Christ has not so constructed Scripture as to dispense with his personal

presence and teaching by his Spirit. The Scripture is the imperfect mirror

of Christ. It is defective, yet it reflects him and leads to him.

Authority resides not in it, but in him, and his Spirit enables the

individual Christian and the collective church progressively to

distinguish the essential from the non-essential, and so to perceive the

truth as it is in Jesus. In thus judging Scripture and interpreting

Scripture, we are not rationalists, but are rather believers in him who

promised to be with us alway even unto the end of the world and to lead us

by his Spirit into all the truth.

James speaks of the law as a mirror (_James 1:23-25—_“like unto a

man beholding his natural face in a mirror ... looketh into the

perfect law”); the law convicts of sin because it reflects Christ.

Paul speaks of the gospel as a mirror (_2 Cor. 3:18—_“we all,

beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord”); the gospel

transforms us because it reflects Christ. Yet both law and gospel

are imperfect; they are like mirrors of polished metal, whose

surface is often dim, and whose images are obscure; (_1 Cor.

13:12—_“For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to

face”); even inspired men know only in part, and prophesy only in

part. Scripture itself is the conception and utterance of a child,

to be done away when that which is perfect is come, and we see

Christ as he is.

Authority is the right to impose beliefs or to command obedience.

The only ultimate authority is God, for he is truth, justice and

love. But he can impose beliefs and command obedience only as he

is known. Authority belongs therefore only to God revealed, and

because Christ is God revealed he can say: “All authority hath

been given unto me in heaven and on earth”_ (Mat. 28:18)_. The

final authority in religion is Jesus Christ. Every one of his

revelations of God is authoritative. Both nature and human nature

are such revelations. He exercises his authority through delegated

and subordinate authorities, such as parents and civil government.

These rightfully claim obedience so long as they hold to their own

respective spheres and recognize their relation of dependence upon

him. “The powers that be are ordained of God”_ (Rom. 13:1)_, even

though they are imperfect manifestations of his wisdom and

righteousness. The decisions of the Supreme Court are

authoritative even though the judges are fallible and come short

of establishing absolute justice. Authority is not infallibility,

in the government either of the family or of the state.

The church of the middle ages was regarded as possessed of

absolute authority. But the Protestant Reformation showed how vain

were these pretensions. The church is an authority only as it

recognizes and expresses the supreme authority of Christ. The

Reformers felt the need of some external authority in place of the

church. They substituted the Scripture. The phrase “the word of

God,” which designates the truth orally uttered or affecting the

minds of men, came to signify only a book. Supreme authority was

ascribed to it. It often usurped the place of Christ. While we

vindicate the proper authority of Scripture, we would show that

its authority is not immediate and absolute, but mediate and

relative, through human and imperfect records, and needing a

supplementary and divine teaching to interpret them. The authority

of Scripture is not apart from Christ or above Christ, but only in

subordination to him and to his Spirit. He who inspired Scripture

must enable us to interpret Scripture. This is not a doctrine of

rationalism, for it holds to man’s absolute dependence upon the

enlightening Spirit of Christ. It is not a doctrine of mysticism,

for it holds that Christ teaches us only by opening to us the

meaning of his past revelations. We do not expect any new worlds

in our astronomy, nor do we expect any new Scriptures in our

theology. But we do expect that the same Christ who gave the

Scriptures will give us new insight into their meaning and will

enable us to make new applications of their teachings.

The right and duty of private judgment with regard to Scripture

belong to no ecclesiastical caste, but are inalienable liberties

of the whole church of Christ and of each individual member of

that church. And yet this judgment is, from another point of view,

no private judgment. It is not the judgment of arbitrariness or

caprice. It does not make the Christian consciousness supreme, if

we mean by this term the consciousness of Christians apart from

the indwelling Christ. When once we come to Christ, he joins us to

himself, he seats us with him upon his throne, he imparts to us

his Spirit, he bids us use our reason in his service. In judging

Scripture, we make not ourselves but Christ supreme, and recognize

him as the only ultimate and infallible authority in matters of

religion. We can believe that the total revelation of Christ in

Scripture is an authority superior to individual reason or to any

single affirmation of the church, while yet we believe that this

very authority of Scripture has its limitation, and that Christ

himself must teach us what this total revelation is. So the

judgment which Scripture encourages us to pass upon its own

limitations only induces a final and more implicit reliance upon

the living and personal Son of God. He has never intended that

Scripture should be a substitute for his own presence, and it is

only his Spirit that is promised to lead us into all the truth.

On the authority of Scripture, see A. H. Strong, Christ in

Creation, 113-136—“The source of all authority is not Scripture,

but Christ.... Nowhere are we told that the Scripture of itself is

able to convince the sinner or to bring him to God. It is a

glittering sword, but it is ‘the sword of the Spirit’_ (Eph.

6:17)_; and unless the Spirit use it, it will never pierce the

heart. It is a heavy hammer, but only the Spirit can wield it so

that it breaks in pieces the flinty rock. It is the type locked in

the form, but the paper will never receive an impression until the

Spirit shall apply the power. No mere instrument shall have the

glory that belongs to God. Every soul shall feel its entire

dependence upon him. Only the Holy Spirit can turn the outer word

into an inner word. And the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ.

Christ comes into direct contact with the soul. He himself gives

his witness to the truth. He bears testimony to Scripture, even

more than Scripture bears testimony to him.”

11. The preceding discussion enables us at least to lay down three

cardinal principles and to answer three common questions with regard to

inspiration.

Principles: (_a_) The human mind can be inhabited and energized by God

while yet attaining and retaining its own highest intelligence and

freedom. (_b_) The Scriptures being the work of the one God, as well as of

the men in whom God moved and dwelt, constitute an articulated and organic

unity. (_c_) The unity and authority of Scripture as a whole are entirely

consistent with its gradual evolution and with great imperfection in its

non-essential parts.

Questions: (_a_) Is any part of Scripture uninspired? Answer: Every part

of Scripture is inspired in its connection and relation with every other

part. (_b_) Are there degrees of inspiration? Answer: There are degrees of

value, but not of inspiration. Each part in its connection with the rest

is made completely true, and completeness has no degrees. (_c_) How may we

know what parts are of most value and what is the teaching of the whole?

Answer: The same Spirit of Christ who inspired the Bible is promised to

take of the things of Christ, and, by showing them to us, to lead us

progressively into all the truth.

Notice the value of the Old Testament, revealing as it does the

natural attributes of God, as a basis and background for the

revelation of mercy in the New Testament. Revelation was in many

parts _(πολυμερῶς—Heb. 1:1)_ as well as in many ways. “Each

individual oracle, taken by itself, was partial and incomplete”

(Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jewish Ch., 21). But the person and the

words of Christ sum up and complete the revelation, so that, taken

together and in their connection with him, the various parts of

Scripture constitute an infallible and sufficient rule of faith

and practice. See Browne, Inspiration of the N. T.; Bernard,

Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of

the O. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of Doctrine. See A. H.

Strong, on Method of Inspiration, in Philosophy and Religion,

148-155.

The divine influence upon the minds of post-biblical writers,

leading to the composition of such allegories as Pilgrim’s

Progress, and such dramas as Macbeth, is to be denominated

illumination rather than inspiration, for the reasons that these

writings contain error as well as truth in matters of religion and

morals; that they add nothing essential to what the Scriptures

give us; and that, even in their expression of truth previously

made known, they are not worthy of a place in the sacred canon. W.

H. P. Faunce: “How far is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress true to

present Christian experience? It is untrue: 1. In its despair of

this world. The Pilgrim has to leave this world in order to be

saved. Modern experience longs to do God’s will _here_, and to

save others instead of forsaking them. 2. In its agony over sin

and frightful conflict. Bunyan illustrates modern experience

better by Christiana and her children who go through the Valley

and the Shadow of Death in the daytime, and without conflict with

Apollyon. 3. In the constant uncertainty of the issue of the

Pilgrim’s fight. Christian enters Doubting Castle and meets Giant

Despair, even after he has won most of his victories. In modern

experience, ‘at evening time there shall be light’_—(Zech. 14:7)_.

4. In the constant conviction of an absent Christ. Bunyan’s Christ

is never met this side of the Celestial City. The Cross at which

the burden dropped is the symbol of a sacrificial act, but it is

not the Savior himself. Modern experience has Christ living in us

and with us alway, and not simply a Christ whom we hope to see at

the end of the journey.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theol., 2:18—“Paul declares his own prophecy and

inspiration to be essentially imperfect (_1 Cor. 13:9, 10, 12; cf.

1 Cor. 12:10; 1 Thess. 5:19-21_). This admission justifies a

Christian criticism even of his views. He can pronounce an

anathema on those who preach ‘a different gospel’_ (Gal. 1:8, 9)_,

for what belongs to simple faith, the facts of salvation, are

absolutely certain. But where prophetic thought and speech go

beyond these facts of salvation, wood and straw may be mingled

with the gold, silver and precious stones built upon the one

foundation. So he distinguishes his own modest γνώμη from the

ἐπιταγὴ κυρίον (1 Cor. 7:25, 40).” Clarke, Christian Theology,

44—“The authority of Scripture is not one that binds, but one that

sets free. Paul is writing of Scripture when he says: ‘Not that we

have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in

faith ye stand fast’_ (2 Cor. 1:24)_.”

Cremer, in Herzog, Realencyc., 183-203—“The church doctrine is

_that_ the Scriptures are inspired, but it has never been

determined by the church _how_ they are inspired.” Butler,

Analogy, part II, chap. III—“The only question concerning the

truth of Christianity is, whether it be a real revelation, not

whether it be attended with every circumstance which we should

have looked for; and concerning the authority of Scripture,

whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a book of

such sort, and so promulgated, as weak men are apt to fancy a book

containing a divine revelation should. And therefore, neither

obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy of style, nor various readings,

nor early disputes about the authors of particular parts, nor any

other things of the like kind, though they had been much more

considerable than they are, could overthrow the authority of the

Scripture; unless the prophets, apostles, or our Lord had promised

that the book containing the divine revelation should be secure

from these things.” W. Robertson Smith: “If am asked why I receive

the Scriptures as the word of God and as the only perfect rule of

faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant

church: ‘Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming

love of God; because in the Bible alone I find God drawing nigh to

men in Jesus Christ, and declaring his will for our salvation. And

the record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit in my

heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God himself is

able to speak such words to my soul.’ ” The gospel of Jesus Christ

is the ἅπαξ λεγόμενον of the Almighty. See Marcus Dods, The Bible,

its Origin and Nature; Bowne, The Immanence of God, 66-115.

