceed to defend and elaborate this definition. First, it asserts the perfect superintendence of God in the making of the Bible — that is, the complete dominance of the divine or supernatural element, making the Bible a fully-inspired book and one that must be inerrant. Still, it allows ample scope for the human element, which is so obvious in the production

26 THK RATION AI, TKST

of the Bible. The inspired writers were not mere machines. God made use of them as free agents and rational beings, permitting their various idiosyncrasies proper play, so that no two of them wrote in the same way, but each was master of his own peculiar style; yet in all this free use of the human element, God so moved and controlled and guided the writers that no errors were committed, and that a vast amount of divine revelation was imparted and recorded. Thus the whole Bible is inspired; not merely some parts of it, but all its parts, even to the sentences and words — that is, they are God-breathed; divinely revealed, when necessary; divinely controlled in all cases.

We are well aware that illustrations are not proofs, but they open the windows and help to throw light on one's meaning, and in that way our Lord used them. For this purpose let us make use of an illustration from the school-room. The teacher sends his pupil to the blackboard to solve a difficult problem. The instructor stands behind the pupil and watches and guides the process from beginning to end. But he gives the pupil some liberty; permits him to write the characters in his own way, to carry forward the solution by his own mental efforts as far as he can; meantime the teacher guides, sometimes suggests, at other times imparts needed information; and all the while keeps the pupil from error. We do not offer this parable as a logical demonstration, but simply as an illustration to make clear our idea of God's method of inspiration. When we remember that God is often represented as our Teacher, and that Jesus is often called the Great Teacher, the parable does not seem to be inapt; it seems to be almost a case of "natural law in the spiritual world." All life is a school; all life has a pedagogic purpose.

We hold to the dynamic theory of inspiration, including revelation, suggestion, and superintendence,

THE PLENARY INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 2J

but in few, if any, cases pure mechanics. "For the prophecy came not in olden time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they w T ere moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Pet. i. 21). But what is to be said about the "verbal theory"? We believe in that, too. "Every Scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Tim. iii. 16, closest translation). However, in saying that we accept the "verbal" theory, we need to make an explanation. Our idea is not that God dictated every word and punctuation mark, giving the Biblical scribes no election in the style of presentation, but that He so guided and superintended their choice of language that they were kept from error and wrote what He desired recorded. Thus the very words of Scripture were all inspired — that is, God-breathed — though not all of them were necessarily dictated. If it were impossible to express the same thought in different ways, this concession might not be made; but since a thought may be set forth in a variety of phrases, a certain degree of individual liberty might well be granted to the several Biblical writers, thus accounting for the diversity of their style, and making them more than mere writing-machines. Even in the human world an intelligent secretary or stenographer may be so imbued with his employer's spirit and plans as to be able freely and correctly to express the latter's thoughts on some matters of business, without direct dictation in every case. At the same time the secretary would be expressing his own thoughts, and, to some extent, in his own way, would he not? And so long as the employer would look over the document and put his seal and signature to it, it would be considered correct, whether composed by direct dictation, or simply imbued with the spirit and purpose of the employer. In this way we have reason to believe that God employed His amanuenses to compose the Sacred Scriptures, dictating when necessary, simply imbuing with the idea in other cases. By this view there is ample room for the play of the human element, and yet the inerrancy of the Holy Word is assured.

It is well to distinguish between inspiration and revelation. The former includes the latter, but is a wider, a more generic term. You might say that revelation is one of the parts or species of inspiration. The Bible is all inspired, every line and word of it; all filled with and produced by the breath of God; but not everything in the Bible is supernaturally revealed. Take a concrete case as an example. The history of creation up to the making of a self-conscious man all had to be especially revealed by the Almighty, whether to Moses or the scribes who lived before his day, because there was no man in existence to observe the acts of creation in the prehistoric ages. On the other hand, when Moses wrote down the events' of the exodus from Egypt, events that were transpiring before his own eyes, there was no need of a special revelation to inform him of what was occurring. He simply needed to use his own powers of observation. And those powers were all God-given. But note carefully : what he wrote about such events was all inspired of God, who moved upon the historian's mind in such a way as to impel him to chronicle the things that God wanted to have inserted in the sacred record ; nothing being inserted that God did not desire there, nothing omitted that He wished to have included.

Such is our view of Biblical inspiration. It is at least a stalwart view, and has given us much comfort and confidence. But can <such a theory be maintained on the ground of reason ? Perhaps not on the ground of reason pure and simple; yet we believe it can be rationally defended and upheld with more conviction and cogency than any other view. Right here is the place, perhaps, to deny the charge of "constructive rationalism," which is likely to be brought against anyone who attempts to uphold positive orthodoxy by a process of reasoning. We shall have to deny the imputation. We do not accept the Bible as an infallibly-inspired book because we have first reasoned the matter out and have solved every difficulty. We accept it by faith, and a faith, too, that we have good ground to believe has been implanted by a Power that is higher than mere human ratiocination. Once we did not believe the Bible to be God's Book ; now we do, with all our heart, and we repeat that we did not arrive at our present conclusions through a process of human intellection. Before we close this chapter we shall describe the pathway by which the doubter comes to believe the Scriptures to be God's infallible book. The process by which such faith is attained is something very different from the doctrine of inspiration objectively considered.

