Full Text for Verbal Inspiration - a Stumbling Block for the Jews and Foolishness to the Greeks, part 8 (Text)

. end to the readers' patience. So we shall bring our ex nina- tion of the first objection to an end with the present writing. No. 18, When the moderns ask us co yield up ~rl l I pi] ,- tion, frankly to admit that the holy writers made many mistakes, .w ~"lL~er ;..,; 6~VC ~l".: il~r1~ ;e"l:l .'~w>.' tv be offended and keep men from being forced into skepticism, they commit a psychological fallacy. - The moderns actually make this proposaL "Take the Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 9 utterances which trench on the domain of science," insist that these utterances are true, "and men like Tyndall and Huxley are forced into skepticism. . .. Because there are some things in the Bible he cannot be quite sure of, he gives it all up." (J. M. Gibson.) We must "shorten our line of defense," give up the teaching that "the very words of Scripture are the Word of God," if we would gain men whose "Weltanschauung, or philosophical outlook, is different" (J. Aberly). See pages 261 ff. and 404 above for these and other similar statements. "Seelenmordende V erbal- inspiration" is the term used by Dr. Johannes Meinhold (Pastoral- blaetter, 1933, p. 443). R. F. Horton formulates the appeasement proposal thus: "If we feel called upon to invent an unfounded dogma that this book is, as it were, written by God, or at least guaranteed against all errors, scientific, chronological, historical, or literary, we must remember the responsibility which we in- cur; the attacks on revelation which are made on the ground of that fictitious theory are attacks of our own creation. If, on the other hand, we will allow this Book of Genesis to be precisely what it is, without claiming for it anything more than it evidently claims for itself, we shall find that the quibbles of Infidelity will fall silent. . .. It is quite possible that the Book of Jonah may by its obvious inspiration reach the conscience of a reader and turn him to God; but if you start with the demand that the episode of the fish is a matter of faith, you at once close the book and its message to the modern mind. . .. The frank surrender of that hurtful dogma - of the worm-eaten dogmatism of the guardians of the letter of Scripture - will be the beginning of a new era of faith in the Bible and its revelation." (Revelation and the Bible, pp.59, 259, 262, 405.) This demand that the Chur ch surrender the teaching of Verbal, Plenary Inspiration, of the infallibility of Scripture, as being a hurtful dogma originates in fallacious thinking. The demand operates, for one thing, with a logical fallacy. This is the demand: The Bible contains many mistakes; therefore honesty and wisdom require that the Church no longer insist on the in- fallibility of Scripture. That would be a perfectly good argument if the premise were correct. But the premise is false, as we have demonstrated ad nauseam. So we need not discuss this logical fallacy any longer. What we are going to discuss is the psy- chological mistake the appeasers are making. 1) They do not understand the psychology of the Bible- theologian, the Bible-Christian . We cannot surrender one w ord of Holy Scripture. Weare convinced that every word of Scripture is a word of God. We should be guilty of high treason if we gave up one jot or tittle of the oracles of God, if we would try to gain 10 Verbal Inspiration- a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. the good will of the infidel or unbeliever by surrendering certain provinces of the holy land. So, when the moderns hold their appeasement conferences, they need not ask the Bible-Christians to attend. Their passionate appeal to us to save the Bible and the cause of the Church by yielding up parts of the Bible makes no impression upon us. The only impression it makes upon us is that we are filled with indignation for being asked to do such a thing. We can understand why the liberals attend the appeasement conference. They look upon the Bible as a purely human book. They feel at liberty to censor and edit it to the liking of themselves and the others. And we can somewhat understand the attitude of the conservatives among the moderns. They have convinced them- selves that those portions of Scripture which offend them and o.~'lers are not Gc -- : W o:d. lUld so the~ . ~el' e t lele' the---. in order not to offend the unbeliever. What we cannot under- stand is that they should think for one moment that those who have a holy awe of Scripture as being throughout God's Word would make common cause with those who set out to ravage and despoil it. Are the moderns really asking the Bible-theologians to be- come their allies? They are not, indeed, going to put it in these bald terms. We know that you believe in Verbal Inspiration, but ... ~ ar= aski"'a; you to sacrifice your conscience. But they do expect that their loud cry that the educated classes cannot accept the Bible as it is will make some impression on us, raise the thought in our minds whether it might not be better not to hold out so stubbornly for Verbal Inspiration.155) And they hope to soften our resistance with the argument that these "mistakes" are, after all, matters of minor importance. They used that argu- ment on themselves; they argued themselves into the belief that m~ttero: wh~~l. dr .."ot rH-rect1u co"""~rn salvation lie outside of Inspiration. They hope that such considerations will influence our attitude, too. Do they know so little of the psychology of t! .~ B:L -;'~-Christian? They misjudge us and (2) they misjudge the unbeliever. If they think they can win the doubter and unbeliever by making concessions, they betray their ignorance of the psychology of the . . 15.!» •• The~.e tac~ics have. proved .eff~tive. Dr: Pi~per: "The !hre::t~s unerea lat ~ C. 'ch "Ill 10::;e Its :Ln...fiuenc", In .... e v ·ld, raIl meo contempt, and drag O.lt L mise~_._le c_-Jtence if it will not submit to so-called science as the supreme authority and pennit it to purge and tify .• ~ cr . ;tia! .. )ctrrn . . .. This threat has jnt;mid"t..,d tl", entire modern so-called 'conressional,' 'conservati.ve' _2olooJ _ M __ ..Jrn __ oio6., has made an appeasement with science." (Proc., Delegate Sy'IWd, 1899, p.34.) Verbal Inspiration - a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 11 skeptic. His mind is so constituted that, if he gains the right to repudiate one statement, one teaching of Scripture, he will claim the right to repudiate two and more statements and teachings. And you cannot blame him for that. If any man is given the right to reject that which does not agree with his "scientific" mind or with his reason, he is not going to stop at the "mistakes" of the Bible, but will repudiate anything that is offensive to him. How are you going to stop him from deleting the doctrine of the deity of Christ and of the vicarious satisfaction and all other teachings which are offensive to his carnal reason? Start out to appease the skeptic, and you will have to yield one province after the other. Those who think that, if they yield one half of the Bible to the unbeliever, he will gladly accept the other half do not know the workings of the unbelieving mind.156) You aim to win the doubting, skeptical mind for the Bible by making these concessions? You are turning it against the Bible! By all the laws of psychology the man who has learned (from you!) that half of the Bible is untrustworthy will conclude that the other half is not much better. "The clever skeptic can ask such awk- ward questions as these; 'If, as you allege, there are errors in the Bible in some things, why not in others - why not in all? If it has erred in an indefinite number of things, why should I believe it in others or be asked to receive it as true in anything?' " (M'Intosh, op. cit., p.471.) He will be filled with suspicion of the Bible; yea, he will come to the inescapable conclusion that the Bible is a lying book. The skeptic does not have to be particularly clever to make this deduction. Common sense tells him that, "if the Bible is not God's book, it is a book of miserable lies. Why? It claims to be the Word of God. But one who assumes a name to which he is not entitled is a swindler and cheat." (Proc. Iowa Dist., 1891, pp. 26,31.) The skeptic who reasons thus has logic on his side, and because of his bad psychology he is quick to operate with this good logic; he thanks the moderns for the con- cession they are making; they are catering to his innate hatred of the Bible.157) 156) H. M'Intosh; "Their [the moderns'] theory of indefinite erro- neousness, by setting reason above revelation and making man's own individual consciousness the standard and judge in the ultimate issue of what is true and v,hat is false in Holy Writ, warrants every man in accepting or rejecting just as much or as little of it as he thinks fit, or none at all should he think best." (Is Christ Infallible and the Bible True? P.456.) 157) And if he is lost, the appeasers will be held accountable. N. R. Best cries out; "Only God knows how many souls that folly [the doc- trine of plenary inspiration] has ruined!" The truth of the matter is that "the price of a lowered and unsettling view of Scripture has been, and is being, paid for by the eternal loss of countless souls" (H. M'Intosh, 12 Verbal Inspiration- a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. These men surely are adepts in the arts of sophistry. They know how to mix up truth and falsehood for the purpose of proving a lie. It is certainly a fact, an undeniable truth, that many intel- lectuals take occasion to stumble at the Word because of the "mis- takes" in the Bible. That is mixed up with the lie that Scripture is mistaken in many of its statements and with the lie that the theologians invented the dogma of verbal inspiration. And that is done in the interest of the lying delusion that men can be won for the truth, for the Church, by the suppression of the truth.158) 3) The moderns should study and apply the psychological ap- proach and method which the Holy Ghost employs. He does not appeal to the thinking of the natural mind, which is and remains enmity against God and His Word. He creates a new way of thinking - the psychology of the Christian which bows before every word of God. And He creates this new psychology simply by preaching the Word. Let us win the skeptic and confirm the doubting Christian through the testimony of the Bible itself! The divine power inheres in the words written in the Bible; and when we confront the doubter and unbeliever with the bare, simple statements of Scripture, we have the power and persuasiveness of God on our side. Let that work on the doubter. That will, by the grace of God, win the consent of men despite the protest of their old way of thinking. - And her e are the appeasers laying aside the sword of the Spir it, the quick and powerful Word, and trying to win the battle by r etreat ing before th e enemy, by con - ceding the partial erroneousness of Scripture. It is unspeakable folly, and it must be "paid for by the eternal loss of countless souls." No. 19. We must take the time to examine one more sophistry. We have promised, in Footnote 10, that we would sometime look into the "tu quoque" argument, and though the sophistry back of it is so bald that it seems a waste of time and paper further to uncover it, we must keep our engagement. In support of the thesis that reason has the right to sit in op. cit., p. 457) . The price is paid by those who permit the objections of carnal wisdom to uproot their faith or strengthen them in their unbelief. But God will demand their blood at the hand of those who nourished their doubt or unbelief. (See pages 425 f . above; also CONe. THEOL. MTHLY., VIII, p. 348.) 158) It is a delusion. Dr. Walther: "We are firmly convin ced that it is not possible to better the present apostate world through the lie that the divinely revealed truth is in fine accord with the wisdom of this world; its only help lies in this, that the divine foolishness, the old unadulterated Gospel, be preached to it." (Lehre und Wehre, 1875, p . 