V. Objections to the Doctrine of Inspiration.

In connection with a divine-human work like the Bible, insoluble

difficulties may be expected to present themselves. So long, however, as

its inspiration is sustained by competent and sufficient evidence, these

difficulties cannot justly prevent our full acceptance of the doctrine,

any more than disorder and mystery in nature warrant us in setting aside

the proofs of its divine authorship. These difficulties are lessened with

time; some have already disappeared; many may be due to ignorance, and may

be removed hereafter; those which are permanent may be intended to

stimulate inquiry and to discipline faith.

It is noticeable that the common objections to inspiration are urged, not

so much against the religious teaching of the Scriptures, as against

certain errors in secular matters which are supposed to be interwoven with

it. But if these are proved to be errors indeed, it will not necessarily

overthrow the doctrine of inspiration; it will only compel us to give a

larger place to the human element in the composition of the Scriptures,

and to regard them more exclusively as a text-book of religion. As a rule

of religious faith and practice, they will still be the infallible word of

God. The Bible is to be judged as a book whose one aim is man’s rescue

from sin and reconciliation to God, and in these respects it will still be

found a record of substantial truth. This will appear more fully as we

examine the objections one by one.

“The Scriptures are given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but

how to go to heaven.” Their aim is certainly not to teach science

or history, except so far as science or history is essential to

their moral and religious purpose. Certain of their doctrines,

like the virgin-birth of Christ and his bodily resurrection, are

historical facts, and certain facts, like that of creation, are

also doctrines. With regard to these great facts, we claim that

inspiration has given us accounts that are essentially

trustworthy, whatever may be their imperfections in detail. To

undermine the scientific trustworthiness of the Indian Vedas is to

undermine the religion which they teach. But this only because

their scientific doctrine is an essential part of their religious

teaching. In the Bible, religion is not dependent upon physical

science. The Scriptures aim only to declare the creatorship and

lordship of the personal God. The method of his working may be

described pictorially without affecting this substantial truth.

The Indian cosmogonies, on the other hand, polytheistic or

pantheistic as they are, teach essential untruth, by describing

the origin of things as due to a series of senseless

transformations without basis of will or wisdom.

So long as the difficulties of Scripture are difficulties of form

rather than substance, of its incidental features rather than its

main doctrine, we may say of its obscurities as Isocrates said of

the work of Heraclitus: “What I understand of it is so excellent

that I can draw conclusions from it concerning what I do not

understand.” “If Bengel finds things in the Bible too hard for his

critical faculty, he finds nothing too hard for his believing

faculty.” With John Smyth, who died at Amsterdam in 1612, we may

say: “I profess I have changed, and shall be ready still to

change, for the better”; and with John Robinson, in his farewell

address to the Pilgrim Fathers: “I am verily persuaded that the

Lord hath more truth yet to break forth from his holy word.” See

Luthardt, Saving Truths, 205; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 205 _sq._;

Bap. Rev., April, 1881: art. by O. P. Eaches; Cardinal Newman, in

19th Century, Feb. 1884.

1. Errors in matters of Science.

Upon this objection we remark:

(_a_) We do not admit the existence of scientific error in the Scripture.

What is charged as such is simply truth presented in popular and

impressive forms.

The common mind receives a more correct idea of unfamiliar facts when

these are narrated in phenomenal language and in summary form than when

they are described in the abstract terms and in the exact detail of

science.

The Scripture writers unconsciously observe Herbert Spencer’s

principle of style: Economy of the reader’s or hearer’s

attention,—the more energy is expended upon the form the less

there remains to grapple with the substance (Essays, 1-47). Wendt,

Teaching of Jesus, 1:130, brings out the principle of Jesus’

style: “The greatest clearness in the smallest compass.” Hence

Scripture uses the phrases of common life rather than scientific

terminology. Thus the language of appearance is probably used in

_Gen. 7:19—_“all the high mountains that were under the whole

heaven were covered”—such would be the appearance, even if the

deluge were local instead of universal; in _Josh. 10:12, 13—_“and

the sun stood still”—such would be the appearance, even if the

sun’s rays were merely refracted so as preternaturally to lengthen

the day; in _Ps. 93:1—_“The world also is established, that it

cannot be moved”—such is the appearance, even though the earth

turns on its axis and moves round the sun. In narrative, to

substitute for “sunset” some scientific description would divert

attention from the main subject. Would it be preferable, in the O.

T., if we should read: “When the revolution of the earth upon its

axis caused the rays of the solar luminary to impinge horizontally

upon the retina, _Isaac went out to meditate_” (_Gen. 24:63_)? “Le

secret d’ennuyer est de tout dire.” Charles Dickens, in his

American Notes, 72, describes a prairie sunset: “The decline of

day here was very gorgeous, tinging the firmament deeply with red

and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above us” (quoted by

Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 97). Did Dickens therefore

believe the firmament to be a piece of solid masonry?

Canon Driver rejects the Bible story of creation because the

distinctions made by modern science cannot be found in the

primitive Hebrew. He thinks the fluid state of the earth’s

substance should have been called “surging chaos,” instead of

“waters”_ (Gen. 1:2)_. “An admirable phrase for modern and

cultivated minds,” replies Mr. Gladstone, “but a phrase that would

have left the pupils of the Mosaic writer in exactly the condition

out of which it was his purpose to bring them, namely, a state of

utter ignorance and darkness, with possibly a little ripple of

bewilderment to boot”; see Sunday School Times, April 26, 1890.

The fallacy of holding that Scripture gives in detail all the

facts connected with a historical narrative has led to many

curious arguments. The Gregorian Calendar which makes the year

begin in January was opposed by representing that Eve was tempted

at the outset by an apple, which was possible only in case the

year began in September; see Thayer, Change of Attitude towards

the Bible, 46.

(_b_) It is not necessary to a proper view of inspiration to suppose that

the human authors of Scripture had in mind the proper scientific

interpretation of the natural events they recorded.

It is enough that this was in the mind of the inspiring Spirit. Through

the comparatively narrow conceptions and inadequate language of the

Scripture writers, the Spirit of inspiration may have secured the

expression of the truth in such germinal form as to be intelligible to the

times in which it was first published, and yet capable of indefinite

expansion as science should advance. In the miniature picture of creation

in the first chapter of Genesis, and in its power of adjusting itself to

every advance of scientific investigation, we have a strong proof of

inspiration.

The word “day” in _Genesis 1_ is an instance of this general mode

of expression. It would be absurd to teach early races, that deal

only in small numbers, about the myriads of years of creation. The

child’s object-lesson, with its graphic summary, conveys to his

mind more of truth than elaborate and exact statement would

convey. Conant (_Genesis 2:10_) says of the description of Eden

and its rivers: “Of course the author’s object is not a minute

topographical description, but a general and impressive conception

as a whole.” Yet the progress of science only shows that these

accounts are not less but more true than was supposed by those who

first received them. Neither the Hindu Shasters nor any heathen

cosmogony can bear such comparison with the results of science.

Why change our interpretations of Scripture so often? Answer: We

do not assume to be original teachers of science, but only to

interpret Scripture with the new lights we have. See Dana, Manual

of Geology, 741-746; Guyot, in Bib. Sac., 1855:324; Dawson, Story

of Earth and Man, 32.

This conception of early Scripture teaching as elementary and

suited to the childhood of the race would make it possible, if the

facts so required, to interpret the early chapters of Genesis as

mythical or legendary. God might condescend to “Kindergarten

formulas.” Goethe said that “We should deal with children as God

deals with us: we are happiest under the influence of innocent

delusions.” Longfellow: “How beautiful is youth! how bright it

gleams, With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of

beginnings, story without end, Each maid a heroine, and each man a

friend!” We might hold with Goethe and with Longfellow, if we only

excluded from God’s teaching all essential error. The narratives

of Scripture might be addressed to the imagination, and so might

take mythical or legendary form, while yet they conveyed

substantial truth that could in no other way be so well

apprehended by early man; see Robert Browning’s poem,

“Development,” in Asolando. The Koran, on the other hand, leaves

no room for imagination, but fixes the number of the stars and

declares the firmament to be solid. Henry Drummond: “Evolution has

given us a new Bible.... The Bible is not a book which has been

made,—it has grown.”

Bagehot tells us that “One of the most remarkable of Father

Newman’s Oxford sermons explains how science teaches that the

earth goes round the sun, and how Scripture teaches that the sun

goes round the earth; and it ends by advising the discreet

believer to accept both.” This is mental bookkeeping by double

entry; see Mackintosh, in Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:41.

Lenormant, in Contemp. Rev., Nov. 1879—“While the tradition of the

deluge holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of

all branches of the Aryan race, the monuments and original texts

of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not

afforded any, even distant, allusion to this cataclysm.” Lenormant

here wrongly assumed that the language of Scripture is scientific

language. If it is the language of appearance, then the deluge may

be a local and not a universal catastrophe. G. F. Wright, Ice Age

in North America, suggests that the numerous traditions of the

deluge may have had their origin in the enormous floods of the

receding glacier. In South-western Queensland, the standard gauge

at the Meteorological Office registered 10-¾, 20, 35-¾, 10-¾

inches of rainfall, in all 77-¼ inches, in four successive days.

(_c_) It may be safely said that science has not yet shown any fairly

interpreted passage of Scripture to be untrue.

With regard to the antiquity of the race, we may say that owing to the

differences of reading between the Septuagint and the Hebrew there is room

for doubt whether either of the received chronologies has the sanction of

inspiration. Although science has made probable the existence of man upon

the earth at a period preceding the dates assigned in these chronologies,

no statement of inspired Scripture is thereby proved false.

Usher’s scheme of chronology, on the basis of the Hebrew, puts the

creation 4004 years before Christ. Hales’s, on the basis of the

Septuagint, puts it 5411 B. C. The Fathers followed the LXX. But

the genealogies before and after the flood may present us only

with the names of “leading and representative men.” Some of these

names seem to stand, not for individuals, but for tribes, _e. g._:

_Gen. 10:16_—where Canaan is said to have begotten the Jebusite

and the Amorite; 29—Joktan begot Ophir and Havilah. In _Gen.