However, though we are no "constructive rationalist" — how can a man be a rationalist when he bows in full surrender to God's Word, and not to reason? — yet we believe our view to be reasonable, more readily defended than any other, and far less dangerous than the view which gives us an errant and only partially inspired Bible. God's Book does not condemn reason ; for it says: "Come now, saith the Lord, and let us reason together" ; and St. Peter goes so far as to admonish his readers to be "ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear." No; God does not condemn nor contemn reason ; He simply does not want us to place it above revelation.

We can see no fault with Dr. Philippi's statement of the doctrine of inspiration when he says it is "that connection of the human will with the divine Spirit, through which the revelation of the former will be pure and uncorrupt as to the contents of the latter" — that is, if by the word "revelation" he means the entire body of the Scriptures, and not only those matters that had to be supernaturally revealed. However, we regret to have to enter our protest against the following comments on this view by an American Lutheran writer :

"If this view, combined with the closer psychological analysis of the older dogmaticians, be so developed as to include the full value of individual passages like 2 Tim. iii. 16," etc.; "all modified by the actual condition of the Bible, with its various readings and verbal inaccuracies, whose occurrence by divine permission marks their non-essentiality, the limits of verbal inspiration will be fixed. With these determined, the how of inspiration will be clearer, and its theanthropic character better defined, as divine in such a way that the truth of salvation is nowise injured, and human to such a degree in style, conception of individual writers, etc., that the reality of the Bible is not contradicted. The question of errancy will then likewise receive its solution, as essential but not mechanically absolute."

The language of this quotation is not quite lucid, and therefore it is difficult to point out the exact errors of statement. However, there are symptoms of a desire to go too far. When the writer speaks of "the actual condition of the Bible, with its various readings and verbal inaccuracies," he must be referring to the translations we have to-day and not to the original copies of the inspired penmen. But what confusion is this? Does he mean to include the translation and transcription of the Bible in his idea of inspiration? If he does, no wonder he can formulate no definition of the doctrine! He is undertaking an impossible task. Besides, we do not believe that anyone to-day thinks for a moment that the translators and copyists were infallibly inspired, however much he may believe that God superintended their work.

In the last sentence the writer says of "the question of errancy" that it is "essential but not mechanically absolute." We think there must have been a slip of the pen or the type in this sentence; the word "errancy" evidently ought to be "inerrancy." Then the meaning must be this : The inerrancy of the Bible is "essential, but not mechanically absolute." Here is confusion again. Does he mean the translations we have to-day, or the original autographs? In this sentence he seems to mean the latter; in the second sentence preceding, the former. If, however, he means the translations all through, he is trying to make out a difficult problem where there is none, for no one would contend for a moment that the translations are "mechanically absolute" — or, better, absolutely inerrant. Still, we cannot help feeling that he really meant to say that the original documents of sacred Scriptures were not infallibly inspired throughout. In the main, he would say, they, the Scriptures, were all right — that is, so far as regards the "truth of salvation" — but in some other matters they may be faulty. This is the view that must be combated to-day with might and main, if we would preserve the integrity of the sacred volume.

If the original Scriptures were not inerrant, the whole record is rendered untrustworthy; you do not know what to believe and what to reject; the feeling of uncertainty at once becomes so great that you lose your spiritual power and unction, and can no longer look upon any portion of Scripture as the true and absolute Word of God. Then, too, instead of making God's Word the ultimate rule and standard, you must either make reason that standard, in which case you fall into rationalism; or else you must make subjective experience the arbiter, in which case you open the floodgates of false mysticism. Some men may be able to retain faith in an imperfectly inspired Bible, and in the God and Saviour whom it imperfectly reveals, but most men cannot accomplish this mental and spiritual exploit. And, to our mind, it can be called nothing more nor less than an exploit. Men of practical minds and hard heads will say: "If the Bible is mistaken on one point, it may be mistaken on many others, and therefore we cannot repose absolute confidence in any part of its record. " Shall we tell a minister how to deplete his congregation in a single year, and rob it of all faith and spiritual verve? Let him preach that the Bible is a fallible book; that it contains errors now, and always has. On the other hand, let a man of sense and spiritual force preach the gospel in a positive way, as if there were no doubt of its truth, and see how his church will grow ! It is a dangerous doctrine — this doctrine of an imperfectly inspired Bible. It depletes, enervates, destroys the faith of the people, as we have seen in more than one instance, and a doctrine that does that surely cannot be true and reasonable.