41. See Pieper, Chr. Dog. I, p.191.) It is a delusion to think that faith can be really helped by establishing harmony between the Bible and science (see Walther's statement, loco cit.); and a wicked and cruel deception is being practiced when this harmony is established by canceling Scripture statements . Can a lie serve faith? Verbal Inspiration--a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 13 judgment on Scripture and to reject any statement which is "un- reasonable" 159l this argument is advanced: Since God has given men reason, He wants them to use it as their guide through Scripture; and when you Bible-theologians employ reason in studying Scripture, you are supporting the thesis that r eason has the right to judge Scripture. N. R. Best: "It may seem a jesting 'tu quoque' to say of the literally orthodox in Bible-studies that they are more inveterate rationalists than the higher critics, whom they so unanimously condemn. But it is not a jest; it is the easily observable fact. Confronting two seemingly disagreeing portions of Scripture, the conservative weaves a great net of cross references by which he drags the questioned paragraph or chapter into a decidedly different orientation. . .. The result reached is the product of a purely human exercise in the art of rationalizing the varied materials of the Bible. . . . He puckers his brow for hours at a time attempting to range all the data of the story in one con- sistent chain. He has a perfect right to. But it's reason he's using; he's an undeniable rationalist ... _ Certainly the reflective and the scrupulous among students using these methods of exposition cannot pretend to abide by the dictum that men have no right to invade the realm of divine revelation with reason's readjust- ments .. . _ The very nature of reason, as God has embedded it in the intelligence of men, gives it a houndlike scent for what is not plain, for what is apparently altogether non-understandable. It is preposterous to put all this artificial enmity between reason and revelation. God gave both, and He prepared the one that it might receive the other. He has fitted each to each." (Inspiration, pp.1l7-121.)16ol That is sophistry. It is certainly true that we employ our reason in studying Scripture. God certainly wants us to use our intelligence in order to understand the meaning of the words He speaks to us. You must be able to think logically in order to 159) R. F. Horton: "The dead are not raised; and such magical prodigies as the transportation of a body through the air are dishonoring to the general tone, the high and spiritual tone, of the narrative. . . . Faith must not be encumbered with demands which strain the reason." (Op. cit., p . 284 f.) 160) Similarly S. P. Cadman: "The Bible is addressed to human intelligence. . .. The Scriptures themselves do not outlaw man's judg- ment on their contents. Why should we do so?" (Answers to Every- day Questions, p. 258.) G . L . Raymond: "The very acceptance of revela- tion as a guide to life involves the use of reason." (The Psychology of Inspiration, p.319. ) R. T. Stamm: "We must never forget that it is im- possible to construct a systematic theology without employing the same human reason which too many of our writers have tried to deprive of all validity at the outset." (Luth. Church Quart., April. 1940, p. 129.) Ingersoll: "If God did not intend I should think, why did He give me a 'thinker'?" (Lectures, p.383.) 14 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. get the import of any statement in Scripture or any other book. That is the God-pleasing usus rati.onis ministeriaLis, or organicus. But it is a transparent fallacy to deduce from the fact that a cel'tain use of reason is required that any other use of reason is permissible, the usus rationis magisterialis, by which reason is permitted to criticize and correct Scripture . People ought to be able to understand that there is a great difference between saying that we must use our reason in order to get the meaning and sense of a Scripture statement and saying that reason has the right to label that statement as nonsense.161) Scripture does not authorize the usus magisterialis by calling for the usus ministerialis (see Col. 2: 8; 2 Cor. 10: 5), nor does reason itself justify it. Reason being the judge, Best's and Stamm's argument is based on a fallacy. To use harsher language, it is a sophistical argument. It operates with an ambiguous term. When these men say: Is not the Bible addr essed to human intelligence? we shall not go on with the argument till they specify very exactly what the Bible, according to their view, expects human intelligence and rea- son to do. They go so far, by the way, as to contend that Scripture itself submits its teaching to the judgment of reason. They quote Is. 1: 18! Best: "Every page of the Bible might be justly inscr ibed with the invitation which stands in living letters on the first page of the prophet Isaiah: 'Come now and let us reason together, saith Jehovah.' Reason is God's joy - not His 'black beast.''' (Loc. cit.) Paine, too, cites this Scripture: "'Come, now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.'. .. It is impossible to reason upon things not comprehensible by reason; and therefore, if you keep to your text, . .. you must admit a religion to which reason can apply, and this certainly is not the Christian religion." (Life and Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 6: "Age of Reason.") Another case of sophistry - twisting the meaning of a word, and, as it happens, of a word which does not occur in Scripture in the sense here attachifd to it. Our word does not really mean "to reason," but it means to judge, to establish the right of a case. The English translation has misled many. But let that go. We are willing to accept Moffatt's translation: "Come, let me put it thus, the 161) Quenstedt understood the difference : "Theology does not con- demn the use of reason, but its abuse and its affectation of directorship, or its magisterial use, as normative and decisive in divine things." (See H . Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, p. 35.) So did Pieper: "Human reason must indeed be employed in interpreting Scriptu re, never, however, as principle, but always only as instrument ." (Lectures on "The Lutheran Church," p. 50.) So did L. S. Keyser: "Reason is a God-given faculty; surely it must be intended to be used, though not abused. We dis- like rationalism, which sets human reason above the Bible." (A R ea- sonable Faith, p. 24 f.) Verbal Inspiration - a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 15 Eternal argues," and t o interpret: "God deigns to argue the case with us, that all may see the just, nay, loving principle of His dealings with men" (M. Henry), and to admit the conclusion: God does appeal to man's reason, to his sense of right and wrong. ·But we do not admit the argument: Because in one case God appeals to man to use his reason and his sense of justice, man's r eason is in every case fit to judge divine things. That is called the fallacy of arguing from a special case and applying it generally. And it is sophistry to build up the case for rationalism on the fact that the English Bible happens to use the word "reason" in Is. 1: 18. You might as well harp on the words "reasonable service" in the translation of Rom. 12: 1. And that, too, is actually being done. G. L. Raymond says: "The third test of truth was said to be con- formity to the results of logical inference, or reasoning. 'Let us reason together,' says Isaiah; let us give a 'reasonable ser vice,' urges Paul in Rom. 12: 1." (Op. cit ., p . 166.) Bound to make the verbal-inspirationist a particeps crimtnts and thus estopping him from denouncing their rationalistic mis- handling of Scripture, these moderns elaborate the " tu quoque" argument by charging that the doctrine of verbal inspiration is constructed on rationalistic principles. "Frank nennt die tradi- tionelle Inspirationslehre, das, was unsere alten Dogmatiker aus der Schrift ueber die Schrift gelehrt haben, schlecht-rationalistische Konsequenzmacherei." (Lehre und Wehre, 1890, p. 145.) J. Stump: "The dogmaticians were led to maintain it (the Verbal Inspiration) by the exegencies of the times and the stress of their severe dialectics." (Lehre und Wehre, 1904, p.86.) P. T. Forsyth "pro- tests against the vice of apriorism, which comes down on the Bible with a theory of inspiration really drawn from mtionalistic expec- tations" and calls it "the rationalism of orthodoxy."162) The charge is not based on truth. We ask the Bible what it says of itself, and only because the Bible says that every word in it is given by inspiration do we teach Verbal Inspiration. W. Sanday is n ot well acquainted with what the Bible theologians have written on the subject of Verbal Inspiration; else he would not have administered this l~cture to them: "The fundamental mistake that is too often made is to form the idea of what Inspiration is from what we 162) Forsyth writes that in the preface (p. XIV) to J . M. Gibson's The Inspiration and Authority of Holy ScriptuTe. Gibson himself says: "The defenders of the authoritative inspiration of the Scriptures have postulated as a necessity of the" case the emancipation of all the writers of Scripture from the effect of human weakness and limitation. This is what may be called the rationalistic method of proceeding, for it starts with a theory framed in accordance with what the theorist regards as reasonable and deals with all the facts in the case in the light of that theory." (P. 32 f.) 16 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. should antecedently expect it to be. . . . We do not think it likely that God would allow the revelation of Himself to be mixed up with such imperfect materials. But we are no good judges of w hat God would or w ou ld not do. His ways are not our ways. Out of the imperfect He brings forth the perfect." (The Oracles of God, p.29.) That is certainly a surprising charge. We have been telling the rationalists that men are "no good judges of what God would do or not do." And now that charge is hurled at our head! But the charge is false. We form our idea of what Inspira- tion is from Scripture. We say that God does not allow the revelation of Himself to be mixed up with errors because, first and foremost, Scripture says that. We do show, too, that that accords with reason, but we base our faith not on the reasonable- ness of it but on the declaration of Scripture. So, then, while the first form of the "tu quoque" argument operates with a fallacy, the second form is based on misrepresentation.163) And, would you believe it, these men are making the verbal- inspirationist not only a particeps criminis but the arch-criminal. Gibson declares that the moderns "proceed on a humbler method, . . . on the modest principle of sitting at the feet of the inspired writers and especially at the feet of Christ Himself, the great Master, and accepting what they find there" (loc. cit.). Best insists that "the liberal scholar is usually content to let the text stand undisturbed and even unexplained, just as it is, while the "con- servative weaves a great net across references," etc.; ... "he's an undeniable rationalist, trying by reason to establish something not said in the Bible. . .. The literally orthodox are more inveterate rationalists than the higher critics" (loc. cit.). We read in Lehre und Wehre, 1895, p. 292: "A prominent professor says that the doctrine of inspiration as formed by our dogmaticians does not spring from the true comprehension and humble acceptance of Holy Scripture but is the product of rationalistic cogitations; it is a deduction from true presuppositions falsely applied." Any com- ment necessary? Lehre und Wehre comments: "Things have reached such a pass that a rationalist accuses the Bible Christians of indulging in rationalistic cogitations, while he plays the role of true orthodoxy." 