10:6_, we read that Mizraim belonged to the sons of Ham. But

Mizraim is a dual, coined to designate the two parts, Upper and

Lower Egypt. Hence a son of Ham could not bear the name of

Mizraim. _Gen. 10:13_ reads: “And Mizraim begat Ludim.” But Ludim

is a plural form. The word signifies a whole nation, and “begat”

is not employed in a literal sense. So in _verses 15, 16: _“Canaan

begat ... the Jebusite,” a tribe; the ancestors of which would

have been called Jebus. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, are

names, not of tribes or nations, but of individuals; see Prof.

Edward König, of Bonn, in S. S. Times, Dec. 14, 1901. E. G.

Robinson: “We may pretty safely go back to the time of Abraham,

but no further.” Bib. Sac., 1899:403—“The lists in Genesis may

relate to families and not to individuals.”

G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lect. II—“When in

David’s time it is said that ‘Shebuel, the son of Gershom, the son

of Moses, was ruler over the treasures’_ (1 Chron. 23:16; 26:24)_,

Gershom was the immediate son of Moses, but Shebuel was separated

by many generations from Gershom. So when Seth is said to have

begotten Enosh when he was 105 years old (_Gen. 5:6_), it is,

according to Hebrew usage, capable of meaning that Enosh was

descended from the branch of Seth’s line which set off at the

105th year, with any number of intermediate links omitted.” The

appearance of completeness in the text may be due to alteration of

the text in the course of centuries; see Bib. Com., 1:30. In the

phrase “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”_ (Mat.

1:1)_ thirty-eight to forty generations are omitted. It may be so

in some of the Old Testament genealogies. There is room for a

hundred thousand years, if necessary (Conant). W. H. Green, in

Bib. Sac., April, 1890:303, and in Independent, June 18, 1891—“The

Scriptures furnish us with no data for a chronological computation

prior to the life of Abraham. The Mosaic records do not fix, and

were not intended to fix, the precise date of the Flood or of the

Creation.... They give a series of specimen lives, with

appropriate numbers attached, to show by selected examples what

was the original term of human life. To make them a complete and

continuous record, and to deduce from them the antiquity of the

race, is to put them to a use they were never intended to serve.”

Comparison with secular history also shows that no such length of

time as 100,000 years for man’s existence upon earth seems

necessary. Rawlinson, in Jour. Christ. Philosophy, 1883:339-364,

dates the beginning of the Chaldean monarchy at 2400 B. C.

Lenormant puts the entrance of the Sanskritic Indians into

Hindustan at 2500 B. C. The earliest Vedas are between 1200 and

1000 B. C. (Max Müller). Call of Abraham, probably 1945 B. C.

Chinese history possibly began as early as 2356 B. C. (Legge). The

old Empire in Egypt possibly began as early as 2650 B. C.

Rawlinson puts the flood at 3600 B. C., and adds 2000 years

between the deluge and the creation, making the age of the world

1886 + 3600 + 2000 = 7486. S. R. Pattison, in Present Day Tracts,

3: no. 13, concludes that “a term of about 8000 years is warranted

by deductions from history, geology, and Scripture.” See also Duke

of Argyll, Primeval Man, 76-128; Cowles on Genesis, 49-80; Dawson,

Fossil Men, 246; Hicks, in Bap. Rev., July, 1884 (15000 years);

Zöckler, Urgeschichte der Erde und des Menschen, 137-163. On the

critical side, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses, 80-102.

Evidence of a geological nature seems to be accumulating, which

tends to prove man’s advent upon earth at least ten thousand years

ago. An arrowhead of tempered copper and a number of human bones

were found in the Rocky Point mines, near Gilman, Colorado, 460

feet beneath the surface of the earth, embedded in a vein of

silver-bearing ore. More than a hundred dollars worth of ore clung

to the bones when they were removed from the mine. On the age of

the earth and the antiquity of man, see G. F. Wright, Man and the

Glacial Epoch, lectures IV and X, and in McClure’s Magazine, June,

1901, and Bib. Sac., 1903:31—“Charles Darwin first talked about

300 million years as a mere trifle of geologic time. His son

George limits it to 50 or 100 million; Croll and Young to 60 or 70

million; Wallace to 28 million; Lord Kelvin to 24 million;

Thompson and Newcomb to only 10 million.” Sir Archibald Geikie, at

the British Association at Dover in 1899, said that 100 million

years sufficed for that small portion of the earth’s history which

is registered in the stratified rocks of the crust.

Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 122, considers vegetable life to

have existed on the planet for at least 100 million years. Warren

Upham, in Pop. Science Monthly, Dec. 1893:153—“How old is the

earth? 100 million years.” D. G. Brinton, in Forum, Dec. 1893:454,

puts the minimum limit of man’s existence on earth at 50,000

years. G. F. Wright does not doubt that man’s presence on this

continent was preglacial, say eleven or twelve thousand years ago.

He asserts that there has been a subsidence of Central Asia and

Southern Russia since man’s advent, and that Arctic seals are

still found in Lake Baikal in Siberia. While he grants that

Egyptian civilization may go back to 5000 B. C., he holds that no

more than 6000 or 7000 years before this are needed as preparation

for history. Le Conte, Elements of Geology, 613—“Men saw the great

glaciers of the second glacial epoch, but there is no reliable

evidence of their existence before the first glacial epoch.

Deltas, implements, lake shores, waterfalls, indicate only 7000 to

10,000 years.” Recent calculations of Prof. Prestwich, the most

eminent living geologist of Great Britain, tend to bring the close

of the glacial epoch down to within 10,000 or 15,000 years.

(_d_) Even if error in matters of science were found in Scripture, it

would not disprove inspiration, since inspiration concerns itself with

science only so far as correct scientific views are necessary to morals

and religion.

Great harm results from identifying Christian doctrine with

specific theories of the universe. The Roman church held that the

revolution of the sun around the earth was taught in Scripture,

and that Christian faith required the condemnation of Galileo;

John Wesley thought Christianity to be inseparable from a belief

in witchcraft; opposers of the higher criticism regard the Mosaic

authorship of the Pentateuch as “articulus stantis vel cadentis

ecclesiæ.” We mistake greatly when we link inspiration with

scientific doctrine. The purpose of Scripture is not to teach

science, but to teach religion, and, with the exception of God’s

creatorship and preserving agency in the universe, no scientific

truth is essential to the system of Christian doctrine.

Inspiration might leave the Scripture writers in possession of the

scientific ideas of their time, while yet they were empowered

correctly to declare both ethical and religious truth. A right

spirit indeed gains some insight into the meaning of nature, and

so the Scripture writers seem to be preserved from incorporating

into their productions much of the scientific error of their day.

But entire freedom from such error must not be regarded as a

necessary accompaniment of inspiration.

2. Errors in matters of History.

To this objection we reply:

(_a_) What are charged as such are often mere mistakes in transcription,

and have no force as arguments against inspiration, unless it can first be

shown that inspired documents are by the very fact of their inspiration

exempt from the operation of those laws which affect the transmission of

other ancient documents.

We have no right to expect that the inspiration of the original

writer will be followed by a miracle in the case of every copyist.

Why believe in infallible copyists, more than in infallible

printers? God educates us to care for his word, and for its

correct transmission. Reverence has kept the Scriptures more free

from various readings than are other ancient manuscripts. None of

the existing variations endanger any important article of faith.

Yet some mistakes in transcription there probably are. In _1

Chron. 22:14_, instead of 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000

talents of silver (= $3,750,000,000), Josephus divides the sum by

ten. Dr. Howard Osgood: “A French writer, Revillout, has accounted

for the differing numbers in Kings and Chronicles, just as he

accounts for the same differences in Egyptian and Assyrian later

accounts, by the change in the value of money and debasement of

issues. He shows the change all over Western Asia.” _Per contra_,

see Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 45.

In _2 Chron. 13:3, 17_, where the numbers of men in the armies of

little Palestine are stated as 400,000 and 800,000, and 500,000

are said to have been slain in a single battle, “some ancient

copies of the Vulgate and Latin translations of Josephus have

40,000, 80,000, and 50,000”; see Annotated Paragraph Bible, _in

loco_. In _2 Chron. 17:14-19_, Jehoshaphat’s army aggregates

1,160,000, besides the garrisons of his fortresses. It is possible

that by errors in transcription these numbers have been multiplied

by ten. Another explanation however, and perhaps a more probable

one, is given under (_d_) below. Similarly, compare _1 Sam. 6:19_,

where 50,070 are slain, with the 70 of Josephus; _2 Sam.

8:4—_“1,700 horsemen,” with _1 Chron. 18:4—_“7,000 horsemen”;

_Esther 9:16_—75,000 slain by the Jews, with LXX—15,000. In _Mat.

27:9_, we have “Jeremiah” for “Zechariah”—this Calvin allows to be

a mistake; and, if a mistake, then one made by the first copyist,

for it appears in all the uncials, all the manuscripts and all the

versions except the Syriac Peshito where it is omitted, evidently

on the authority of the individual transcriber and translator. In

_Acts 7:16—_“the tomb that Abraham bought”—Hackett regards

“Abraham” as a clerical error for “Jacob” (compare _Gen. 33:18,

19_). See Bible Com., 3:165, 249, 251, 317.

(_b_) Other so-called errors are to be explained as a permissible use of

round numbers, which cannot be denied to the sacred writers except upon

the principle that mathematical accuracy was more important than the

general impression to be secured by the narrative.

In _Numbers 25:9_, we read that there fell in the plague 24,000;

_1 Cor. 10:8_ says 23,000. The actual number was possibly

somewhere between the two. Upon a similar principle, we do not

scruple to celebrate the Landing of the Pilgrims on December 22nd

and the birth of Christ on December 25th. We speak of the battle

of Bunker Hill, although at Bunker Hill no battle was really

fought. In _Ex. 12:40, 41_, the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt

is declared to be 430 years. Yet Paul, in _Gal. 3:17_, says that

the giving of the law through Moses was 430 years after the call

of Abraham, whereas the call of Abraham took place 215 years

before Jacob and his sons went down into Egypt, and Paul should

have said 645 years instead of 430. Franz Delitzsch: “The Hebrew

Bible counts four centuries of Egyptian sojourn (_Gen. 15:13-16_),

more accurately, 430 years (_Ex. 12:40_); but according to the LXX

(_Ex. 12:40_) this number comprehends the sojourn in Canaan and

Egypt, so that 215 years come to the pilgrimage in Canaan, and 215

to the servitude in Egypt. This kind of calculation is not

exclusively Hellenistic; it is also found in the oldest

Palestinian Midrash. Paul stands on this side in _Gal. 3:17_,

making, not the immigration into Egypt, but the covenant with

Abraham the _terminus a quo_ of the 430 years which end in the

Exodus from Egypt and in the legislation”; see also Hovey, Com. on

_Gal. 3:17_. It was not Paul’s purpose to write chronology,—so he

may follow the LXX, and call the time between the promise to

Abraham and the giving of the law to Moses 430 years, rather than

the actual 600. If he had given the larger number, it might have

led to perplexity and discussion about a matter which had nothing

to do with the vital question in hand. Inspiration may have

employed current though inaccurate statements as to matters of

history, because they were the best available means of impressing

upon men’s minds truth of a more important sort. In _Gen. 15:13_

the 430 years is called in round numbers 400 years, and so in

_Acts 7:6_.

