Science and the Unity of the Scriptures
(Concluded from last week) A NOTED theologian spoke unimpeachable truth when he said: “For Christians it will be enough to know that our Lord Jesus Christ set the seal of His infallible sanction on the whole of the Old Testament. He found the Hebrew canon as we have it in our hands to-day, and He treated it as an authority which was above discussion. Nay, more, He went out of His way—if we may reverently speak thus—to sanction not a few portions of it which modern skepticism rejects. When He would warn His hearers against the dangers of spiritual relapse, He bids them remember ‘Lot’s wife.’ Luke 17:32. If He would point out how worldly engagements may blind the soul to a coming judgment, He reminds them how men ate, and drank, and married, and were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the Flood came and destroyed them all. Luke 17:27. If He would put His finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, would warrant belief in His own coming resurrection, He points to Jonah’s being three days and three nights in the whale’s belly.” Matt. 12:40. And against those who would hold the view that Christ shared the popular ignorance when He made allusion to these historical things, the preacher continues: “But they will find it difficult to persuade mankind, if He could be mistaken on a matter of such strictly religious importance as the value of the sacred literature of His countrymen, that He can be safely trusted about anything else. The trustworthiness of the Old Testament is, in fact, inseparable from the trustworthiness of our Lord Jesus Christ; and if we believe that He is the true Light of the world, we shall close our ears against suggestions impairing the credit of those Jewish Scriptures which have received the stamp of His divine authority.” (Canon Liddon.) These are brave, plain, consistent words; and Huxley, by quoting them, shows that he believes it to be the only consistent position for a man to take who claims to believe the Bible at all. But Huxley did not believe the Bible. He puts the two positions thus: “The books of ecclesiastical authority declare that certain events happened in a certain fashion; the books of scientific authority say they did not.” Of course, Huxley believes the books of scientific authority; in fact, he wrote some of them himself. He believed that a man ought to stand squarely on one or the other of these foundations. He hated the idea that a man could compromise between the two, and fought it with page after page of argument, illustration, irony, and sarcasm. As an example, he puts one of these compromising logicians under the search-light. The logician has tried to show that there is nothing to prevent our believing that the record, from Abraham downward, is, in substance, in the strict sense historical, but from Abraham upward, consists of stories in the strict sense unhistorical, and that the pre-Abrahamic narratives are mere moral and religious types and parables. What has Huxley to say regarding such a position? It is very plain reading. Listen. “I confess,” says he, “I soon lose my way when I try to follow those who walk delicately among types and allegories. A certain passion for clearness forces me to ask, bluntly, whether the writer means to say that Jesus did not believe the stories in question, or that He did. When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that ‘the Flood came and destroyed them all,’ did He believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? . . . I venture to ask, What sort of value, as an illustration of God’s method of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of ‘Wolf’ when there is no wolf? If Jonah’s three days’ residence in the whale is not an ‘admitted reality,’ how could it ‘warrant belief’ in the coming resurrection? If Lot’s wife was not turned into a pillar of salt, the bidding those who turn back from the narrow path to ‘remember’ it, is, morally, about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away.” And right along this line he wants to know if the story of Adam and Eve is to be regarded as one of these pre-Abrahamic narratives, the historical truth of which is an open question, in face of Christ’s reference to it as being genuine, as related in Matt. 19:4, 5; and then asks, If Christ by this does not claim divine authority for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, he asks, “If one may play fast and loose with the story of the fall as a ‘type’ or ‘allegory,’ what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology? ‘For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’ 1 Cor. 15:21, 22.” I believe with Huxley that the position of these compromising theologians is untenable. But I also believe that Huxley himself has not bettered matters. While he is consistent in not compromising, he is, in my belief, utterly inconsistent in departing a step away from that Word which alone can tell us the real truth of the creation of the world. But those who leave the Scriptures at one point, open the way to leave them at any point. Nearly the whole Christian world at one time held to the literal record of Genesis, but they have now been led to take steps away from this. Such men as Huxley have the chief credit of it, if credit it can be called. And the logic of it is that they must follow him to the limit. And it is constantly growing clear that those who took this first step with him away from the literality of Genesis, are in these later days going still farther in departing from the plain statements of the Word. “Time was—and that not very long ago—when all the relations of Biblical authors concerning the whole world were received with a ready belief; and an unreasoning(?) and uncritical faith accepted with equal satisfaction the narrative of the captivity and the doings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the account of the apostolic meeting in the epistle to the Galatians, and that of the fabrication of Eve. We can most of us remember, when, in this country, the whole story of Exodus and even the legend of Jonah were seriously placed before boys as history, and discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt or the history of the Norman Conquest. “But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the growth of scientific criticism to its full strength. The whole world of history has been revolutionized, and the mythology which embarrassed earnest Christianity has vanished as an evil mist, the lifting of which has only more fully revealed the lineaments of infallible truth. No longer in contact with fact of any kind, Faith stands now and forever proudly inaccessible to the attacks of the infidel.” This and countless more like it shows us that he who leaves the literal record of Genesis will not stop at that. Huxley has truly said: “Our age is a day of compromises. The present and the near future seem given over to those happily if curiously constituted people who see as little difficulty in throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic Scriptural narrative, as the authors of ‘Lux Mundi’ see in sacrificing the pre-Abrahamic stories; and having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine6honors to the residue.”—“Science and Hebrew Tradition,” page 237. Science and the Unity of the Scriptures
And so it has come about. At the first compromise, only the first chapter of Genesis was to be considered fiction; then the compromising ecclesiasticism undertook to underpin the superstructure at this point, and make the rest, to the eye at least, as firm as ever. But it did not long stay thus. The foundation of the compromising theologians was next shifted forward to the time of Abraham, and there made fast. But now not even this will do. The present body of catering ecclesiastics desire to knock out every historic fact which in any sense embarrasses them before the infidel, and underpin a new structure, independent of all historic facts, that shall defy the critic’s blast. How different a view we find when we turn away from these compromisers! “Every word of God is pure: He is a shield unto them that put their trust in Him. Add thou not unto His words, lest He reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.” Prov. 30: 5, 6. “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” 2 Peter 1: 20, 21. For “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroly furnished unto all good works.” 2 Tim. 3: 16, 17. And so “if any man shall take away from the words of the book, . . . God shall take away his part out of the Book of Life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” Rev. 22: 19. Do you not see how it is? Take away the literal record of creation and call it an allegory or a myth, and you not only lose the logical reason for the Sabbath, but you open wide the flood-gates of infidelity that almost certainly shall sweep everything of faith before it. The observer of the seventh day stands for the literal interpretation of Genesis, not merely to give him support for his Sabbath observance, but because he believes it is the only consistent thing he can do so long as he believes the Bible at all. He believes, however, that the Sabbath is a memorial of God’s supernatural creative work, and therefore a sign of all God’s miraculous or supernatural work. And hence while science, so-called, which is constantly only a reader of the natural, and is forever in ignorance of the supernatural, seeks to deny and invalidate the supernatural work recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, and, with it, all the supernatural religion and facts recorded in all the Scriptures, the Sabbath-keeper continues to keep that which is always the safeguard against all this infidelity—continues to keep that Sabbath which memorializes God’s wonderful creative work; yea, continues to keep holy that seventh-day Sabbath which is forever a sign of a God above nature and greater than nature, who upholds and preserves not only the world, but all His creatures, and who can work according to His own counsels, and none can say Him nay or what doest Thou?
R.