163) Dr. J. H . C. Fritz: "We know and believe that 'all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.' We believe this not because we have ar- rived at this truth by a process of reasoning but because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, who by His very Word has wrought this divine con- viction in our heart. The Verbal Inspiration is an article of faith . Though we can prove to anyone that it is not even reasonable to deny this Verbal Inspiration, yet we can argue no one into believing it; that faith must be wrought by the Holy Spirit Himself." (Proe., Texas Dist., 1939, p . 12.) Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews .. Etc. i 7 No. 20. The moderns deal very largely in misstatements and misrepresentations. That is their chief stock in trade. The basic untruth that the Bible contains many mistakes has spawned a countless number of other untruths. Would you want to give the exact score of only those misstatements which have been listed here from page one on down, some of them under the heading of "bare assertions" and "sophistries"? Instead of that let us add a few new ones; the examination of these and of some of the old ones will exemplify and illustrate the. dishonest polemics of the moderns against Verbal Inspiration. There is the assertion of H. E. Fosdick "that at the beginning Hebrew religion had no hope of immortality." Proof-texts cited are Eccl. 9: 4- 6 and 3: 19. Consequently there is a contradiction between these passages and 1 Cor. 15: 53- 55. "No ingenuity of exegesis can make these two agree." (The Modern Use of the Bible, p. 25.) However, in J ob's days Hebrew religion had the hope of immortality, Job 19: 25 fT.! Those who say that this book was written in or after the exile might ponder Gen. 15: 15: "Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace." If these words are not plain enough, read Matt. 22: 31 f. The statement of J esus stamps the assertion of Fosdick as a misstatement. You have the choice of charging either Fosdick or J esus with making a misstatement. Fosdick states further that the Bible does not really teach the resurrection of the body. Read Matt.22:31 again: "as touching the resurrection of the dead." The only way of clearing F osdick of having made a misstatement is to employ the sophistry of C. H . Dodd: "On this occasion Jesus dismisses with cool contempt the crude notion of a renewal of physical existence." (The Authority of the Bible, p. 219.) How much truth is there in the statement that Biblical "tradi- tion" is nothing more than an adapted form of specifically Baby- lonian folk-lore and tradition and in that other statement that God in His marvelous grace so lifted up the best legendary literature of the world, the story of the Creation, of the Fall, etc., as to make it the vehicle of high and pure revelation? (See p. 251 f. above.) The statement that the writer (or writers) of the Pentateuch bor- rowed from Babylonian sources is a misstatement of the rankest kind. One who knows these Babylonian tales will never make such an assertion. There is a faint resemblance, but too great a difference in the essentials. The Babylonian account of "creation" knows nothing of a creatio ex nihilo. Further, "according to the pagan story the gods were n ot existent from eternity but were either created or begotten, the myth does not say by whom or in what way" (L. S. Keyser, op. cit., p . 87 fT.) . Another essential dif- ference lies in the puerile and repulsive conceptions that charac- 2 18 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. terize the pagan myths. That is the judgment of H. E. Fosdick.1641 And it is the judgment of the experts, the assyriologists. When Friedrich Delitzsch went before the public, in his Babel und Bibel, with the assertion that the Bible in many of its portions is simply a reproduction of Babylonian myths and legends, they discredited him. "Einstimmig ist Babel und Bibel von der fachmaennischen Kritik zurueckgewiesen worden," said the periodical Der Alte Glaube and named Cornill, Koenig, Strack, Kittel, and many others as repudiating him. (See Lehre und Wehre, 1903, p . 16 ff., 90 f.) But the myth (that the Biblical writers were borrowers) persists. R. F. Malden, Dean of Wells, to mention just one instance, still believes it and spreads it. "The Babylonian version of the Flood is much older than the version in Genesis, but the two correspond so closely in many points of detail that there is no room for doubt as to the source of the Biblical narrative. . . . Eden is fairy-land. A sacred tree appears frequently on Baby- lonian gems . .. . " (The Inspiration of the Bible, pp. 54, 56.) Moses did some more borrowing, said Delitzsch in Babel und Bibel; he got the Decalog and the rest of the Pentateuchal code from Hammurabi. Wrong again; just r ead the 282 regulations of this Babylonian code and compare them with the Mosaic code. Barton's Archeology and the Bible lists them and comes to the conclusion: "The Mosaic code was not borrowed from the Baby- lonian. A comparison of the code of Hammurabi as a whole with the Pentateuchal laws as a whole, while it reveals certain sim- ilarities, convinces the student that the laws of the Old Testament are in no essential way dependent upon the Babylonian laws. Such resemblances as there are arose, it seems clear, from a sim- ilarity of antecedents and of general intellectual outlook; the striking differences show that there was no direct borrowing." (P.340.) Barton is liberal, as some of his phrases indicate, but honesty c9mpels him to denounce this charge of borrowing. The liberal Independent does the same and points out that the Baby- lonian code contains no trace of the Decalog and no Sabbath legislation. (See Lehre und Wehre, 1903, p.60; 1913, p.172, in the series of articles "Die Assyriologie und das Alte Testament.") Above all, in the Babylonian code Hammurabi is speaking; in the 164) "Folk call them parallels [to the Bible account] , but I do not see how they can do it if they have read them. They are full of the quarrels of gods, the fear of primeval dragons, the war of Tiamat and the hosts of chaos against Marduk and the gods of light. They do, in- deed, give us the same cosmology, but Marduk builds it up by slitting Tiamat like a flat fish and making the firmament of her upper half and the earth of her lower. . .. This welter of mythology, . . . these miasmic marshes." (Op. cit., p. 52.) Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 19 Mosaic code God is the Lawgiver. No wonder that the assyriol- ogists called Delitzsch out of order on this point, too. The purpose of the charge that the sacred writers were bor- rowers is to show that. the Bible is a purely human product, a poor product at that. Delitzsch: "The thought that the Bible is the personal r evelation of God constitutes a mental aberration of the gravest type." The Bible comes from Babel! - What Delitzsch proved is that he knew very little of the Bible. The Babylonians knew nothing of the essential teachings of the Bible - salvation by grace, through the Messiah. And the Bible originated in Babel! The other contention, that God made "the best legendary literature of the world" the vehicle of pure revelation, operates with the same untruth that the Bible account of creation, etc., is of one piece with the Babylonian legends. Moreover, it gives expression to the hideous untruth that God induced the prophets to tell these myths as facts of history, and to the further hideous untr uth that Jesus and the apostles, who endorsed the history related by the prophets, either were mistaken in accepting myths as true stories or, knowing better, hoped that the Christians would soon advance far enough to discover "the profound prophetic prophecy" hidden in them. A few samples of scientific blunders committed by those who charge the Bible with scientific blunders. H. E. Fosdick cannot believe in Verbal Inspiration because Gen. 1 states that light ex- isted befor e the sun existed, three days before. (Op. cit., p.34.) A New Commentary on HoLy Scripture, edited by Charles Gore and others, states: "There can be little doubt that the writer of P based his account on cosmological ideas current in Babylon; and in their close material resemblances both accounts are at variance with the conclusions established by modern scientific research. For example, we notice at once that light is created and day divided from night before the creation of the luminaries; and, moreover, plant-life appears before the sun, a manifest impos- sibility." These men do not seem to know that even today the sun is not the only source of light.165) Those who deny the inspiration of Scripture because of their firm belief in atheistic evolution should read the article "The Great 165) See H. Rimmer (Modern Science and the Genesis Recol'd, p. 43 ft.) on "the contention of semiknowledge that there could be no light before the creation of the sun. The criticism of Gen. 1 is not scien- tifically tenable. There are m any sources of light apart from sunlight itself. . . . The aurora bor ealis. . .. The brilliant gleaming light that at night transforms the dark depths of the sea into a luminous highway . . . phosphorus. . .. Another source of light is the radioactive glow that comes from those particles which Sir Oliver Lodge defines as cosmic light." 20 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. Deception" in the Journal of Theol. of the A. I". Conf., Aug., 1941, with the addendum in the September issue, p. 796. That tells them what arrant blunderers they are. "To assume that beginningless inorganic matter, without intelligence of course, after countless myriads of light-years should have chanced to be so influenced by other inorganic forces as to change into organic matter which after, new myriads of light-years have produced intelligence in man, is so monstrous a thought that we prefer assuming a beginningless transcendental intelligence, which at least can account for the phenomena." Again: "The species are so persistent in preserving themselves that they revert to type when man's efforts cease." Conclusion: "To ascribe such powers to senseless matter is itself utterly senseless. . . . Materialism finds itself in conflict not only with the nature of natural phenomena and with human reason but also with its own postulates." Here is a "scientific" blunder of a somewhat different kind. Liberals believe that the hope of the moral and spiritual advance of man rests not in the Bible and its teachings but in the new science and the new philosophy based on the new scientific outlook. They even go so far as to say with Prof. H. E. Barnes, at a regional meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in December, 1928, that "this newer view of God must be formulated in the light of contemporary astrophysics, which completely repudiates the theological and cosmological outlook of the Holy Scriptures." This has nothing to do with science; it is the "higher science" discussed above. But since they call it "science," we are going to list it among the "scientific" blunders. It is a colossal blunder. This new science has utterly failed of its purpose. President Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chi- cago said in his address at the December, 1933, convocation of the university: "We do not know where we are going, or why, and we have almost given up the attempt to find out. We are in despair because the keys which were to open the gates of heaven have let us into a larger but more oppressive prison-house. We think those keys were science and the free intelligence of man. They have failed us. We have long since cast off God. To what can we now appeal? The answer comes in the undiluted animalism of the last works of D. H. Lawrence. . .." President Mackay of Princeton Seminary records the same experience: "The inter- national public had believed in evolution, which was felt to guaran- tee a flowering, developing progress with much better days ahead," but this new philosophy has failed in lifting the poor depraved human race to a higher level. (See footnote 114.) But when men stick to a theory which has fallen down, they are committing a scientific blunder. And they are sticking to this false theory. The eTbal Inspiration -- a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 