(_c_) Diversities of statement in accounts of the same event, so long as

they touch no substantial truth, may be due to the meagreness of the

narrative, and might be fully explained if some single fact, now

unrecorded, were only known. To explain these apparent discrepancies would

not only be beside the purpose of the record, but would destroy one

valuable evidence of the independence of the several writers or witnesses.

On the Stokes trial, the judge spoke of two apparently conflicting

testimonies as neither of them necessarily false. On the

difference between Matthew and Luke as to the scene of the Sermon

on the Mount (_Mat. 5:1_; _cf._ _Luke 6:17_) see Stanley, Sinai

and Palestine, 360. As to one blind man or two (_Mat. 20:30_;

_cf._ _Luke 18:35_) see Bliss, Com. on Luke, 275, and Gardiner, in

Bib. Sac., July, 1879:513, 514; Jesus may have healed the blind

men during a day’s excursion from Jericho, and it might be

described as “when they went out,” or “as they drew nigh to

Jericho.” Prof. M. B. Riddle: “_Luke 18:35_ describes the general

movement towards Jerusalem and not the precise detail preceding

the miracle; _Mat. 20:30_ intimates that the miracle occurred

during an excursion from the city,—Luke afterwards telling of the

final departure”; Calvin holds to two meetings; Godet to two

cities; if Jesus healed two blind men, he certainly healed one,

and Luke did not need to mention more than one, even if he knew of

both; see Broadus on _Mat. 20:30_. In _Mat. 8:28_, where Matthew

has two demoniacs at Gadara and Luke has only one at Gerasa,

Broadus supposes that the village of Gerasa belonged to the

territory of the city of Gadara, a few miles to the Southeast of

the lake, and he quotes the case of Lafayette: “In the year 1824

Lafayette visited the United States and was welcomed with honors

and pageants. Some historians will mention only Lafayette, but

others will relate the same visit as made and the same honors as

enjoyed by two persons, namely, Lafayette and his son. Will not

both be right?” On Christ’s last Passover, see Robinson, Harmony,

212; E. H. Sears, Fourth Gospel, Appendix A; Edersheim, Life and

Times of the Messiah, 2:507. Augustine: “Locutiones variæ, sed non

contrariæ: dlversæ, sed non adversæ.”

Bartlett, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1880:46, 47, gives the following

modern illustrations: Winslow’s Journal (of Plymouth Plantation)

speaks of a ship sent out “by Master Thomas Weston.” But Bradford

in his far briefer narrative of the matter, mentions it as sent

“by Mr. Weston and another.” John Adams, in his letters, tells the

story of the daughter of Otis about her father’s destruction of

his own manuscripts. At one time he makes her say: “In one of his

unhappy moments he committed them all to the flames”; yet, in the

second letter, she is made to say that “he was several days in

doing it.” One newspaper says: President Hayes attended the

Bennington centennial; another newspaper says: the President and

Mrs. Hayes; a third: the President and his Cabinet; a fourth: the

President, Mrs. Hayes and a majority of his Cabinet. Archibald

Forbes, in his account of Napoleon III at Sedan, points out an

agreement of narratives as to the salient points, combined with

“the hopeless and bewildering discrepancies as to details,” even

as these are reported by eye-witnesses, including himself,

Bismarck, and General Sheridan who was on the ground, as well as

others.

Thayer, Change of Attitude, 52, speaks of Luke’s “plump

anachronism in the matter of Theudas”—_Acts 5:36—_“For before

those days rose up Theudas.” Josephus, Antiquities, 20:5:1,

mentions an insurrectionary Theudas, but the date and other

incidents do not agree with those of Luke. Josephus however may

have mistaken the date as easily as Luke, or he may refer to

another man of the same name. The inscription on the Cross is

given in _Mark 15:26_, as “The King of the Jews”; in _Luke 23:38_,

as “This is the King of the Jews”; in _Mat. 27:37_, as “This is

Jesus the King of the Jews”; and in _John 19:19_, as “Jesus of

Nazareth the King of the Jews.” The entire superscription, in

Hebrew, Greek and Latin, may have contained every word given by

the several evangelists combined, and may have read “This is Jesus

of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” and each separate report may

be entirely correct so far as it goes. See, on the general

subject, Haley, Alleged Discrepancies; Fisher, Beginnings of

Christianity, 406-412.

(_d_) While historical and archæological discovery in many important

particulars goes to sustain the general correctness of the Scripture

narratives, and no statement essential to the moral and religious teaching

of Scripture has been invalidated, inspiration is still consistent with

much imperfection in historical detail and its narratives “do not seem to

be exempted from possibilities of error.”

The words last quoted are those of Sanday. In his Bampton Lectures

on Inspiration, 400, he remarks that “Inspiration belongs to the

historical books rather as conveying a religious lesson, than as

histories; rather as interpreting, than as narrating plain matter

of fact. The crucial issue is that in these last respects they do

not seem to be exempted from possibilities of error.” R. V.

Foster, Systematic Theology, (Cumberland Presbyterian): The

Scripture writers “were not inspired to do otherwise than to take

these statements as they found them.” Inerrancy is not freedom

from misstatements, but from error defined as “that which misleads

in any serious or important sense.” When we compare the accounts

of _1_ and _2 Chronicles_ with those of _1_ and _2 Kings_ we find

in the former an exaggeration of numbers, a suppression of

material unfavorable to the writer’s purpose, and an emphasis upon

that which is favorable, that contrasts strongly with the method

of the latter. These characteristics are so continuous that the

theory of mistakes in transcription does not seem sufficient to

account for the facts. The author’s aim was to draw out the

religious lessons of the story, and historical details are to him

of comparative unimportance.

H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 108—“Inspiration

did not correct the Chronicler’s historical point of view, more

than it corrected his scientific point of view, which no doubt

made the earth the centre of the solar system. It therefore left

him open to receive documents, and to use them, which idealized

the history of the past, and described David and Solomon according

to the ideas of later times and the priestly class. David’s sins

are omitted, and numbers are multiplied, to give greater dignity

to the earlier kingdom.” As Tennyson’s Idylls of the King give a

nobler picture of King Arthur, and a more definite aspect to his

history, than actual records justify, yet the picture teaches

great moral and religious lessons, so the Chronicler seems to have

manipulated his material in the interest of religion. Matters of

arithmetic were minor matters. “Majoribus intentus est.”

E. G. Robinson: “The numbers of the Bible are characteristic of a

semi-barbarous age. The writers took care to guess enough. The

tendency of such an age is always to exaggerate.” Two Formosan

savages divide five pieces between them by taking two apiece and

throwing one away. The lowest tribes can count only with the

fingers of their hands; when they use their toes as well, it marks

an advance in civilization. To the modern child a hundred is just

as great a number as a million. So the early Scriptures seem to

use numbers with a childlike ignorance as to their meaning.

Hundreds of thousands can be substituted for tens of thousands,

and the substitution seems only a proper tribute to the dignity of

the subject. Gore, in Lux Mundi, 353—“This was not conscious

perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading

back into past records of a ritual development which was really

later. Inspiration excludes conscious deception, but it appears to

be quite consistent with this sort of idealizing; always supposing

that the result read back into the earlier history does represent

the real purpose of God and only anticipates the realization.”

There are some who contend that these historical imperfections are

due to transcription and that they did not belong to the original

documents. Watts, New Apologetic, 71, 111, when asked what is

gained by contending for infallible original autographs if they

have been since corrupted, replies: “Just what we gain by

contending for the original perfection of human nature, though man

has since corrupted it. We must believe God’s own testimony about

his own work. God may permit others to do what, as a holy

righteous God, he cannot do himself.” When the objector declares

it a matter of little consequence whether a pair of trousers were

or were not originally perfect, so long as they are badly rent

just now, Watts replies: “The tailor who made them would probably

prefer to have it understood that the trousers did not leave his

shop in their present forlorn condition. God drops no stitches and

sends out no imperfect work.” Watts however seems dominated by an

_a priori_ theory of inspiration, which blinds him to the actual

facts of the Bible.

Evans, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 40—“Does the _present_

error destroy the inspiration of the Bible as we have it? No. Then

why should the _original_ error destroy the inspiration of the

Bible, as it was first given? There are spots on yonder sun; do

they stop its being the sun? Why, the sun is all the more a sun

for the spots. So the Bible.” Inspiration seems to have permitted

the gathering of such material as was at hand, very much as a

modern editor might construct his account of an army movement from

the reports of a number of observers; or as a modern historian

might combine the records of a past age with all their

imperfections of detail. In the case of the Scripture writers,

however, we maintain that inspiration has permitted no sacrifice

of moral and religious truth in the completed Scripture, but has

woven its historical material together into an organic whole which

teaches all the facts essential to the knowledge of Christ and of

salvation.

When we come to examine in detail what purport to be historical

narratives, we must be neither credulous nor sceptical, but simply

candid and open-minded. With regard for example to the great age

of the Old Testament patriarchs, we are no more warranted in

rejecting the Scripture accounts upon the ground that life in

later times is so much shorter, than we are to reject the

testimony of botanists as to trees of the Sequoia family between

four and five hundred feet high, or the testimony of geologists as

to Saurians a hundred feet long, upon the ground that the trees

and reptiles with which we are acquainted are so much smaller.

Every species at its introduction seems to exhibit the maximum of

size and vitality. Weismann, Heredity, 6, 30—“Whales live some

hundreds of years; elephants two hundred—their gestation taking

two years. Giants prove that the plan upon which man is

constructed can also be carried out on a scale far larger than the

normal one.” E. Ray Lankester, Adv. of Science, 205-237,

286—agrees with Weismann in his general theory. Sir George

Cornewall Lewis long denied centenarism, but at last had to admit

it.

