Dr. Harnack Rejects the Miracles and the Gospel of John

Then there are the miracles. A friend of mine once averted a disaster by “healing” a man upon whom the safety of a party of travellers depended. Their hale, rough, mountain guide was seized with a sudden illness, and

p. 156. +p. 157. re dl § p.159.

‘lay down to die. By the use of a strong will, and a bottle of hair-wash from his valise, he had the man on his feet again in half an hour. I once got him to tell the whole story to the late Sir Andrew Clark, and I remember well the response it evoked, uttered in Sir Andrew’s staccato style: “I thoroughly believe in a gift of healing.” So also does Prof. Harnack; and thus he is able to accept what I may call the everyday miracles of the ministry. For, he tells us, “historical science in the last generation has taken a great step in advance by learning to pass a more intelligent and benevolent judgment on those narratives.”*

And yet, with strange inconsistency, he writes : —

‘It is not miracles that matter; the question on which everything turns is whether we are helplessly yoked to an inexorable necessity, or whether a God exists who rules and governs, and whose power to compel Nature we can move by prayer and make a part of our experience.”

Now this entirely explodes the infidel argument against miracles. For the seeming force of that argument depends on the fallacy that a

p. 24. ae tp. 30.

miracle is a.violation of the laws of nature, whereas in fact it is but “the introduction of a new agent possessing new powers.” Once we acknowledge a God who rules and governs and can “compel Nature,’* the credibility of divine miracles resolves itself into a question of evidence, and a refusal on a priori grounds to examine the evidence betokens sheer materialism or stupidity.

Take Joshua’s miracle for example. “That the earth in its course stood still” (Dr. Harnack declares) “we shall never again believe.” + Some of us never did believe it. Nor does the Bible state it. Joshua’s prayer was that the sun might “be silent.” And the record of what follows explains this Hebrew figure of speech: “The sun was silent in the half of the heaven and hasted not to go down a whole day.” It is incongruous to say that “the sun stood still and hasted not to go down.” When we say that a man did not haste to catch a

* Nature is, of course, but one sphere of God’s government, and, therefore, to speak of God’s ‘‘compelling Nature’ seems incongruous. Upon this whole question of miracles I take the liberty of referring to my book, The Silence of God, especially chapter iii,

+p. 28.

train, we imply, not that he sat down, but that he went to the station slowly. And so here: the sun lingered in the [visible] half* of the heaven. And if we believe in a God who has power over “Nature,” His retarding the rotation of the earth does not seem more wonderful than an engineer’s “slowing down” the great wheel of a steam engine.

So much, then, for the miracles. As for the rest, Prof. Harnack’s purpose being to reduce the facts and the phenomena of what he calls “Christianity” to the level of Rationalism, he reads the New Testament with a predetermination to refuse everything which clashes with his own system. Not only, therefore, is the story of the birth rejected, but also that wonderful narrative which he dismisses as “a curious story of a temptation.” And the Messiahship, the eternal Sonship, and the atonement are,

* The word is so rendered with rare exceptions in all its one hundred and seventeen occurrences. The rendering “in the midst’ suggests the grotesque idea that at noonday Joshua gave a drill-sergeant command to the sun to halt, and it stood still! Common sense might tell us that the need would not arise till the sun was sinking, and it became clear that the approach of night would enable the enemy to escape.

ial like the resurrection, relegated to the category of “ideas.”

The Gospel of John, of course, goes overboard. It “does not emanate from the apostle John,” and it “cannot be taken as an historical authority in the ordinary sense of the word.”* The genuineness of the fourth gospel is too well established to be dismissed in this jaunty way, by a wave of the hand. If in any other sphere than that of religious controversy a writer were to treat in such a contemptuous fashion the convictions and conclusions of scholars and thinkers as competent and trustworthy as himself, he would be told — well, he would be told what Prof. Harnack needs to be told here. But I will leave it to someone else to say, for I am neither a scholar nor a university professor nor a professional theologian.

But I may claim to be, at least, as competent as he is to discriminate between fact and fiction, to detect a fraud, to pursue an inquiry which requires practical acquaintance with the science of evidence. I propose, therefore, to bring his methods to bear upon his own position. A sceptic both by temperament and by training, 3 a ep,

’

I propose to examine his scheme from the standpoint of scepticism — thorough, Telentlese scepticism.