21 Christian Centuy'y, for instance, discusses President Hutchins's statement in an article published Jan. 24, 1934, with the heading "The Revolt against Science," chides President Hutchins for giving aid, -l')rt to "th- -"------:ists in rE ,- '1," derides Verbal Inspi ~ ""d insists th8r. ~-'--'~e will save the race: "The revolt is not in L ___ lterest of reaction, but of liberty and progress. It is not out to discredit science, but to save it, to expand it, to put purpose in it, to build a sky over it, and to call its attention to the stars. It has no wish to return to a culture from which science is banned, nor to a cultus that is too sacrosanct to submit to criticism. It looks forward, not backward - toward the emergence of a culture which will eInbody excellencies impossible in any previous culture which lacked science." Is a scientist speaking or a visionary? We next su_b".,it fl few samples of the great lot of misr::presen- tations. There is the claim "that all scholarship is aLLayed against the credibility of the Scriptures," or, toning it down a bit, "that the leading scientists of recent times are all arrayed against the Book." (See D. J. Burrell, Why I Believe the Bible, p.184.) That misrepresents the situation. Some, indeed of the leading scientists, yes, many of them, or perhaps most of them, deny the inspiration and the infallibility of Scripture, but the statement that all the leading scientists are arrayed against the Book is an untruth Many of the leaders in science believe the Bible.166) The list of 166) In the Bodleian Library at Oxford you will find the original of a manifesto signed by 617 leading scientists of the time (Balfour, Bently, Bosworth, Sir David Brewster, and 613 others), who deeply de- plore that men pursue scientific studies for the purpose of raising doubts concerning the truth and authority of Scripture and declare: What God has revealed in nature cannot contradict God's revelation in Scripture_ (See Pmc., Iowa Dist., 1892, p. 67.) Gladstone: "The older I grow, the more conJirmed I am in my faith and religion. I have been in public life 58 years, and 47 in the cabinet of the British government, and during those 47 years I have been associated with 60 master minds of the country, and all but five of the 60 were Christians." Gladstone did not find that he had to "sacrifice his intelligence" (Baumgaertel's phrase) in accepting the teachings of Scripture. After naming seven scientists, among them Isaac Newton, whose intelligence did not compel them to charge the Bible with mistakes, D. J. Burrell quotes the "last words of Professor Dana to the members of my class at graduation: 'Young men, you are going out into a world, where you must meet an unceasing assault upon your faith. Let moe ask you to n~meillber, as my pal'ti;:-, counsel, that, whenever you are in doubt amid the confused voices ot scientific controversy, you may always with perfect confidence affix your faith to the statements of the Word of God.''' (Loc. cit.) The Lutheran Wiiness, 1931, p.370: "For every scientist who denies the hereafter and calls the religion of the Christian Church 'bunk' I will quote you a scientist who declared himself a believer in the Bible. Make the test. Agah ~, for one, 1_ 'd Kelvin, t- gianb uf teenth-century physics, who, when asked what he considered his greatest discovery, said, 'When I discovered my Savior in Jesus Christ.''' 22 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. those who accept the Bible as God's Word is a long one. Read the list given in CONe. THEOL. MTHLY., X, p.225, Sir William Dawson, ]Iff A, L. L. D., F. G. S., and others, who refuse to fault the Bible because of the teaching of evolution, "which is a thec,.y founded on ignorance." Add the name of R. A. Millikan - and many others. Why should we name them? Our moderns know them as wen as we do. And mark well: a goodly number of them stand for Verbal Inspiration. Let Dr. Howard A Kelly, professor in the Johns Hopkins University, holding academic degrees from the lead- ing universities of America and Europe, speak in their name: "I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God. . .. I can trust God, though I shall have to stand alone before the world in declaring Him to be true."167) Many of the leading scientists are on our side. We are not citing this fact as a support of our faith. Nor S]1.811 Wi!, on the other hand, permit the fact that many scientists are against us to disturb our raith. Let the majority be ag2,inst us. Majorities do not decide questions of religion and faith. 'Llley do not even decide questions in science. Weare calling attention to the fact that many scientists are believing Christians and that not a few of them stand for the full inerrancy of Scripture simply in order to show up the dishonesty of the polemics against Verbal Inspiration.l6S ) 167) "I was once profoundly disturbed in the traditional faith . wluch I was brought up, by ITJ.l'oads vvu ... ~h W~.·e made upon the bo_.~ of Genesis by the higher critics. I could then not gainsay them, not knowing Hebrew nor archeology well, and to me, as to many, to pull out one great prop was to make the whole foundation uncertain. So I floundered on for some years. . .. One day it occurred to me to see what the Book had to say about itself. . .. I now believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, inspired in a sense utterly different from that of any human book. I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God .... I can put God's assertions and commands above every seeming proba- bility in life, dismissing cherished convictions and looking upon the wis- dom and reasoning of men as folly opposed to Him .... " (See Watchman- Examiner, Nov. 10, 1932.) 168) A few side-lights on this dishonesty. Some scientists are dis- honest. Dey Alte Glaube said: "Man klagt in unserer Zeit mit Recht darueber, dass in del' Wissenschaft so viel Schwindel, so viel Betrug, so viel Falschmuenzerei getrieben wird, ... dass man den sonst verpoenten 'Prc'Jabi"-us'-""'-:m und l.mgescheut ais gangbare Muenze verwertet." (See Lehre und Wehre, 1913, p. 310.) When E. Haeckel was charged with committing falsifications in the interest of the doctrine of evolution and was convicted of it, he said: "I find some comfort in the fact that h1.mdreds of accomplices are sitting with me in the dock; die grosse Mehrzahl naemlich von allen morphologischen, anatomischen, histologi- schen 1.illd embryologischen Figuren, welche in den besten Lehrbuechern verbreitet sbd, sind aile nicht exo!.:t, sondern mehr odel' weniger zurecht- gestutzt odeI' konstruiert" (loc. cit.). That is a matter which concerns the scientists. But since these "facts" are being adduced as proofs for the e!Taney Uf ScrJ1J'Ure, "dle mah,," eom2~ witl:lill the ~('0p'e 0:' ~e present discussion. Prof. J. J. Reeve calls attention to another dishonest practice. Having stated: "I was much impressed with their boast of Verbal Inspiration - a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 23 Another misrepresentation: the men of Bible times had little knowledge of science; the Biblical ',vriters were not trained thlnkers; because of that they could harbor such superstitious notions and pen such unscientific nonsense. Recall the statement of Clarence Darrow that "the human beings who wrote the Bible had no knowledge of science," and that of H . E. Fosdick: The float- ing ax-head "presented no intellectual problem whatever. No laws were broken because no laws were known. No Hebrew had ever dreamed of such a thing as a mathematical formula of specific gravity" (op. cit., p.136) . - The ancients were not so rude and witless as all that. They did not know quite so many things as we do, but they knew quite a lot, and their intellectual faculties were quite well developed. "Do not forget that the gospel-facts occurred in the age of Caesar, Augustus, Tacitus, Pliny, an age of ripe scholarship and keen criticism. The gospel-facts do not belong to a period in the hazy past wherein fact and fancy blend. They transpired before a wide-awake, intelligent, cultured citizenship. Nothing could convince them unless supported by the strongest evidence." (F. S. Downs, The Heart of the Christian Faith, p.113.) Going farther back, we find that Solomon was not a mean scientist. He knew his botany. And "his copper-refineries at Ezion-geber used methods rediscovered less than a hundred years ago in the Bessemer process" (statement by Prof. Nelson Glueck; see Lu- theran W itness, 1941, p . 114) . Jacob knew something about the science of genetics and had observed the results of cross-breeding. And "an ancient Babylonian frieze from the year 800 B. C. shows a man putting pollen on a fig flower, plainly indicating an act of artificial cross-pollination." The Lutheran Church Herald quoted this from the Journal of Heredity.169) Ask the schoolchildren having all scholarship on their side. But some investigation and con- sideration led me to see that the boast of scholarship is tremendously overdone," he adds: "A striking characteristic of these people is a per- sistent ignoring of what is written on the other side. They think to kill their opponents by either ignoring or despising them. They have made no attempt to answer Robertson's The Early Religion of Israel; Orr's The Problem of the Old Testament; Wiener's Studies in Biblical Law; and Studies in Pentateuchical Criticism, etc. They still treat these books which undermined the very foundations of their theories with the same magnificent scorn." (The Fundamentals, ill, p . 111 f.) Again, some act on the assumption that only the higher critics count as authorities. Once more, we hear them loudly proclaiming that the advance of science has discredited the Bible; but when the progress of scientific research cor- roborates the Bible, all is silent. The tactics employed by these men is to make such a loud noise that the innocent public gets the false im- pression that all the leading scientists and theologians are arrayed against the Bible. 169) The Hemld adds the remark: "The theory of evolution has so blurred the thinking of many men that they cannot see how it could be otherwise than that the ancients were primitive, childlike men in point of intelligence and were incapable of solving the problems of us moderns. 24 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. about the scientific attainments of the ancient Egyptians. More- over, the holy writers knew certain things which the scientists could not tell them, knew them by inspiration. "He hangeth the earth upon nothin g!" Job 26: 7. The writer may not have known that it is "gravity" which holds the earth in place (if our present assumptions are correct; the thing is becoming doubtful). But they did know - what their contemporaries did not know - that the earth rested on nothing. Since inspiration does not work "mechanically" and does not produce unconsciousness, the holy writers knew what they had written and those that read these statements were intelligent beings.170) Other misrepresentations: The Bible theologians invented the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Scripture.I 7l) That is a slanderous misstatement. They got their doctrine of verbal in- spiration in the same way as Dr. H . A. Kelly got it: they went to the Bible to see what it had to say about itself, and they believed w hat they heard the Bible say. - Cremer: "Diese Inspirationslehre [der Dogmatiker] war ein schlechthinniges Novum." And a writer in the CongregationaList: "The Fundamentalist theory of a verbally inspired Bible was unheard of in the Church until the post- Reformation period." That is a falsification of history. The ancient Church taught exactly what Luther and the later dogmaticians taught.172) - "Others have affirmed that the seat of authority is ... There are many evidences that in matters of astronomy, principles of building and architecture, artwork, literary expression, the ancients were the equals, if not the superiors, of men today, who have all the advantage of building on what the pioneers before them have learned." 