Charles Dudley Warner, in Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1895, gives

instances of men 137, 140, and 192 years old. The German Haller

asserts that “the ultimate limit of human life does not exceed two

centuries: to fix the exact number of years is exceedingly

difficult.” J. Norman Lockyer, in Nature, regards the years of the

patriarchs as lunar years. In Egypt, the sun being used, the unit

of time was a year; but in Chaldea, the unit of time was a month,

for the reason that the standard of time was the moon. Divide the

numbers by twelve, and the lives of the patriarchs come out very

much the same length with lives at the present day. We may ask,

however, how this theory would work in shortening the lives

between Noah and Moses. On the genealogies in Matthew and Luke,

see Lord Harvey, Genealogies of our Lord, and his art, in Smith’s

Bible Dictionary; _per contra_, see Andrews, Life of Christ, 55

_sq._ On Quirinius and the enrollment for taxation (_Luke 2:2_),

see Pres. Woolsey, in New Englander, 1869. On the general subject,

see Rawlinson, Historical Evidences, and essay in Modern

Scepticism, published by Christian Evidence Society, 1:265;

Crooker, New Bible and New Uses, 102-126.

3. Errors in Morality.

(_a_) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good

men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the

inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or

the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.

Instances of this sort are Noah’s drunkenness (_Gen. 9:20-27_);

Lot’s incest (_Gen. 19:30-38_); Jacob’s falsehood (_Gen.

27:19-24_); David’s adultery (_2 Sam. 11:1-4_); Peter’s denial

(_Mat. 26:69-75_). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther’s

vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the

Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine

command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and

prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven

among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old

Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and

we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate

between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in

David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of

gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine

Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to

some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man

has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a

man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most

human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is

of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”

(_b_) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is

frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act

itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.

As Rehab’s faith, not her duplicity (_Josh. 2:1-24_; _cf._ _Heb.

11:31_ and _James 2:25_); Jael’s patriotism, not her treachery

(_Judges 4:17-22_; _cf._ _5:24_). Or did they cast in their lot

with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next

paragraph)? Herder: “The limitations of the pupil are also

limitations of the teacher.” While Dean Stanley praises Solomon

for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:

“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas

of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and

Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has

been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in

persecution.”

(_c_) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively

just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to

be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose

key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.

_Ex. 20:25—_“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses’

permission of divorce and retaliation (_Deut. 24:1_; _cf._ _Mat.

5:31, 32; 19:7-9_; _Ex. 21:24_; _cf._ _Mat. 5:38, 39_). Compare

Elijah’s calling down fire from heaven (_2 K. 1:10-12_) with

Jesus’ refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit

of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (_Luke 9:52-56_); _cf._

Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, on _Mat. 17:8—_“Jesus

only”: “The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood

of enemies requires less strength than to shed one’s own blood,

and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.” Hovey:

“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally

day.” George Washington once gave directions for the

transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a

refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at

variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit

the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather

than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by

barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar’s

unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.

“What did you say to him?” asked the teacher. “We didn’t say

nothing; we just punched his head for him.” This was Old Testament

righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly

rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed

as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compare

_Ex. 20:12_ with _Mat. 5:10; 25:46_. The Old Testament aimed to

fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and

holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other

teaching was postponed. See Peabody, Religion of Nature, 45;

Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April,

1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit.

and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.

When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the

prophetess (_Judges 5:30_), an allusion to the common spoils of

war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man” or in _Prov. 31:6,

7—_“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine

unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty,

and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that

these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr.

Fisher calls the latter “the worst advice to a person in

affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.” They mark past

stages in God’s providential leading of mankind. A higher stage

indeed is already intimated in _Prov. 31:4—_“it is not for kings

to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?” We

see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could

inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men’s

“hardness of heart”_ (Mat. 19:8)_. The Sermon on the Mount is a

great advance on the law of Moses (_Mat. 5:21—_“Ye have heard that

it was said to them of old time”; _cf._ 22—“But I say unto you”).

Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if

Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual,

and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is

conceded in the common phrase: “the new dispensation.” Abraham

Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common

sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the

capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to

sacrifice his son (_Gen. 22:1-19_) was a proper test of Abraham’s

faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical

standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman, “patria potestas” did

not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but

included the child in the parent and made the child equally

responsible for the parent’s sin. But that very command was given

_only_ as a test of faith, and with the intent to make the

intended obedience the occasion of revealing God’s provision of a

substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all

future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine

revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.

(_d_) God’s righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has

the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor

when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or

executors of his purposes.

Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (_137:9_; _cf._ _Is.

13:16-18_ and _Jer. 50:16, 29_); executors, as in the destruction

of the Canaanites (_Deut. 7:2, 16_). In the former case the Psalm

was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of

judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must

distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the

denunciation of God’s righteous judgments; the form was taken from

the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist’s time. See Park, in

Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms,

Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505; _cf._ _2 Tim.

4:14—_“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a

prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the

latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery

that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of

the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold,

Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings

of Christianity, 11-24.

Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which

would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (_c_)

above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the

imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his

purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary

vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command,

though through it the purpose of God as to Christ’s descent was

accomplished.” John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls,

143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings

of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer

necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now

be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of

grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have

been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by

their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral

processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a

steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”

Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the

voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to

God, and interpreted it as a command to slay his son as a burnt

offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the

cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine

summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death;

a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish

between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal

principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor

as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to

regard them as of equal authority.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul,

281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That

utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense

not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—_i. e._, putting

some of his own sinful anger into God’s calm predictions of

judgment. Compare the stern last words of “Zechariah, the son of

Jehoiada, the priest” when stoned to death in the temple court:

“Jehovah look upon it and require it”_ (2 Chron. 24:20-22)_, with

the last words of Jesus: “Father, forgive them, for they know not

what they do”_ (Luke 23:34)_ and of Stephen: “Lord, lay not this

sin to their charge”_ (Acts 7:60)_.

(_e_) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations.

Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is

understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental

description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature;

appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the

higher.

In _Hosea 1:2, 3_, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot

was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended

only as symbolic: compare _Jer. 25:15-18—_“Take this cup ... and

cause all the nations ... to drink.” Literal obedience would have

made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and

would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the

designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible, _in loco_. In _2 K. 6:19_,

Elisha’s deception, so called, was probably only ironical and

benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were

completely in his power. In the _Song of Solomon_, we have, as

Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic

description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we

must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.

Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New

Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is

true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these

motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and

fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed

as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for

God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged

both by Christ and by his apostles: _Mat. 6:20—_“lay up for

yourselves treasures in heaven”; _10:28—_“fear him who is able to

destroy both soul and body in hell”; _Jude 23—_“some save with

fear, snatching them out of the fire.” In this respect the N. T.

does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out

that the royalists got their texts, “the powers that be”_ (Rom.

13:1)_ and “the king as supreme”_ (1 Pet. 2:13)_, from the N. T.,

while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty.

While the O. T. deals with _national_ life, and the discharge of

social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main with

_individuals_ and with their relations to God. On the whole

subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett,

Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by

Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler,

Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.

4. Errors of Reasoning.

(_a_) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid

argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may

be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.

In _Mat. 22:32_, Christ’s argument for the resurrection, drawn

from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is

perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed

premise that the living relation to God which is here implied

cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but

necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God

is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall

rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology.

Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme,

according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is “a syllogism in which the

major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”

(_b_) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from

given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to

ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation or _ad

hominem_ arguments on the part of the Scripture writers.

By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and

processes are correct, though not understood by us. In _Heb. 7:9,

10_ (Levi’s paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a

recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature

illustrates the organic unity of the race. In _Gal. 3:20—_“a

mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with

its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which

proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable.

Paul’s argument here rests on Christ’s divinity as its

foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same

sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot, _in loco_). In

_Gal. 4:21-31_, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and

Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the

law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham.

Abraham’s two wives, and the two classes of people in the two

sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). In _John 10:34—_“I

said, Ye are gods,” the implication is that Judaism was not a

system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism,

a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_).

Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul’s logic will do well

first to suspect his own.

(_c_) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be

proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but

rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular

case.

In _Gal. 3:16—_“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of

one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” Here it is intimated that

the very form of the expression in _Gen. 22:18_, which denotes

unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one

person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all

nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single

word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more

of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New

Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew

or Greek terms for ‘seed’ is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers

as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at

Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I

was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’ ” In _1

Cor. 10:1-6—_“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that

the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is

declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual

fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with

his ancient people. _Per contra_, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories,

98-128.

(_d_) If it should appear however upon further investigation that

Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their

argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are

seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration

may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the

truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.

Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the

utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose

that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of

literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the

truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers

as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they

illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once

clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.” If however

the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof,

we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional

logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration

may have put them in possession of this truth without altering

their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression.

Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings

were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not

materially distort or hide the Person” whose glory they sought to

reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a

certain argument in the epistle was “good enough for the

Galatians.”

5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.

(_a_) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning

of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.

In _Eph. 5:14, _“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon

thee” is an inspired interpretation of _Is. 60:1—_“Arise, shine;

for thy light is come.” _Ps. 68:18—_“Thou hast received gifts

among men”—is quoted in _Eph. 4:8_ as “gave gifts to men.” The

words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for “thou hast

taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.” _Eph.

4:8_ agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of

the Psalm. In _Heb. 11:21, _“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the

top of his staff” (LXX); _Gen. 47:31_ has “bowed himself upon the

bed’s head.” The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief

and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed’s head. Jacob,

too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that “the

apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what

was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous” as to details.

Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of “a reshaping

of his own words by the Author of them.” We prefer, with Calvin,

to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were

insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the

form, the spirit rather than the letter.

(_b_) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint,

the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least

of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of

meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.

_Ps. 4:4_—Heb.: “Tremble, and sin not” (= no longer); LXX: “Be ye

angry, and sin not.”_ Eph. 4:26_ quotes the LXX. The words may

originally have been addressed to David’s comrades, exhorting them

to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are

needed to bring out the meaning of the original. _Ps.

