The Warping of Interpretation by Rev. J. B. Thomas, D. D.

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 9, 1883

The Warping of Interpretation.

By Rev. J. B. Thomas, D. D.

"THE Scriptures," says Bungener, "were written by common men to be understood by common men." "The more any interpretation bears the mark of simplicity, and it appears as if it ought to have struck the reader before, the more likely it to be true," says Ernesti. "It is better to run all lengths with Scripture truth in a natural and open manner," Bengal adds, "than to shift and twist and accommodate." "The sense of Scripture is one, certain and simple," breaks in Melanchthon, "and is everywhere to be ascertained in accordance with the principles of grammar and human discourse." And finally Luther: "We must not make God's word mean what we wish; we must not bend it, but allow it to bend us; and give it the honor of being better than we could make it; so that we must let it stand."

But the fatal facility of exegesis under stress is proverbial, and has been often justly satirized.

Mohammed, it was said, prohibited the eating of a certain part of the swine. But the Mussulman, having first assumed uncertainty as to the part forbidden, argued against the probability of the intended application of the prohibition to each part successively, until he had gone over the whole.

The result Cowper sums up:—

"Thus, conscience freed from every clog, Mohammedans eat up the hog."

Dean Swift's famous story of the dexterously interpreted will scarifies the same foible. The retention of the demise was made dependent among other things on the heir's refraining from the wearing of "silver fringe." But that style of decoration having come in fashion, it was opportunely found that the term "silver" was "allegorical," and that "fringe" (being perhaps a "generic" word) might mean "broomstick." The objection that a prohibition to wear an "allegorical broomstick" was unmeaning, was overruled as "irreverent and hypocritical." This sarcasm is not lower than the strange abuses of Scripture which provoked it.

Of such a character was the sermon justifying the persecution of heretics, from the words, "Rise, Peter, slay and eat." The defense of seven as the number of the sacraments on the ground that mysterion is the Greek word for sacrament, and that seven is the mystic number, and the proof that the mass is a true oblation because Paul speaks of the "table of the Lord," while "table" means "altar," and an "altar" implies "sacrifice;" are of like character. Dumoulin justly says that to depend on such proof-texts is "like warming one's self at the moon."

Even the great Augustine, to save unbroken the doctrine that baptism is essential to salvation, maintains that the dying thief was baptized with blood from the Saviour's wounded side, or else had been baptized before his conviction.

OTHER ILLUSTRATIVE INSTANCES.

Matthew 3:6 describes the people as baptized "in Jordan." Dr. Whedon (in loco) says: "The Jordan had several banks within banks, so that a person could be in the Jordon on dry ground." This curious geographical information, fortified by a citation from Dr. Thomson, is conveyed for the purpose of adding a caveat against what, it seems to be implied, would be a natural inference from the language itself. "This expression 'in Jordan' only indicates, therefore, where the rite was performed; it in no way indicates the mode." This adroit effort at the evisceration of the evangelist's meaning (suggested long before, by the way, by Ewing, an antagonist of Dr. Carson) has been since treated somewhat harshly by the Revisers, who make the text now read "in the River Jordan," as the parallel passage

in Mark already did.

But waiving that, consider how fantastic a theory is here put forth in the name of interpretation to divest the words of their natural meaning, obvious but inconvenient for the interpreter. By the same process, having moved 1,800 years forward, try the statement that a man was "drowned in the Mississippi." "Mississippi" may readily mean Mississippi Valley, especially as that is often called the Mississippi "bottom"—the word "drowned" means "strangled," and "strangled" is a "generic" word including "hanged"; and since no man would go into the water to be hanged, the legitimate rendering of the passage would be that he was "hanged in the Mississippi Valley." One of the pioneers and among the ablest exponents of this school of exegesis was Dr. Paulus, who sought to prove by the same process, also with an ulterior though different motive, that when our Lord is said to have walked on the Sea of Galilee, he only walked in fact along its shores.—Rev. J. B. Thomas, D. D., in N. Y. Examiner.