170) It has been said that the Biblical account "anticipates modern scientific discovery." That means: "The Bible has been so written that in the fierce light of the latest science its truthfulness has stood the test of the most searching investigation by the keenest antagonists - the highest scientific authorities themselves being witness." (H. M'Intosh, op. cit., p. 626.) 171) R. F. Horton: "At last the poor and insufficient answer is forced to come out: We have no reason to give except the arbitrary dogma of the Church, and we suppose the dogma was invented as a security for the truth of Jesus. . .. The belief in its inspiration rests only on an un- supported dogma." (Op. cit., pp. 235, 240.) 172) H. C. Vedder, who does not believe in Verbal Inspiration, quotes statements of the earliest writers (Justin, Irenaeus, and others) to that effect and then adds: "It would seem also that there was early developed as 'high' a doctrine of inspiration as that held by modern theologians. Gaius, rather earlier than later , had said: 'For either they do not be- lieve that the divine Scriptures were dictated by the Holy Spirit, and thus are infidels ; or they think themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and what are they then but demoniacs? '" (Our New Testament. How did We Get It? pp. 48-50.) - The term "dictated" will be examined later on. - Charles Gore: "It ought to be said frankly that Luther often clings to the OLDER notion of a verbally inspired Bible. He actually speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Author of the books of Moses." (The Doctrine of the Infallible Book, p. 58.) - The Proceedings of the Iowa District, 1892, p . 19 ff., submits voluminous quotations from the Church Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 25 to be found in the [infallible] Bible. This was particularly the contention of the later reformers, who felt the need of some author- ity to oppose to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the infallible Church." (The Bible Through the Centuries, p.290.) Dr. J. Stump seconds Willett: "The dogmaticians were led to maintain it (the Verbal Inspiration) by the exigencies of the times and the stress of their severe dialectics." One cannot fault Dr. F. Bente for saying: "Stump fiunkert hier; die Dogmatiker hatten das Interesse, die klare Lehre der Schrift ueber die Inspiration vor- zulegen." (Lehre und Wehre, 1904, p. 86.) -H. C. Vedder: "The followers of Luther developed an extreme theory of the verbal in- spiration and absolute authority of the whole canon." (Op. cit., p.326.) Not true! Luther had the same "extreme" doctrine as the dogmaticians. Charles Gore knows his Luther and says: "Lu- ther actually speaks of the Holy Spirit as the author of the books of Moses; he submitted his judgment undoubtingly to Scriptural statements on points of natural science; and in a famous contro- versy he appealed to a New Testament verse as an infallible oracle, to be accepted with the purest literalism." (Loc. cit.) Any "ex- treme" statement adduced from the dogmaticians can be mat ched by one from Luther just as "extreme." - "How sternly would Luther have rebuked the rash and baseless dogmatism which says that to question a part of the Scriptures is to shake the authority of the whole." (R. F. Horton, op. cit., p . 342.) Do not try to make people believe that! Luther had no occasion to say anything like that. One who declares "The Scriptures have never erred"; "Scrip- ture cannot err" (XV: 1481; XIX: 1073), is not going to extenuate the occurrence of mistakes in the Bible. Horton's interest in this is to find support for his contention that the occurrence of errors in the Bible need not create doubt as to the trustworthiness of the divine parts of the Bible (op. cit., p. 289). Do not ask Luther to back up this idea! Luther would say: "No man will take stock in a book or writing parts of which are untrue, particularly if he cannot tell which parts are true and which are untrue." (XX:227S.) When Professor Fr ank (Erlangen) applied the same tactics, claim- ing that Luther found the Bible to be a mixture of divine and human elements, of truth and error, and was not much disturbed thereat, Professor Stoeckhardt commented: "Das kann Frank nur einem Ignoranten, der Luther nicht kennt, einreden." (Lehre und Wehre, 1890, p .145.) -Anything to discredit Verbal Inspiration! No. 21. A large part of the misstatements with which the Fathers which prove that they taught Verbal Inspiration. See also P. Kretzmann, The Foundations Must Stand, p. 69 ft . - Dr. Pieper is right in saying: "It is evident that Cremer had entirely lost control not only of the historical facts but also of himself when he wrote the above." (Op. cit., p. 280.) 26 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. moderns operate consists of misinterpretations of Scripture. Of the texts which suffer much at their hands 2 Tim. 3: 16 is the chief suf- ferer. They use it to support their favorite thesis that only the Gospel-message or only the religious teachings are inspired, true and trustworthy. As a rule, they offer no proof for this thesis. We have noted this u nder No. 13 (2): "The moderns deal lar gely in bar e assertions." But the bare assertion becomes a false assertion, a mis- statement, when they use 2 Tim. 3: 16 or any other text to support it. We have come across this misinterpretation several times already; but since it is such a glaring maltreatment of Scripture, it ought to receive one more treatment. It seems incredible that a theologian would attempt to prove the thesis that not all of Scripture is inspired by quoting the text that "all Scripture is given by inspiration." But here is, for instance, J ames Orr (conservative), who writes in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (s. v . Bible) : "Marks of Inspiration. - This is the ultimate test of 'inspir at ion' - that t o which P aul likewise ap- peals - its power to 'make wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus' (2 Tim. 3: 15) - its profitableness for 'teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruct ion which is in righteousness' (v. 16) - all to the end 'that the man of God may be complete, fur- nished completely u nto every good work' (v. 17) . Nothing is here determined as to 'inerrancy' in minor historical, geographical, chronological details, in which some would wrongly put the essence of inspiration; but it seems implied that at least there is n o error which can interfere with, or nullify, the utility of Scripture for the ends specified. Who that brings Scripture to its own tests of in- spiration will deny that, judged as a whole, it fulfils them?" 173) We shall restrict ourselves to three remarks. (1) In no known lan- guage can the statement that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, etc., be made to mean that some parts of Scripture are not profitable. 173) Similarly J. M. Gibson: "'Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching ... .' That is perhaps the locus classicus on the subject of inspiration. . . . Almost every one in our day is willing to have the scope of Scripture teaching limited to the spi1·itual and the practical." (Op. cit., p. 90.) Dr . N. R. Melhorn in the Lutheran of July 16, 1941: "The testimony of three apostles (Paul, Peter, Jude) affirms the Bible's reliable authority. 2 Tim. 3: 16. . .. The process of delivery of truths to prophets and apostles is termed inspiration. Inspiration, while beyond human understanding of its nature, can be defined as that action of God whereby certain chosen servants of Him were protected from error in recording revelation." (Italics in original. Inspiration, accord- ingly, covers only so much of Scripture as deals with the truths of reve- lation.) - In this article Dr . Melhorn remarks: "It is not surprising that at least once in every generation of the Christian Church the question of the Bible's authority has been raised." Very true! It has been raised in the present generation. That is why we are discussing it just now. And as long as men persist in curtailing the authority of Scripture, the discussion will have to go on. Verbal InspiTation - a Stumbling-Block to .Tews, Etc. 27 (2) The text does not propose to give the "marks of inspiration." What the text does is to name the purpose and benefit of inspiration. (3) If this were the mark of inspiration, that "it is profitable for doctrine," etc., St. Paul should have given us the mark by which we can tell what is profitable for doctrine. Since he did not give such a mark, men will have to depend on either your or my or their own judgment of what it profitable. But a mark which has no objective certainty is useless as a mark. - The moderns are setting 2 Tim. 3: 16 topsy-turvy. They do the same with many other passages. Numerous in- stances have been given above, such as the maltreatment of: "Let us reason together," "reasonable service," "treasure in earthen vessels," "Rahab and the dragon" (Is. 51 : 9) , etc. Add, as samples, the following monstrosities, taken from Revelation and the Bible, by R. F. Horton: "We certainly misunderstand the apostle when we give to the moral teaching with which his writings abound that note of finality and that suggestion of infallibility which would preclude the free operation of the Spirit in revealing other things to us as the ages roll by." (P.302.) And the proof-text offered for this state- ment is - Phil. 3: 13-16! Look it up. - "The epistle of James dis- tinctly disclaims the infallibility which a foolish dogmatism has attached to it. See chap. 3: 2: nonn ynQ mu.(OJ.1, EV UrtU.V1:EC; . " (P.349.) - "Whoever wrote 2 Pet. 3: 1-7 was under the unscientific im- pression that the heavens were a solid substance capable of being destroyed by fire." (P. 362.) - "It was the complaint of our Lord against the men of His own day that they searched the Scriptures because they thought that in them" (italics in the original) "they had eternal life, but would not come to Him that they might have life, John 5: 39; the R. V. gives the obvious sense of the original. It is not a little significant that the passage most frequently quoted as an authority for Bible-study is indeed a warning against the substitution of Scripture, which is a mere witness, for the Savior to whom it is meant to bear witness." (P.406.) Anything to get r id ·of Verbal Inspiration! 174) Why, they even resort to mistranslations. Horton writes: "Because this is the Book of God, we have no reason to say that everything said about God in the Book is true. The historical and 174) That is the purpose of Horton's book. It ends with these state - ments: "We have exalted the Scriptures above our Lord so as to make Him Himself seem to be dependent upon them: with a mistaken zeal we have given them the very title, viz., the Word of God, which is His own ineffable name. In our blindness we have attached such sacred significance to everything which is contained in the Biblical literature that. . .. This dangerous and, in the last resort, idolatrous perversion of Christianity. . .. And if even one soul is led out of the comfortable but suffocating prison- house of the received dogma into the open air of the true revelation, the author will not have toiled in vain." (pp. 406, 407.) 