Suppose there were errors in the original Scriptures, then who is to decide what is true and what is untrue ? How is the true to be separated from the untrue? What shall be the norm of judgment, and who shall be the judge? You must accept only that which appeals to reason — rationalism; or that which agrees with your experience — the destruction of the whole Bible history. You and I never experienced that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, or was laid in a manger, or that the angels sang to the shepherds on the first Christmas night, or that Jesus disputed with the doctors in the temple at the age of twelve, and a thousand other events recorded in the gospels! The historical and the spiritual portions of the gospels are so interblended that you cannot take away the one without rending the other into fragments.

It has been said that the doctrine of Christ is primary; the doctrine of inspiration secondary; and therefore you are to believe in an infallible Christ, but need not believe in an infallible Bible. Do men who speak and write in that way realize that the Christ they exalt is only an ideal Christ, and not the historic Christ ? How do we know anything about our Lord ? Where do we look for His portrayal as an infallible Saviour and Teacher? In only one book — the Bible. But suppose the Bible is not fully trustworthy ! How do you know, after all, that you have an infallible Lord? There are some things in this world that you cannot separate without dire and destructive results. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; separate them, and you no longer have water, but something entirely different. Separate Christ from the gospel that tells us all we know of Him, and you no longer have Christ — you have another kind of a being.

We have also heard it said, "The Bible says, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved; 5 it does not say, 'Believe the Bible, and thou shalt be saved !' " This is a one-sided and narrowed interpretation of Scripture, and fails to take into account the whole analogy of faith. Jesus also said, "Repent, and believe the gospel/' What gospel? The gospel which He was preaching to them. Where have we to-day any record of that gospel save in the New Testament ? Paul said that if even an angel from heaven should preach another gospel than the one he had preached, he should be anathema. Where do we learn what Paul's great gospel was, save in his epistles, linked with the records of the evangelists? Where do we find even the command, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," except in the New Testament? Suppose we cannot be sure, after all, that the injunction is correct, is inspired of God, and not merely a human statement, what becomes of our faith? It is founded on the sand. Now that the inspired penmen are dead, and we can no longer hear their voices, we must have a true and imperishable record of their teachings, or we cannot be certain what their gospel was. If that record is not in the New Testament, we have no such record, and are therefore out upon the sea of incertitude, without a chart or

'°S P has been said that the "spiritual truths," or the "saving truths," of the Scriptures are infallible and inerrant, while other parts of even the original writings may have contained errors! By what right does any man make such a distinction ? Is there any warrant for it in God's Word? The trouble is, you cannot separate the saving truths from their historical setting by a sharp line of cleavage. Let us try it and see The gospel history tells us that Christ healed a man that had a palsied arm. What is the saving truth in that beautiful narrative? Suppose you deny its historical verity, what have you left? The gospel informs us that Christ fed five thousand persons in a miraculous way ; that He turned water into wine ; that He walked on the water ; that He raised the son of a widow from the dead; that He opened the eyes of blind Bartimeus, and so on. What are the saving truths in those narratives? Do you not see that you cannot separate a historical person from his history? The trouble with this partial-inspiration hypothesis is, when you come to apply it to concrete cases, it falls hapless and helpless to the ground. It is not a good working theory; it is not practical. If you discredit part of the gospel history, you discredit the entire record, and then you have no "saving truths" left.

"But what have you to say about the errors of transcription and translation which are to be found in all the Bibles extant at the present day?" someone asks, with not a little concern. We have very little to say about them. They cause most of us little uneasiness.

We cannot help feeling that it is proof of a rationalistic temper to become polemical in attempting to make much of those errors. It seems to arise from a desire to prove that, take it as you will, you cannot have a perfect revelation, an infallible book. We simply admit, as an honest investigator must, that some such errors have occurred in translating and transcribing the sacred records ; but we hasten at once to say that they are of such slight significance that not a single essential, vital, or important truth of the Word, historical or spiritual, is affected one way or another by them ; nothing important even in the history is invalidated, not one event lost that would add to the strength and power and completeness of the gospel. God has perhaps permitted such slight errors to occur to keep us busy finding out as near as may be what was the original text, to incite us to more diligent research into the deep things of His revelation. How much more the Bible is studied because we must search for the truth, and because we are impelled by the hope of finding it ! But you tell men that they cannot find the true Word of God with all their searching, because mistakes were made in the original autographs, and you cut the nerve of all activity in the way of striving for positive results.

Do you wonder why we are ready to admit the presence of errors of copyists, while we will not concede that errors might have occurred in the original autographs? We will tell you why. Because the church has for centuries been aware of the errors of transcription, and yet that knowledge has not destroyed or even weakened her faith in the infallible Word of God ; which is positive and prima facie proof that her faith can bridge over that slight difficulty. But what has always happened when the original Scriptures themselves have been looked upon as faulty? Let the history, of rationalism wherever it has gained foothold tell the doleful story. It has meant an emasculated faith and a depleted spiritual life.