40:6-8—_“Mine ears hast thou opened” is translated in _Heb.

10:5-7—_“a body didst thou prepare for me.” Here the Epistle

quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally: “Mine ears

hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to

the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in

token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is

therefore given in the Epistle: “Thou hast made me thine in body

and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.” A. C. Kendrick: “David, just

entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ

entering on his earthly mission. Hence David’s words are put into

the mouth of Christ. For ‘ears,’ the organs with which we hear and

obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God,

the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word ‘body,’ as the

_general_ instrument of doing God’s will” (Com. on _Heb. 10:5-7_).

(_c_) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not

warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages

whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.

We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab

(_Josh. 2:18_) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of

Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid

her leaven (_Mat. 13:33_) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the

three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the

tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that “the loops of blue = heavenly

grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams’

skins dyed red = Christ’s consecration and devotedness; the

badgers’ skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The

tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (_John 1:14_—ἐσκήνωσεν.

_2:19, 21—_“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of

the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail

of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one

main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may

use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine

authority to our private impressions of their meaning.

_Mat. 25:1-13_—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish

virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved

precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended

persecution from the words in _Luke 14:23—_“constrain them to come

in.” The Inquisition was justified by _Mat. 13:30—_“bind them in

bundles to burn them.” Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the

laity, quoting _Heb. 12:20—_“If even a beast touch the mountain,

it shall be stoned.” A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe

on an evangelizing journey because he read in _John 19:36—_“A bone

of him shall not be broken.” _Mat. 17:8—_“they saw no one, save

Jesus only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus.

The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham’s 318 servants a

prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in

Abraham’s three days’ journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in

the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four

natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All

this is to make a parable “run on all fours.” While we call a hero

a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond

to the lion’s mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.;

Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker,

The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.

(_d_) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper

sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard

absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration.

The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in

the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men’s

moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship

or exegesis.

In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally

unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson,

Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their

correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:

“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the

creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by

the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of

literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory,

allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the

resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision

on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another,

its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and

guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the

utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ

its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they

not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of

rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the

usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to

commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings

of their readers.”

6. Errors in Prophecy.

(_a_) What are charged as such may frequently be explained by remembering

that much of prophecy is yet unfulfilled.

It is sometimes taken for granted that the book of Revelation, for

example, refers entirely to events already past. Moses Stuart, in

his Commentary, and Warren’s Parousia, represent this preterist

interpretation. Thus judged, however, many of the predictions of

the book might seem to have failed.

(_b_) The personal surmises of the prophets as to the meaning of the

prophecies they recorded may have been incorrect, while yet the prophecies

themselves are inspired.

In _1 Pet. 1:10, 11_, the apostle declares that the prophets

searched “what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ

which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the

sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow them.” So

Paul, although he does not announce it as certain, seems to have

had some hope that he might live to witness Christ’s second

coming. See _2 Cor. 5:4—_“not for that we would be unclothed, but

that we would be clothed upon” (ἐπενδύσασθαι—put on the spiritual

body, as over the present one, without the intervention of death);

_1 Thess. 4:15, 17—_“we that are alive, that are left unto the

coming of the Lord.” So _Mat. 2:15_ quotes from _Hosea 11:1—_“Out

of Egypt did I call my son,” and applies the prophecy to Christ,

although Hosea was doubtless thinking only of the exodus of the

people of Israel.

(_c_) The prophet’s earlier utterances are not to be severed from the

later utterances which elucidate them, nor from the whole revelation of

which they form a part. It is unjust to forbid the prophet to explain his

own meaning.

_2 Thessalonians_ was written expressly to correct wrong

inferences as to the apostle’s teaching drawn from his peculiar

mode of speaking in the first epistle. In _2 Thess. 2:2-5_ he

removes the impression “that the day of the Lord is now present”

or “just at hand”; declares that “it will not be, except the

falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed”; reminds

the Thessalonians: “when I was yet with you, I told you these

things.” Yet still, in _verse 1_, he speaks of “the coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him.”

These passages, taken together, show: (1) that the two epistles

are one in their teaching; (2) that in neither epistle is there

any prediction of the immediate coming of the Lord; (3) that in

the second epistle great events are foretold as intervening before

that coming; (4) that while Paul never taught that Christ would

come during his own lifetime, he hoped at least during the earlier

part of his life that it might be so—a hope that seems to have

been dissipated in his later years. (See _2 Tim. 4:6—_“I am

already being offered, and the time of my departure is come.”) We

must remember, however, that there was a “coming of the Lord” in

the destruction of Jerusalem within three or four years of Paul’s

death. Henry Van Dyke: “The point of Paul’s teaching in _1_ and _2

Thess._ is not that Christ is coming to-morrow, but that he is

surely coming.” The absence of perspective in prophecy may explain

Paul’s not at first defining the precise time of the end, and so

leaving it to be misunderstood.

The second Epistle to the Thessalonians, therefore, only makes

more plain the meaning of the first, and adds new items of

prediction. It is important to recognize in Paul’s epistles a

progress in prophecy, in doctrine, in church polity. The full

statement of the truth was gradually drawn out, under the

influence of the Spirit, upon occasion of successive outward

demands and inward experiences. Much is to be learned by studying

the chronological order of Paul’s epistles, as well as of the

other N. T. books. For evidence of similar progress in the

epistles of Peter, compare _1 Pet. 4:7_ with _2 Pet. 3:4_ _sq._

(_d_) The character of prophecy as a rough general sketch of the future,

in highly figurative language, and without historical perspective, renders

it peculiarly probable that what at first sight seem to be errors are due

to a misinterpretation on our part, which confounds the drapery with the

substance, or applies its language to events to which it had no reference.

_James 5:9_ and _Phil. 4:5_ are instances of that large prophetic

speech which regards the distant future as near at hand, because

so certain to the faith and hope of the church. Sanday,

Inspiration, 376-378—“No doubt the Christians of the Apostolic age

did live in immediate expectation of the Second Coming, and that

expectation culminated at the crisis in which the Apocalypse was

written. In the Apocalypse, as in every predictive prophecy, there

is a double element, one part derived from the circumstances of

the present and another pointing forwards to the future.... All

these things, in an exact and literal sense have fallen through

with the postponement of that great event in which they centre.

From the first they were but meant as the imaginative pictorial

and symbolical clothing of that event. What measure of real

fulfilment the Apocalypse may yet be destined to receive we cannot

tell. But in predictive prophecy, even when most closely verified,

the essence lies less in the prediction than in the eternal laws

of moral and religious truth which the fact predicted reveals or

exemplifies.” Thus we recognize both the divinity and the freedom

of prophecy, and reject the rationalistic theory which would

relate the fall of the Beaconsfield government in Matthew’s way:

“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Cromwell, saying:

‘Get you gone, and make room for honest men!’ ” See the more full

statement of the nature of prophecy, on pages 132-141. Also

Bernard, Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.

7. Certain books unworthy of a place in inspired Scripture.

(_a_) This charge may be shown, in each single case, to rest upon a

misapprehension of the aim and method of the book, and its connection with

the remainder of the Bible, together with a narrowness of nature or of

doctrinal view, which prevents the critic from appreciating the wants of

the peculiar class of men to which the book is especially serviceable.

Luther called _James_ “a right strawy epistle.” His constant

pondering of the doctrine of justification by faith alone made it

difficult for him to grasp the complementary truth that we are

justified only by such faith as brings forth good works, or to

perceive the essential agreement of James and Paul. Prof. R. E.

Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3,1898:803, 804—“Luther refused

canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or

composed (as Mark and Luke) under their direction. So he rejected

from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2

Peter, Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2

Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which

he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored 2 and 3 John.” G. P.

Fisher in S. S. Times, Aug. 29, 1891—“Luther, in his preface to

the N. T. (Edition of 1522), gives a list of what he considers as

the principal books of the N. T. These are John’s Gospel and First

Epistle, Paul’s Epistles, especially Romans and Galatians, and

Peter’s First Epistle. Then he adds that ‘St. James’ Epistle is a

right strawy Epistle _compared with them_’—‘_ein recht strohern

Epistel gegen sie,_’ thus characterizing it not absolutely but

only relatively.” Zwingle even said of the Apocalypse: “It is not

a Biblical book.” So Thomas Arnold, with his exaggerated love for

historical accuracy and definite outline, found the Oriental

imagery and sweeping visions of the book of Revelation so bizarre

and distasteful that he doubted their divine authority.

(_b_) The testimony of church history and general Christian experience to

the profitableness and divinity of the disputed books is of greater weight

than the personal impressions of the few who criticize them.

Instance the testimonies of the ages of persecution to the worth

of the prophecies, which assure God’s people that his cause shall

surely triumph. Denney, Studies in Theology, 226—“It is at least

as likely that the individual should be insensible to the divine

message in a book, as that the church should have judged it to

contain such a message if it did not do so.” Milton, Areopagitica:

“The Bible brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against

Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.” Bruce,

Apologetics, 329—“O. T. religion was querulous, vindictive,

philolevitical, hostile toward foreigners, morbidly

self-conscious, and tending to self-righteousness. Ecclesiastes

shows us how we ought _not_ to feel. To go about crying _Vanitas!_

is to miss the lesson it was meant to teach, namely, that the Old

Covenant was vanity—proved to be vanity by allowing a son of the

Covenant to get into so despairing a mood.” Chadwick says that

Ecclesiastes got into the Canon only after it had received an

orthodox postscript.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:193—“Slavish fear and

self-righteous reckoning with God are the unlovely features of

this Jewish religion of law to which the ethical idealism of the

prophets had degenerated, and these traits strike us most visibly

in Pharsiaism.... It was this side of the O. T. religion to which

Christianity took a critical and destroying attitude, while it

revealed a new and higher knowledge of God. For, says Paul, ‘ye

received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye

received the spirit of adoption’_ (Rom. 8:15)_. In unity with God

man does not lose his soul but preserves it. God not only commands

but gives.” Ian Maclaren (John Watson), Cure of Souls, 144—“When

the book of Ecclesiastes is referred to the days of the third

century B. C., then its note is caught, and any man who has been

wronged and embittered by political tyranny and social corruption

has his bitter cry included in the book of God.”

(_c_) Such testimony can be adduced in favor of the value of each one of

the books to which exception is taken, such as Esther, Job, Song of

Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, James, Revelation.