28 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. progressive character of the Book gives no foothold for such un- intelligent and slumberous dogmatism. Cf. Deut. 4: 19, where Jahveh is spoken of as allotting the various objects of false worship unto all nations under the whole heaven, but r etaining Israel for- Himself." (P. l0.) That is a misinterpretation of Deut. 4:19. And to support this misinterpretation, Moffatt perpetrates this bald mistranslation: "The Eternal, your God, has allotted them for worship to all nations under the broad sky." "For worship" is not found in the Hebrew text. Putting it in the translation is falsifying the text. It amounts to the same when Gore's A New Commentary says: "'divided,' i. e., allotted to be worshiped by them."175)- Another sample. Moffatt translates the iJ''''S and i'lJ't.:l' of Gen. 1: 11 and 24 with: "of every kind" "every 'kind of." T That is an impossible translation. The only possible translation is "after his kind." What is the purpose of this falsification? Is it to ward off the smashing blow which the phrase "after his kind" gives to evolution?176) Better stick to the old tactics and say: Because evolution is true, Moses made a mistake by teaching tbe contrar y and using the phrase "after his kind." No. 22. The following assertions and arguments might have been discussed under the head of "bare assertions" or "misstate- ments," but the reader will see at once why we put them in a lower bracket and label them as ludicrous. Here are nine samples, all taken from writings which r idicule Verbal Inspiration. Other s have been noted above. There is (1) the allegorizing nonsense. H . E. Fosdick and the others condemn the allegorizing interpretation employed by Church Fathers in the strongest terms and thank God that this arbitrary and fanciful method is no longer in vogue.177) They are right in 175) See Koenig, Theologie des Alten Testaments, p.249: "Erst in der neuesten Zeit hat man ja auszusprechen gewagt, dass die Voelker ausser Israel 'von Jahve selbst der Gottlosigkeit und dem Goetzendienst preisgegeben' worden seien. (Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel, II, p. 36.) Und wie kommt er zu dieser furchtbaren Anklage? Nun, wie soehen aus seinem Buch angefuehrt worden ist, soll es 'mit nackten Worten' in Deut. 4: 19 ausgesprochen sein. . .. Deut. 4: 19 sagt also nur dasselbe aus wie viele andere Stellen (Ps.19: 2; Jes. 40: 26 usw.), dass Gott den Nicht- israeliten bloss, aber auch wirklich die allgemeine Offenbarung geschenkt hat, die aus Natur und Weltgeschichte herausleuchtet." 176) L . S. Keyser: "The so- called translation of Dr. James Moffatt cannot be trusted, because he so frequently misconstrues the Hebrew text in the interest of his higher criticism and evolutionary conceptions . . . . Moffatt has 'doctored up' the Hebrew text of Gen. 1: 12. 'Every' is not in the text. And th e pronominal form for 'his' is ignored." (Op. cit., p .1l3.) 177) H. E. Fosdick: "Allegorizing appeared everywhere. . .. By allegory Origen supported allegory_ . .. We have outgrown allegory. _ . _ In the modern Church this old method of interpretation is largely dis- credited." (Op. cit., pp. 65-96.) Charles Gore: "In the great Alex- Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling- Block to Jews, Etc. 29 condemnillg . the allegorizing of the Fathers, but the queer thing is that they are doing the very same thing; only they can it by a different name. Fosdick calls it "change in mental categories." The Bible speaks of miracles, of the floating ax-head and the dead rising, of angels and devils, etc., but these "forms of thought and speech must be translated into modern categories." (P. 129.) The others speal~ of "didactic poems" and "apocalyptic symbolism," can the "legends of the Garden of Eden and of the Fan the vehicle of high and pure revelation," and try to ' find "the profound prophetic philosophy of history" hidden in these stories. Another queer thing is that these moderns believe, and would have us believe, that it requires great acumen and deep spiritual insight to establish which stories of the Bible are history and which are myths and fables. The truth of the matter is that they apply a very simple canon: any story which contains miraculous or unheard-of elements must be treated as a fable. The story of the Fan, for instance, is, on the face of it, a fable. R. F . Horton : "A serpent that speaks proclaims itself to be in the region of fable." (Op. cit., p. 38.) R. H. Malden puts it this way: "Nor do I think that God ever created a serpent which spoke with a human voice." (Op. cit., p . 54.) Franz De- litzsch, prominent Lutheran exegete, came to the same conclusion: "Das Reden der Schlange steht auf gleicher Linie mit dem Reden der Tiere in der Fabel," and you have the choice, he says, of dis- missing it as a pure myth or t rying to find some deep symbolic import in it. And the sun, of course, could not literally do what the Book of Joshua says it did. Nor could a real fish have swallowed and disgorged a real man. It is the old canon of the anegorist Origen: when we cannot believe the literal meaning to be true, we must resort to allegorizing. The only difference is that these moderns apply the canon in the spirit of "vulgar" rationalism. Discussing the statement of Delitzsch, Dr. Stoeckhardt says: "Von solchen Saetzen zum rationalismus vulgaris ist nur ein kleiner Schritt." (Lehre und Wehre, 1890, p. 204.) It really harks back to the old vulgar rationalist Celsus, the pagan. "Celsus makes jest also of the serpent, taking the narrative to be an old wife's fable." (See footnote 40.) Were the "vulgar" rationalists possessed of deep spiritual insight? Furthermore, it strains our powers of belief too much when the moderns ask us to believe that the writers of these Biblical poems and fables believed that their readers would possess such a high andrian teachers, Clement and Origen, this allegorical method runs riot again. Origen held that the literal meaning of the text is constantly allowed to be such as we cannot believe to be true, just in order to force us to consider the spiritual, or hidden, meaning. Most of the Fathers held fast to both the literal and the hidden meaning. To us their allegorical interpretations appear utterly arbitrary." (Op. cit., p . 51.) 30 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. degree of intelligence that they would not mistake these poems and fables for actual history though they are presented as actual history and would find the intended meaning though not a hint of the in- tended meaning is given by the story-teller. The story of J onah does not hint at any hidden meaning, but the readers of the story, at least the readers in the centuries of Enlightenment, would find that here the story of Israel's captivity and deliverance was being told. As we said above, "Fosdick is able to believe that when the writer of Josh. 10:12 wrote: 'Then spake Joshua,' etc., he did not mean to say that Joshua actually spoke or that the sun actually stood still, but that he was writing a poem and hoping that in the last days a man would arise who would be able to interpret the mysterious words 'And the sun stood still.''' And finally, when you hear how the moderns interpret these poems, myths and fables, you will understand why we had to have a ludicrous section in our black-list. For instance, what was the real story clothed in the poetic language of Josh. 10: 12 f. ? Why, simply this, say some of the interpreters, that Joshua asked for, and received, the strength and ability to do two days' work in one day.17S) Or, what is back of the legend of Abraham? Why, says the Dean of Wells, "Abraham should perhaps be regarded as repre- senting a tribe or clan rather than as a single historic figure" (op. cit., p . ll) . Please give us the meaning of particular incidents in the legend; for instance, what does the laughing of Sarah mean? We cannot tell you that, say the interpreters of the Biblical story- tellers, that is an immaterial embellishment; but we can tell you what the marriage of Abraham and Sarah means. - Tell us! - Why, it was "the symbol of the political union of a southern Israelitic clan with a non-Israelitic tribe south of Hebron. And Abraham's relations with Hagar represent the intimate intercourse between Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia." Etc. Thus the Encyclopaedia Biblica. (See 178) Ernst Muehe: "Theologen der Neuzeit meinen, die Stelle muesste als eine blass dichterische Darstellung des Ereignisses aufgefasst werden: Josua habe erkannt, das Werk dieses Tages sei so gross, dass fuer die bloss menschliche Kraft der Tag noch einmal so lang sein muesste als ein gewoehnlicher, sonst koenne er es nicht zu Ende bringen. In heiligem Eifer betend, haette er diese Ueberzeugung in die dichteri- schen Worte gekleidet: Sonne, stehe still usw. Damit haette er aber nur gemeint: HErr Gott, verleihe uns auf ausserordentliche Weise doppelte Kraft, dass wir in einem Tage vollbringen, wozu sonst die An- strengung zweier Tage noetig ist. Dies Gebet haette del' liebe Gott auch erhoert und ihnen doppelte Kraft gegeben .... Ein wirklicher Stillstand del' Sonne und des Mondes sei dabei gar nicht behauptet, sondern das waere nur bildliche Redeweise. Seitdem selbst der grosse Gottes- gelehrte Hengstenberg leider diese willkuerliche Meinung behauptet hat, sind ihm darin viele gefolgt." (Biblische Merkwuerdigkeiten, p. 93.) Muehe then goes on to point out that the poem is somewhat askew, since it tells the story in such a way that not only additional strength but also additional time was needed. Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 31 Lehre und Wehre, 1902, p.25.) Then there is Fosdick's allegorizing which translates the Biblical forms of thought and speech into modern categories. The women at the tomb never really saw angels. Then what did they mean when they told the disciples that they really did see some? In his examination of the Modern Use of the Bible John Bloore deals with this puzzle: "How, then, shall we ex- plain what these categories, which the modern man discards because of his superior intelligence, meant to those who could and did use them? .. , The category of demonology and angelology is nothing more or less than 'a transient phrasing of abiding experiences' (Fos- dick) . .. , The modern man is virtually denying that the Biblical writers meant what they said when they described angelic visitation, ministry, and communication as being commerce with actual spir - itual beings." And now: "Did the Lord mean that the Father would send Him twelve legions of 'spiritual experiences'? And what can He mean when He speaks of joy in the presence of the angels [of spiritual experiences] over a repentant sinner?" (Alternative Views of the Bible, p. 94 £.) - These are some of the "facts" which keep the moderns from accepting Verbal Inspiration! - Indeed, if the Bible- stories were of such a nature that we had to go to these interpreters to find out their meaning, we, too, would turn our backs on Verbal Inspiration.179 ) 2) Speaking of myths, we want to say that we are unable to accept and believe the myths which the moderns present to us. We cannot believe in the existence of the Redactor. He is nothing but a mythical character. Weare loathe to believe that a man worked on the Bible in such a clumsy fashion that it takes the higher critics years and decades and centuries to unravel his work. And that is another myth which we cannot accept - that the higher critics possess the uncanny ability to take up a book written centuries ago and tell us with unfailing accuracy which sections were written by P and which by J, and even to split up a single verse, assigning each half to a different source. You are asking too much of us if you want us to invest the higher critics with these supernatural powers.180) You cannot expect us to keep a 179) By the way, Gore makes a most illogical deduction from the fact that he and we condemn Origen's allegorical interpretation. In the passage quoted above he continues: "Hardly anyone now can be found really to rely upon it. I mention this only because those who would force us to retain the ancient literalism without the ancient allegorism seem to be behaving unreasonably." That is certainly a queer canon: if a man is wrong in one thing, it must be presumed that he is wrong in everyth ing.-Anything to bring Verbal Inspiration into disrepute! 