A speaker once exclaimed: "You talk about the original autographs of the Scriptures! I don't know anything about them! I never saw them!" We cannot help wondering whether the speaker ever saw even the Codex Sinaiticus, or Codex Alexandrinus, or the original copies of Shakespeare's plays, or Virgil's or Homer's poems. Such an outburst is not even clever rationalism, for everyone knows that there must have been original autographs, or we could not have had copies of them. Those original documents, fresh from the pens of prophets, evangelists and apostles, were inerrantly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and have come down to us with a fidelity and integrity that point to God as their custodian.

Should it be asked why the canon was ever closed, or was closed when it was, our reply would be : That is God's way. He created the world and all that is in it, then ceased creating, and began developing and unfolding. He created a human couple, then ceased creating human beings, and developed all others from the primitive pair. He sent Christ into the world, who "died once for all," and did not continue to make atonement for sin, but unfolded the spiritual potencies infused into the world by His coming and sacrificial work. So He gave the world an inspired canon, and when it was completed, He closed it and set it forth to be our guide until the next epoch in the earth's history, which will be the millennium. Such are the ways of God, and they are wonderfully wise. A finished creation, a finished atonement, a finished Biblical canon, but a continuous development — that is the divine modus operandi. What fault can rightly be found with it?

As a sample of the methods of the negative criticism, we will cite a concrete case. In Matthew's gospel it is said that two blind men were cured by Christ as He was departing from Jericho (Matt. xx. 29-34). The gospel of Mark says that there was only one blind man, namely, Bartimeus (Mark x. 46-52). Now, says the critic, the two accounts are irreconcilable, and therefore one or both of the evangelists must have made a mistake. We are far from ready to concede either the premise or the conclusion; but suppose for the moment that Matthew was in error; that he mistook one blind man for two ; what will the world think of him as a witness and historian? If Matthew would make a blunder in so simple a matter, mistaking one blind man for two, how can we trust him when he describes weightier events ? How do we know that he did not commit many blunders when he described the passion and resurrection of our Lord? That is the way the practical man looks at the matter. The same difficulty occurs if you suppose that Mark mistook two blind men for one. So great a miracle as the healing of the blind was performed; yet here are witnesses who are supposed to be partially inspired, but they are so careless or so inaccurate as not to know how many blind persons had their sight restored !

No ! no ! we can find a simpler and far less dangerous explanation of these seemingly divergent narratives. It is this : Christ healed many blind men, as we know full well from the gospels. As He was going out of Jericho, He opened the eyes of blind Bartimeus, and Mark records that miracle, to give an example of Christ's wonderful works ; perhaps a little later He opened the eyes of two other blind men, and Matthew describes that miracle; thus both narratives are true, and neither evangelist made a mistake. Will someone exclaim against the "harmonists/' if we explain the difficulty in that way? Why should he? Surely that explanation is just as reasonable as, and far less dangerous than, to admit that the inspired writers may have made a blunder.

It may be said that there are apparent contradictions in the Bible that cannot be harmonized, try as you will. Perhaps there are; but so many of these difficulties have given way before the efforts of reverent and enlightened scholarship that we have good reason to believe that there is no real contradiction in the few that remain and that additional light will resolve them in good time. For our own part we are glad to acknowledge our indebtedness to the harmonists, who have removed many an intellectual difficulty for us ; and, while they have not been able to say the final word — God only can do that — they have helped us not a little to see more and more clearly the "sweet reasonableness of the gospel/'

The negative critics have so ofte/i been proved in error that we feel less and less confidence in their decisions as the years go by. Once they declared that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because in his age the art of writing was unknown; now Dr. H. L. Sayce and other Egyptologists inform us that the golden age of Egyptian culture came before Moses, and explorers have discovered writing both in Egypt and Palestine that antedates Moses by many centuries. See the results of excavations in Babylon, Nineveh, and Nippur, by Dr. Hilprecht and others, all of them corroborating the Biblical record not only in its spiritual parts, but also in its historical parts.

Let us go back now to our definition of inspiration. It gives room for the discrimination that, while everything in the Bible is God-breathed, not every assertion in the Bible is true. We hasten to explain. In the second chapter of Genesis the devil makes a declaration, but it is false, and Christ says the devil was a liar from the beginning, and is the father of lies. Now, of course, the devil was not divinely inspired ; but the narrator of the story was — so inspired that he set down the devil's lie correctly, just as God wanted it stated, to show that the evil one was an impostor. This rule of hermeneutics, that the writers of the Biblical books were inspired, but not necessarily all the characters therein portrayed, will help to resolve more than one difficulty.