Esther is the book, next to the Pentateuch, held in highest

reverence by the Jews. “Job was the discoverer of infinity, and

the first to see the bearing of infinity on righteousness. It was

the return of religion to nature. Job heard the voice beyond the

Sinai-voice” (Shadow-Cross, 89). Inge, Christian Mysticism, 43—“As

to the Song of Solomon, its influence upon Christian Mysticism has

been simply deplorable. A graceful romance in honor of true love

has been distorted into a precedent and sanction for giving way to

hysterical emotions in which sexual imagery has been freely used

to symbolize the relation between the soul and its Lord.” Chadwick

says that the Song of Solomon got into the Canon only after it had

received an allegorical interpretation. Gladden, Seven Puzzling

Bible Books, 165, thinks it impossible that “the addition of one

more inmate to the harem of that royal rake, King Solomon, should

have been made the type of the spiritual affection between Christ

and his church. Instead of this, the book is a glorification of

pure love. The Shulamite, transported to the court of Solomon,

remains faithful to her shepherd lover, and is restored to him.”

Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“The Song of Solomon, literally

interpreted as a story of true love, proof against the

blandishments of the royal harem, is rightfully in the Canon as a

buttress to the true religion; for whatever made for purity in the

relations of the sexes made for the worship of Jehovah—Baal

worship and impurity being closely associated.” Rutherford,

McCheyne, and Spurgeon have taken more texts from the Song of

Solomon than from any other portion of Scripture of like extent.

Charles G. Finney, Autobiography, 378—“At this time it seemed as

if my soul was wedded to Christ in a sense which I never had any

thought or conception of before. The language of the Song of

Solomon was as natural to me as my breath. I thought I could

understand well the state he was in when he wrote that Song, and

concluded then, as I have ever thought since, that that Song was

written by him after he had been reclaimed from his great

backsliding. I not only had all the fulness of my first love, but

a vast accession to it. Indeed, the Lord lifted me up so much

above anything that I had experienced before, and taught me so

much of the meaning of the Bible, of Christ’s relations and power

and willingness, that I found myself saying to him: I had not

known or conceived that any such thing was true.” On Jonah, see R.

W. Dale, in Expositor, July, 1892, advocating the non-historical

and allegorical character of the book. Bib. Sac.,

10:737-764—“Jonah represents the nation of Israel as emerging

through a miracle from the exile, in order to carry out its

mission to the world at large. It teaches that God is the God of

the whole earth; that the Ninevites as well as the Israelites are

dear to him; that his threatenings of penalty are conditional.”

8. Portions of the Scripture books written by others than the persons to

whom they are ascribed.

The objection rests upon a misunderstanding of the nature and object of

inspiration. It may be removed by considering that

(_a_) In the case of books made up from preëxisting documents, inspiration

simply preserved the compilers of them from selecting inadequate or

improper material. The fact of such compilation does not impugn their

value as records of a divine revelation, since these books supplement each

other’s deficiencies and together are sufficient for man’s religious

needs.

Luke distinctly informs us that he secured the materials for his

gospel from the reports of others who were eye-witnesses of the

events he recorded (_Luke 1:1-4_). The book of Genesis bears marks

of having incorporated documents of earlier times. The account of

creation which begins with _Gen. 2:4_ is evidently written by a

different hand from that which penned _1:1-31_ and _2:1-3_.

Instances of the same sort may be found in the books of

Chronicles. In like manner, Marshall’s Life of Washington

incorporates documents by other writers. By thus incorporating

them, Marshall vouches for their truth. See Bible Com., 1:2, 22.

Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theology, 1:243—“Luther ascribes to faith

critical authority with reference to the Canon. He denies the

canonicity of James, without regarding it as spurious. So of

Hebrews and Revelation, though later, in 1545, he passed a more

favorable judgment upon the latter. He even says of a proof

adduced by Paul in Galatians that it is too weak to hold. He

allows that in external matters not only Stephen but even the

sacred authors contain inaccuracies. The authority of the O. T.

does not seem to him invalidated by the admission that several of

its writings have passed through revising hands. What would it

matter, he asks, if Moses did not write the Pentateuch? The

prophets studied Moses and one another. If they built in much

wood, hay and stubble along with the rest, still the foundation

abides; the fire of the great day shall consume the former; for in

this manner do we treat the writings of Augustine and others.

Kings is far more to be believed than Chronicles. Ecclesiastes is

forged and cannot come from Solomon. Esther is not canonical. The

church may have erred in adopting a book into the Canon. Faith

first requires proof. Hence he ejects the Apocryphal books of the

O. T. from the Canon. So some parts of the N. T. receive only a

secondary, deuterocanonical position. There is a difference

between the word of God and the holy Scriptures, not merely in

reference to the form, but also in reference to the subject

matter.”

H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 94—“The Editor of

the Minor Prophets united in one roll the prophetic fragments

which were in circulation in his time. Finding a fragment without

an author’s name he inserted it in the series. It would not have

been distinguished from the work of the author immediately

preceding. So _Zech. 9:1-4_ came to go under the name of

Zechariah, and _Is. 40-66_ under the name of Isaiah. Reuss called

these ‘anatomical studies.’ ” On the authorship of the book of

Daniel, see W. C. Wilkinson, in Homiletical Review, March,

1902:208, and Oct. 1902:305; on Paul, see Hom. Rev., June,

1902:501; on 110th Psalm, Hom. Rev., April, 1902:309.

(_b_) In the case of additions to Scripture books by later writers, it is

reasonable to suppose that the additions, as well as the originals, were

made by inspiration, and no essential truth is sacrificed by allowing the

whole to go under the name of the chief author.

_Mark 16:9-20_ appears to have been added by a later hand (see

English Revised Version). The Eng. Rev. Vers. also brackets or

segregates a part of _verse 3_ and the whole of _verse 4_ in _John

5_ (the moving of the water by the angel), and the whole passage

_John 7:53-8:11_ (the woman taken in adultery). Westcott and Hort

regard the latter passage as an interpolation, probably “Western”

in its origin (so also _Mark 16:9-20_). Others regard it as

authentic, though not written by John. The closing chapter of

Deuteronomy was apparently added after Moses’ death—perhaps by

Joshua. If criticism should prove other portions of the Pentateuch

to have been composed after Moses’ time, the inspiration of the

Pentateuch would not be invalidated, so long as Moses was its

chief author or even the original source and founder of its

legislation (_John 5:46—_“he wrote of me”). Gore, in Lux Mundi,

355—“Deuteronomy may be a republication of the law, in the spirit

and power of Moses, and put dramatically into his mouth.”

At a spot near the Pool of Siloam, Manasseh is said to have

ordered that Isaiah should be sawn asunder with a wooden saw. The

prophet is again sawn asunder by the recent criticism. But his

prophecy opens (_Is. 1:1_) with the statement that it was composed

during a period which covered the reigns of four kings—Uzziah,

Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah—nearly forty years. In so long a time

the style of a writer greatly changes. _Chapters 40-66_ may have

been written in Isaiah’s later age, after he had retired from

public life. Compare the change in the style of Zechariah, John

and Paul, with that in Thomas Carlyle and George William Curtis.

On Isaiah, see Smyth, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ; Bib.

Sac., Apr. 1881:230-253; also July, 1881; Stanley, Jewish Ch.,

2:646, 647; Nägelsbach, Int. to Lange’s Isaiah.

For the view that there were two Isaiahs, see George Adam Smith,

Com. on Isaiah, 2:1-25: Isaiah flourished B. C. 740-700. The last

27 chapters deal with the captivity (598-538) and with Cyrus

(550), whom they name. The book is not one continuous prophecy,

but a number of separate orations. Some of these claim to be

Isaiah’s own, and have titles, such as “The vision of Isaiah the

son of Amos”_ (1:1)_; “The word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw”_

(2:1)_. But such titles describe only the individual prophecies

they head. Other portions of the book, on other subjects and in

different styles, have no titles at all. Chapters _40-66_ do not

claim to be his. There are nine citations in the N. T. from the

disputed chapters, but none by our Lord. None of these citations

were given in answer to the question: Did Isaiah write chapters

_44-66_? Isaiah’s name is mentioned only for the sake of

reference. Chapters _44-66_ set forth the exile and captivity as

already having taken place. Israel is addressed as ready for

deliverance. Cyrus is named as deliverer. There is no grammar of

the future like Jeremiah’s. Cyrus is pointed out as proof that

_former_ prophecies of deliverance are at last coming to pass. He

is not presented as a prediction, but as a proof that prediction

is being fulfilled. The prophet could not have referred the

heathen to Cyrus as proof that prophecy had been fulfilled, had he

not been visible to them in all his weight of war. Babylon has

still to fall before the exiles can go free. But chapters _40-66_

speak of the coming of Cyrus as past, and of the fall of Babylon

as yet to come. Why not use the prophetic perfect of both, if both

were yet future? Local color, language and thought are all

consistent with exilic authorship. All suits the exile, but all is

foreign to the subjects and methods of Isaiah, for example, the

use of the terms _righteous_ and _righteousness_. Calvin admits

exilic authorship (on _Is. 55:3_). The passage _56:9-57_, however,

is an exception and is preëxilic. _40-48_ are certainly by one

hand, and may be dated 555-538. 2nd Isaiah is not a unity, but

consists of a number of pieces written before, during, and after

the exile, to comfort the people of God.

(_c_) It is unjust to deny to inspired Scripture the right exercised by

all historians of introducing certain documents and sayings as simply

historical, while their complete truthfulness is neither vouched for nor

denied.

An instance in point is the letter of Claudius Lysias in _Acts

23:26-30_—a letter which represents his conduct in a more

favorable light than the facts would justify—for he had not

learned that Paul was a Roman when he rescued him in the temple

(_Acts 21:31-33; 22:26-29_). An incorrect statement may be

correctly reported. A set of pamphlets printed in the time of the

French Revolution might be made an appendix to some history of

France without implying that the historian vouched for their

truth. The sacred historians may similarly have been inspired to

use only the material within their reach, leaving their readers by

comparison with other Scriptures to judge of its truthfulness and

value. This seems to have been the method adopted by the compiler

of _1_ and _2 Chronicles_. The moral and religious lessons of the

history are patent, even though there is inaccuracy in reporting

some of the facts. So the assertions of the authors of the Psalms

cannot be taken for absolute truth. The authors were not sinless

models for the Christian,—only Christ is that. But the Psalms

present us with a record of the actual experience of believers in

the past. It has its human weakness, but we can profit by it, even

though it expresses itself at times in imprecations. _Jeremiah

20:7—_“O lord, thou hast deceived me”—may possibly be thus

explained.