180) J. Bloore: "Its acceptance requires us to believe that the critics possess unparalleled literary keenness and an acumen which indeed must be accounted stupendous. In fact , could anything short of the supernatural account for their mysterious, uncanny skill in dismantling 32 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. sober face when we hear the modern redactors telling us the true story of the Cursing of the Fig-tree (see No. 13, 8) and pretending that they can tell the story of Christ's life and death better than the eye-witnesses. It is too ludicrous; says H. M'Intosh: "He [Pro- fessor Schmiedel in Encycl. Biblica] fitly crowns these feats, o~ this assumption, by what is perhaps the most ludicrous of all- that these critics are able two millenniums away to know and tell what Jesus was, said, and did, better than the men who lived with Him, and died for Him, and were especially chosen and in- spired of God for the express purpose of giving to the world for its salvation God's record of His Son and revelation of Himself." The crowning absurdity appears from the next sentence: "And that, too, from these assumed to be 'utterly untrustworthy' writ- ings." (Op. cit., p. 711.) On a par with this conceit of the higher critics is the claim of the evolutionists that they can give us the authentic account of the origin of this world. Far removed from the scene of activities, they act and speak as though they had been present, and, ignorant though they are of the inner working of the forces of nature today, they claim to know all about their operation "millions of years ago." When a Christian hears these claims, he says: "Das glaube ich noch lange nicht."181) And the scientist declares: "If we are not able to see far into the causes and origin of life in our day, it is not probable that we shall deal more successfully with the problem as to how it arose many million years ago." (Marquis of Salisbury. See footnote 118.) - Anything to discredit Verbal In- spiration - even if they have to credit the higher critics with supernatural faculties. 3) The higher critics take great credit for having discovered a simple way of disposing of the Biblical difficulties. H. L. Willett: documents? .. . The critics of Scripture go at their task with neither doubts nor qualms. They even split up the text of a document into such minute fractions that a single word is sometimes assigned to another source than that of the rest of the verse. Resort must be had to that which their highly developed historical sense requires them to discard - the supernatural and miraculous - as well-nigh the only adequate explanation of this extraordinary ability to analyze, dissect, sift, and piece together the different documents in so complete a mass of literature as the Old Testament must be, according to their views. It is really too much to ask of anyone not already committed to it as a corollary of their peculiar view of the Bible." (Op. cit., p. 64.) 181) Dr. E. A. W. Krauss: "Wie, fragt ein Christ, die Heilige Schrift soli den Naturwissenschaften widersprechen? der Astronomie? Und wenn sie es tut, wer hat dann r echt? Gott, cler Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne selbst erschaffen hat, . .. der soli in seinem Wort nicht besser und zuverlaessiger reden koennen vom Lauf und Gang dieser Himmels- koerper als wese Menschen, deren nie einer auch nur einem weser Koerper nahe gekommen ist? Das glaube ich noch lange nicht." (Froc. Syn. Conf., 1902, p. 7.) Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling- Block to Jews, Etc. 33 "Higher criticism has destroyed the doctrine of verbal inspiration. It has made faith easier and more confident. . . . Most of all, it' has explained the seeming contradictions and conflicts of Biblical statements which were in former periods the target of captious and often successful attack." (Op. cit., p .264.) Yes, Paine attacks, for instance, the accounts that Saul knew David and that Saul did not recognize David, and declares: "These two accounts belie each other." How do the higher critics relieve the situation and explain the conflict of these two statements? N . R. Best has told us that, while "the conservative puckers his brows for hours attempting to range all the data of the story in one consistent chain and weaves a great net of cross references by which he drags the questioned paragraph or chapter into a decidedly different orientation," the liberal scholar has found an easy way out of the difficulty: "The higher critic says: 'Two traditions' - and lets it go at that." (Op. cit., p. 120 f.)182) Very simple; but Paine would say that that does away with Verbal Inspiration. Surely, say the higher critics, Verbal Inspiration must go; we are one with you there. And so Paine is satisfied. And the higher critics actually believe that they have accomplished great things for the cause of the Bible and Christen- dom. H. L. Willett can solve many other difficulties. Ingersoll finds the story of J onah difficult to believe. Willett tells him: "The miraculous features of the narrative present no difficulties to one who approaches it in the spirit of a student of history and tradition." The thing did not happen in real life! (Op. cit., p.no f .) And so Ingersoll is satisfied. But he is not going to give the higher critics credit for having discovered a new and ingenious way of solving the difficulty. He will insist that he knew that right along. Professor Kantonen tells us that "the application of scientific and historical methods to the study of the Bible" will relieve us of the "handicaps" which "the mechanical theories of inspiration" place upon exegesis. (See CONe. THEOL. MTllLY., VII, p.223.) All very simple, but what we are objecting to at present is that the higher critics want us to look upon their proposed solution as indicative of great acumen. 4) We can credit the higher critics with great resourcefulness. 182) R. F. Horton: "How is it that in the story of Saul and David we find David, in 1 Sam. 16: 18, introduced to Saul as 'a mighty man of valor and a man of war,' and yet, at the end of chapter 17, Saul inquires of Abner whose son David was, as if h e had never seen him before, and can get no information from Abner about him?" Answer: "Criticism has solved the difficulties and given us a genuine explanation of the apparent flaws and imperfections. . .. Criticism has, in one word, revealed the nature of these historical compositions, showing approximately the materials which go to their making and the period of their compilation." (Op. cit., pp. 91-94.) Higher criticism says: "Two traditions" and lets it go at that. 3 34 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. First they said that Moses could not have composed the P enta- teuchal code; such an elaborate code could have been produced only in the ninth century. Then it was found that the code of Hammurabi was written about 850 years before Moses. What now? Why, Moses copied from Hammurabi. (See Lehre und Wehre, 1903, p . 60; 1913, p . 306.) - "A few years ago it was customary for criticism to deny that these plagues ever happened. Classify- ing them among the reputed folk-lore of the Hebrews and rele- gating them to the realm of the purely mythological, the critic calmly and boldly denied that they ever occurred at all. But these past years of research and study have so established the historicity of the record that this procedure is no longer possible; so the new attack has been made on the basis of naturalism. It is plainly stated that Moses himself brought about these plagues upon the Egyptians, and that he did so by the use of his own superior knowledge. In a word, he was a bacteriologist, three and a half thousand years before Pasteur! That in itself is a greater miracle than the plagues could ever have been! No microscope, no instru- ments of research, yet he not only anticipated the discoveries of Lister and Pasteur, but he also applied germ warfare to the redemp- tion of Israel and 'bent the Egyptians to his will.' . .. The present writer of this refutation is not utterly ignorant of the science of bacteriology, but he humbly confesses that he does not know of any pathogenic micro-organism that would bite everybody except a Hebrew .... " (H. Rimmer, in Ch1"istian Faith and Life, April, 1937, pp. 91, 98.) 5) The critics display great ingenuity in extenuating the pious frauds practiced upon God's people. How did the Book of Jonah, a romance, a fable, get among the sacred books of Israel? That was due to "the inveterate love of romance common to the ancient Jews." (See No. 13, 4.) Or, it is due to the queer working of the Oriental mind. Dealing with the question whether "the story of Eden is to be called history or allegory," N. R. Best says: "The difficulty felt by so many modern Christians in accepting allegory as an inspired vehicle of God's truth is strictly an occidental diffi- culty. No Oriental would feel it. It is a hindrance imposed on faith by the unimaginative matter-of-factness that is more or less characteristic of the Anglo- Saxon mind ever ywhere, and especially of that strain in Anglo-Saxondom which draws inspiration from the rigid and literal Puritans. To them the exercise of mental inven- tion to create a tale of what never happened on sea or land was a wilful excursion into the realm of that Evil One who was a liar from the beginning. Of course, they could not dream of such a piece of wicked impertinence existing within the covers of the Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 35 Bible." (Op. cit., p. 88.)183) We have strong doubts whether the Oriental mind is so constituted that it condones the telling of myths as true hist01-Y. Furthennore, the Bible is meant for the occidentals as much as for the Orientals. On Best's and Malden's theory God would have had to give the world two Bibles, an Oriental and an Occidental Bible. Above all, the normal (the Christian) Oriental mind feels on this point the same as the normal (the Christian) Occidental, Anglo-Saxon, Puritan mind: it feels and knows that God could not · have inspired the prophets t o present myths and romances as history. 6) Some more "pious fraud." By what right did the anonymous writer of the Pastoral Epistles sign Paul's name to them? "It seemed legitimate in that age to put w ords on the lips of a man whose mind was being interpreted." (Prof. W. C. Berkemeyer in New Testament Comm.enta1-y, p.582.) This flimsy apology is elaborated by R. F. Horton thus: "Supposing this conjecture of the origin of these letters be accepted - that they are not a composition of St. Paul in the literal sense of the word - what difference does it make to our idea of the revelation contained in them? It must be owned, very little. The truths are not less true because they are incorporated in a com- position which had the origin we have supposed. . .. We have here an example of religious writing common in antiquity but unknown among us." (The Oriental mind works differently from the Occi- dental mind, and the mind of the ancients diffe r ently from that of the moderns!) And "the author of the Second Epistle of Peter" (which purports to be a writing of St. Peter) "had no intention to deceive when he wrote in the name of his august master. To call him a falsa1-1.US is a very gratuitous condemnation. . .. This humble disciple had no intention whatever of imposing on his readers, who knew as well as he did that Peter was dead years ago." (Op. cit., p. 310 £., 360 £.) Was the Chronicler a falsarius? "In 1 Kings 5: 13-15 Solomon sends a levy of 30,000 men out of Israel to do the work, while the Chronicler (2 Chron. 2: 17 f.) insists on it that these hewers of wood, etc., were strangers, and he gives their number 183) The Dean of Wells on the Oriental mind: "We always think first of truth of fact ; Orientals are said always to think first of truth of value . .. . We must remember that the Old Testament was written by Orientals, who did not contemplate any but Oriental readers. We are likely to miss a great deal of its meaning unless we can learn to read it with Oriental eyes." On the legends in Numbers, Exodus, and the latter part of Genesis : "The Oriental attitude towards fact is not the same as our own, and in the Old Testament the center of interest is riot in the facts narrated but in the construction put upon them." "The stories of Abraham passing off Sarah as his sister and Jacob's deception of Isaac are legends or pieces of folk-lore. Orientals have never regarded duplicity as we do, but have always admired it (when successful) as a mark of superior intelligence. They do not appear to feel strongly against treachery." (Op. cit., pp. 8, 31, 61.) 