9. Sceptical or fictitious Narratives.

(_a_) Descriptions of human experience may be embraced in Scripture, not

as models for imitation, but as illustrations of the doubts, struggles,

and needs of the soul. In these cases inspiration may vouch, not for the

correctness of the views expressed by those who thus describe their mental

history, but only for the correspondence of the description with actual

fact, and for its usefulness as indirectly teaching important moral

lessons.

The book of Ecclesiastes, for example, is the record of the mental

struggles of a soul seeking satisfaction without God. If written

by Solomon during the time of his religious declension, or near

the close of it, it would constitute a most valuable commentary

upon the inspired history. Yet it might be equally valuable,

though composed by some later writer under divine direction and

inspiration. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 97—“To

suppose Solomon the author of Ecclesiastes is like supposing

Spenser to have written In Memoriam.” Luther, Keil, Delitzsch,

Ginsburg, Hengstenberg all declare it to be a production of later

times (330 B. C.). The book shows experience of misgovernment. An

earlier writer cannot write in the style of a later one, though

the later can imitate the earlier. The early Latin and Greek

Fathers quoted the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon as by Solomon; see

Plumptre, Introd. to Ecclesiastes, in Cambridge Bible. Gore, in

Lux Mundi, 355—“Ecclesiastes, though like the book of Wisdom

purporting to be by Solomon, may be by another author.... ‘A pious

fraud’ cannot be inspired; an idealizing personification, as a

normal type of literature, can be inspired.” Yet Bernhard Schäfer,

Das Buch Koheleth, ably maintains the Solomonic authorship.

(_b_) Moral truth may be put by Scripture writers into parabolic or

dramatic form, and the sayings of Satan and of perverse men may form parts

of such a production. In such cases, inspiration may vouch, not for the

historical truth, much less for the moral truth of each separate

statement, but only for the correspondence of the whole with ideal fact;

in other words, inspiration may guarantee that the story is true to

nature, and is valuable as conveying divine instruction.

It is not necessary to suppose that the poetical speeches of Job’s

friends were actually delivered in the words that have come down

to us. Though Job never had had a historical existence, the book

would still be of the utmost value, and would convey to us a vast

amount of true teaching with regard to the dealings of God and the

problem of evil. Fact is local; truth is universal. Some novels

contain more truth than can be found in some histories. Other

books of Scripture, however, assure us that Job was an actual

historical character (_Ez. 14:14_; _James 5:11_). Nor is it

necessary to suppose that our Lord, in telling the parable of the

Prodigal Son (_Luke 15:11-32_) or that of the Unjust Steward

(_16:1-8_), had in mind actual persons of whom each parable was an

exact description.

Fiction is not an unworthy vehicle of spiritual truth. Parable,

and even fable, may convey valuable lessons. In _Judges 9:14, 15_,

the trees, the vine, the bramble, all talk. If truth can be

transmitted in myth and legend, surely God may make use of these

methods of communicating it, and even though _Gen. 1-3_ were

mythical it might still be inspired. Aristotle said that poetry is

truer than history. The latter only tells us that certain things

happened. Poetry presents to us the permanent passions,

aspirations and deeds of men which are behind all history and

which make it what it is; see Dewey, Psychology, 197. Though Job

were a drama and Jonah an apologue, both might be inspired. David

Copperfield, the Apology of Socrates, Fra Lippo Lippi, were not

the authors of the productions which bear their names, but

Dickens, Plato and Browning, rather. Impersonation is a proper

method in literature. The speeches of Herodotus and Thucydides

might be analogues to those in Deuteronomy and in the Acts, and

yet these last might be inspired.

The book of Job could not have been written in patriarchal times.

Walled cities, kings, courts, lawsuits, prisons, stocks, mining

enterprises, are found in it. Judges are bribed by the rich to

decide against the poor. All this belongs to the latter years of

the Jewish Kingdom. Is then the book of Job all a lie? No more

than Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the parable of the Good

Samaritan are all a lie. The book of Job is a dramatic poem. Like

Macbeth or the Ring and the Book, it is founded in fact. H. P.

Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 101—“The value of the

book of Job lies in the spectacle of a human soul in its direst

affliction working through its doubts, and at last humbly

confessing its weakness and sinfulness in the presence of its

Maker. The inerrancy is not in Job’s words or in those of his

friends, but in the truth of the picture presented. If Jehovah’s

words at the end of the book are true, then the first thirty-five

chapters are not infallible teaching.”

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 355, suggests in a similar manner that the

books of Jonah and of Daniel may be dramatic compositions worked

up upon a basis of history. George Adam Smith, in the Expositors’

Bible, tells us that Jonah flourished 780 B. C., in the reign of

Jeroboam II. Nineveh fell in 606. The book implies that it was

written after this (_3:3_—“Nineveh _was_ an exceeding great

city”). The book does not claim to be written by Jonah, by an

eye-witness, or by a contemporary. The language has Aramaic forms.

The date is probably 300 B. C. There is an absence of precise

data, such as the sin of Nineveh, the journey of the prophet

thither, the place where he was cast out on land, the name of the

Assyrian king. The book illustrates God’s mission of prophecy to

the Gentiles, his care for them, their susceptibility to his word.

Israel flies from duty, but is delivered to carry salvation to the

heathen. Jeremiah had represented Israel as swallowed up and cast

out (_Jer. 51:34, 44 __sq.__—_“Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon

hath devoured me ... he hath, like a monster, swallowed me up, he

hath filled his maw with my delicacies; he hath cast me out.... I

will bring forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed

up.”) Some tradition of Jonah’s proclaiming doom to Nineveh may

have furnished the basis of the apologue. Our Lord uses the story

as a mere illustration, like the homiletic use of Shakespeare’s

dramas. “As Macbeth did,” “As Hamlet said,” do not commit us to

the historical reality of Macbeth or of Hamlet. Jesus may say as

to questions of criticism: “Man, who made me a judge or a divider

over you?”_ _“I came not to judge the world, but to save the

world”_ (Luke 12:14; John 12:47)_. He had no thought of

confirming, or of not confirming, the historic character of the

story. It is hard to conceive the compilation of a psalm by a man

in Jonah’s position. It is not the prayer of one inside the fish,

but of one already saved. More than forty years ago President

Woolsey of Yale conceded that the book of Jonah was probably an

apologue.

(_c_) In none of these cases ought the difficulty of distinguishing man’s

words from God’s words, or ideal truth from actual truth, to prevent our

acceptance of the fact of inspiration; for in this very variety of the

Bible, combined with the stimulus it gives to inquiry and the general

plainness of its lessons, we have the very characteristics we should

expect in a book whose authorship was divine.

The Scripture is a stream in which “the lamb may wade and the

elephant may swim.” There is need both of literary sense and of

spiritual insight to interpret it. This sense and this insight can

be given only by the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, who

inspired the various writings to witness of him in various ways,

and who is present in the world to take of the things of Christ

and show them to us (_Mat. 28:20_; _John 16:13, 14_). In a

subordinate sense the Holy Spirit inspires us to recognize

inspiration in the Bible. In the sense here suggested we may

assent to the words of Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst at the

inauguration of William Adams Brown as Professor of Systematic

Theology in the Union Theological Seminary, November 1,

1898—“Unfortunately we have condemned the word ‘inspiration’ to a

particular and isolated field of divine operation, and it is a

trespass upon current usage to employ it in the full urgency of

its Scriptural intent in connection with work like your own or

mine. But the word voices a reality that lies so close to the

heart of the entire Christian matter that we can ill afford to

relegate it to any single or technical function. Just as much

to-day as back at the first beginnings of Christianity, those who

would _declare_ the truths of God must be inspired to _behold_ the

truths of God.... The only irresistible persuasiveness is that

which is born of vision, and it is _not_ vision to be able merely

to describe what some seer has seen, though it were Moses or Paul

that was the seer.”

10. Acknowledgment of the non-inspiration of Scripture teachers and their

writings.

This charge rests mainly upon the misinterpretation of two particular

passages:

(_a_) Acts 23:5 (“I wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest”) may

be explained either as the language of indignant irony: “I would not

recognize such a man as high priest”; or, more naturally, an actual

confession of personal ignorance and fallibility, which does not affect

the inspiration of any of Paul’s final teachings or writings.

Of a more reprehensible sort was Peter’s dissimulation at Antioch,

or practical disavowal of his convictions by separating or

withdrawing himself from the Gentile Christians (_Gal. 2:11-13_).

Here was no public teaching, but the influence of private example.

But neither in this case, nor in that mentioned above, did God

suffer the error to be a final one. Through the agency of Paul,

the Holy Spirit set the matter right.

(_b_) 1 Cor. 7:12, 10 (“I, not the Lord”; “not I, but the Lord”). Here the

contrast is not between the apostle inspired and the apostle uninspired,

but between the apostle’s words and an actual saying of our Lord, as in

Mat. 5:32; 19:3-10; Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18 (Stanley on Corinthians). The

expressions may be paraphrased:—“With regard to this matter no express

command was given by Christ before his ascension. As one inspired by

Christ, however, I give you my command.”

Meyer on _1 Cor. 7:10_—“Paul distinguishes, therefore, here and in

verses 12, 25, not between _his own_ and _inspired_ commands, but

between those which proceeded from his own (God-inspired)

subjectivity and those which Christ himself supplied by his

objective word.” “Paul knew from the living voice of tradition

what commands Christ had given concerning divorce.” Or if it

should be maintained that Paul here disclaims inspiration,—a

supposition contradicted by the following δοκῶ—“I think that I

also have the Spirit of God”_ (verse 40)_,—it only proves a single

exception to his inspiration, and since it is expressly mentioned,

and mentioned only once, it implies the inspiration of all the

rest of his writings. We might illustrate Paul’s method, if this

were the case, by the course of the New York Herald when it was

first published. Other journals had stood by their own mistakes

and had never been willing to acknowledge error. The Herald gained

the confidence of the public by correcting every mistake of its

reporters. The result was that, when there was no confession of

error, the paper was regarded as absolutely trustworthy. So Paul’s

one acknowledgment of non-inspiration might imply that in all

other cases his words had divine authority. On Authority in

Religion, see Wilfred Ward, in Hibbert Journal, July,

1903:677-692.