36 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. exactly as the same as the passage in Kings, which suggests that he purposely corrects the impression that native-born Israelites would be employed on such corvee-work." (P. 131.) He was not a falsarius but a corrector! But some of his statements must be taken cum grano salis. "A comparison between 2 Sam. 24: 9 and 1 Chron. 21: 5 illustrates afresh the Chronicler's habit of mising the figures." (P.129.) The Chronicler committed a falsification, and he did it from chauvinistic motives. What about the pious fraud committed by the writer of Heb. XI? "We are not at liberty to accept the statements there made about Abraham and the other worthies as additional historical facts." But the writer of He·. brews presents them as historical facts - is that not a falsification? No, indeed, "our author is simply treating the subject homiletically; he is reading into those early records a rich spiritual or theological significance." (P.130.) - We thought that the era of Bruno Bauer, who made Luke invent historical figures (Lysanias) to suit his purpose, was past. We were mistaken. 7) Occasionally the Biblical writers make false statements in good faith. They are not falsarii; their fault is incompetence. We must remember that the authors of the books of Judges, Kings, Chronicles, wrote in the days when "the habits of exact chronology and accurate chronicling had not been cultivated." (R. F. Horton, op. cit., p. 104.) "The Chronicler - in perfect good faith, but with- out any historic justification - reads into the story of the ancient monarchy the ideas and practices of his own time. It is idle and foolish to bring the charges of dishonesty against a writer because, in the manner of all authors in antiquity, he felt at liberty to dress the story of by-gone and ancient days in the garb and color- ing of his own surroundings and his own preconceptions." "For example, when the older historian says that Solomon gave to Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee (1 Kings 9: 11) and the Chronicler speaks of the cities which Hiram had given to Solomon (2 Chron. 8: 2), we are to conclude that the later author, dazzled with the glory of the great king, could not credit the story that Solomon had handed over cities in his own land to a stranger and assumed that the transaction had been precisely the other way." (P. 134 f. , 124.)184) Was Luke one of these authors of antiquity who had not cultivated the habits of exact chronology? Yes, in- deed, says Gore's A New Commentary, on Acts 7: 6-11: "Luke's defective sense of time, which is one of his limitations as a his- 184) Gore's A New Commentary: "A remarkable rewriting of history; the Chronicler dismisses such a tradition as unworthy of a great king and reverses the transaction H - See Commentary by Jamieson, Fausset, Brown or Weimar Bibel: "Die Staedte, die Hiram Salomo wiedergab, well sie fum nicht gefielen." Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 37 torian, appears here." Luke was honest enough, but he lacked the exactitude of the modern historian.185) 8) When we saw the statement by F. Bettex: "These critics say that God, not being a m an, cannot speak; consequently there is no word of God!" (Fu ndamentals, IV, p . 82) , we w ere inclined to think that he might have ov erstated the case. But we later found that, for instance, C. H. Dodd, professor of exegesis at Oxford, declares in all seriousness: The Epistle to the Romans cannot be, strictly speaking, "the Word of God." For "in the expression 'the Word of God' lurks an equivocation. A word is properly a means of conmmunicating thought through vibrations of the vocal cords, peculiar to the human species. The Eternal has neither breath nor vocal cords; how should He speaks words?" (Op. cit., p.16.) It is an undeniable fact that God has no vocal cords; and this is one of the "facts" over against which Verbal Inspiration cannot stand! 9) We listed a number of misinterpretations under No. 21. The following ones are listed here because of their outstanding absurdity. Paine: "I begin by saying that these two chapters [Gen. 1 and 2] contain two different and contradictory stories of a creation." Name one of these contradictions! Gore's New Com- m entary: "Gen. 2: 4 b-25 : J's Narrative of Creation. . . . Man is formed before plants and animals." Name one more! Ingersoll: "In the first account, man is made 'm ale and female'; in the second only a male is made, and there is n o in tention of making a w oman whatever." Any more? Yes. "In the first chapter of Genesis, Adam alone is mentioned and the woman is left out." We have already listed this particular blunder of a nameless discrepancy- hunter (see page 501) ,186) but set it down here again for the 185) R. F. Horton: "This opening passage of Acts gives us a clear indication that the author lays no claim to infallibility. In the simplest and most natural way he corrects himself." (Italics in original.) "When he wrote the gospel, he had been under the impression that the ascension had taken place immediately after the resurrection. . . . The author looked on these events as compressed into a few hours. When he approached his second treatise, he was better informed and knew that for six weeks after the resurrection the risen Lord manifested Himself to His disciples. . .. When an author thus corrects himself, we certainly learn to trust him more as an honest writer, but we feel at once the absurdity of ascribing the qualities of infallibility and inerrancy to his work." (Gp. cit., p. 260 f .) - Lenski on Luke 24: 50: "Intolerable is the claim, which boasts as being the genuine exegesis, that in his gospel Luke tells us that Jesus ascended to heaven on the very day of His resurrection, while in the Acts the same Luke tells us that Jesus ascended forty days later. This preposterous claim calls it genuine exegesis when it decrees, 'He led them out' must mean that very Easter night. So the ascension took place at night, in the moonlight! First Luke got hold of one tradition and followed it; then he discovered another and again followed it, with never a word of explanation - and he sent both documents to the same man, Theophilus!" 186) H. Rimmer "pointed out to him that his error was a lack of intelligent reading of the text" (Gen. 1: 27). And, "Moses adds later 38 Verbal Inspiration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. purpose of comparing his lack of intelligent reading of the text with that evidenced by the New Commentary of the well-known Bishop Gore. The writer of the statement: "Man is formed before plants and animals (Gen. 2: 4 b-25)" did not read this text intel- ligently. - R. H . Malden: "Eden is fairy - land. . . . It was fairy_ land to Ezekiel when he wrote of the king of Tyre of his own day: 'Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God, . . . thou art the anointed cherub,' chap. 28: 13,14." (Op. cit., p. 53.) "I doubt whether justice is, as a general rule, done to the episode of the burning bush, Ex. 3. Knowledge of another person's name was, and probably still is, in some parts of the world, supposed to give the possessor some power over him." (P.33.) "The prayer of Jonah does not fit the cir- cumstances which are said to have given rise to it. 'Out of the belly of hell cried l' - not of the fish." Best of all: "Jonah was angry at the success of his own mission to Nineveh, but in spite of its repentance it had long been desolate. (In fact , it had been destroyed some three centuries before the book was written.)" (P. 57 f.) So the story is evidently a fabrication, and in the face of these "facts" Verbal Inspiration cannot stand! - R. F . Horton: "On the old and orthodox idea of revelation the Epistle of Jude would be discredited; for it is impossible that apocryphal works like the Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses (v. 9) are worthy of credit." (Op. cit., p.364.) Who told Horton that Jude is quoting from these apocryphal books? But aside from that, on Horton's theory St. Paul's writings would be in worse condemnation, for Paul even quotes from pagan writers. - It seems incredible that Marcus Dods (a conservative modern), in listing "irreconcilable discrepancies," should offer this: "According to Mark, Luke, and John the women found the stone already rolled away from the entrance to the tomb; according to Matthew this was accomplished by an angel in the presence of the women." (The BiMe, Its Origin and Nature, p.136.) Matthew does not say that the women saw the angel rolling away the stone and seating himself on it. For one thing, he has E%6.ihrto and not E%6.'frLOEV. See Zahn's Kommentar on Matt. 28 : 1-3. - We have not the space to display any more samples. No. 23. Some of the assertions and arguments are more than ludicrous; they are gr otesque. We submit three samples. Arthur Brisbane (who would classify himself as ultraliberal) thus proves that the Bible-story is not true: Jesus said, "Today thou shalt," etc.; but "if the soul travels at the speed of the radio rays, which in less than one second pass around the globe seven times, it would take it 300,000,000 years to r each the limits of the universe." details that he did not use in the broad outline. . . . How marvelously this illustrates the ability of the keen mentality that would contradict the Book that God has written!" Verbal Iru,"'Piration-a Stumbling-Block to Jews, Etc. 39 H. E. Fosdick (very liberal) and Ingersoll find that the Sinaitic wilderness could not possibly have sustained the 600,000 men and their families, 3,000,000 persons. So Fosdick solves the difficulty by suggesting, in the Ladies' Home Journal, that the Hebrew word alaf be here translated "a family." "All our trouble comes from translating it 'a thousand' here." Num. 1: 34,35 would thus state that the tribe of Manasseh numbered not 32,000 but had thirty-two jamilies, making 200 people altogether. So a total of only about 5,500 made the Exodus. "At least that fits the possibilities." No miracle was needed to sustain such a vast host. It is not neces- sary to assume that Moses "stretched the statistics." And Ingersoll can no longer gloat over the biometrical blunder committed by Moses in letting the seventy increase to three millions in such a short time. However, if Fosdick's suggestion is adopted, Ingersoll will have to charge Moses with a bad arithmetical error. Add the 46 "families" of Reuben, the 59 of Simeon, and all the others, and we get 598 "families." But the census officials whose figures Moses accepts, get the sum of 603 "families" (Num. 1: 46) . Com- puting a family at 6, the census official for Gad should have reported 270 persons. He padded the figures and reported 650. The national official tried to rectify these mistakes, and in verse 46, where he was entitled to 3,618, he put down only 550. These men were poor in arithmetic. If Israel numbered 603,550 men, the figures given Ex. 38: 25, 26, as to the sum raised by taxation, are correct. If Fosdick's suggested figure , 5,500, is correct , the sum given in verse 25, at half a shekel for every man, cannot be correct. Or else they were taxed to death. (See further Theol. Mthly ., 1928, p. 299 ff.) H. C .. Alleman: "Matt. 21: 7 says the disciples placed their gar- ments upon them (the ass and the colt), and He sat on them. Does that mean that Jesus sat upon both animals?" (Luth. Church Quart., Oct., 1940, p . 356.)187) Dr. Alleman goes out of his way to give the sacred story a farcical twist. Before him David Fried- rich Strauss did it. He says that "the evangelist makes Jesus slavishly and unreasonably carry out the prophetic description by riding at once upon both animals." The Lange-Schaff Com- mentary calls it a "frivolous criticism," "to which it is sufficient to reply that Matthew knew as much Hebrew and had as much common sense as any modern critic of his gospel." "Wir sind Wirklichkeitsmenschen!" - Gentlemen, your facts have turned out to be fictions. TH. ENGELDER (To be continued) 187) Similarly Gore's A New Commentary: "Matthew's misunder- standing of Zechariah leads him into absurdity. He speaks ... of the Lord as riding on both animals." He does not. Just "refer the second aih;wv (them) to the garments" (Exp. Gr. Test .) . According to Greek grammar it fits perfectly.