Chapter VIII
SETTLING the issues” is one of the essential preHminaries to a lawsuit. The object of the VJ “pleadings” is to ascertain with precision the matter in dispute. And anything alleged upon one side and admitted upon the other is taken as proved, and no evidence is needed to establish it.
Now it is neither denied nor even questioned, and therefore it may be accepted as indisputable, that the Lord Jesus Christ regarded the Hebrew Bible as possessing Divine authority. It would unduly strain His words to construe them as vetoing inquiry upon matters which fall within the scope of true criticism; such, for example, as whether the book of Genesis was not in part»a compilation of earlier documents, or whether the book of Isaiah may not include the prophecies of some other prophet.
In a well-known passage Josephus describes the spirit in which the Hebrew Scriptures were treated by his nation. Here are his words:” Although so great an interval of time has now passed [since they were written], not a soul has ventured either to add, or to
^I do not allude to the sixteen “Second Isaiahs” theory or the cutting up of the book into fragments — all this only illustrates the fact that eminent scholars may be very silly — but whether the later section of Isaiah may not be by a later prophet. As a matter of evidence, it is hopelessly untenable. (See “Bible and Modern Criticism,” pp. 45-47.)
remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is the instinct of every Jew, from the day of his birth, to consider those [Scriptures] as the teaching of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to lay down life in their behalf.”
It was to men whose minds were saturated with this spirit and these beliefs that our Lord addressed such words as these: —
“The Scripture cannot be broken.” *
“Verily I say unto you. Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”’
The question is often asked. What were “the Scriptures” tO’ which the Lord so often referred? Some books of seeming repute aver that the Jewish Canon was at that time not yet settled, and that it certainly included apocryphal writings which have no Divine sanction. In answer to this question, and in refutation of these false statements, I will again appeal to a writer of high authority with the Critics.
In the “Canon of the Old Testament” the Bishop of Winchester uses these words: —
“The full complement of Scripture had been arrived at a century before the coming of Him who came not to destroy but to fulfil ’ the Law and the Prophets.’ ... It was thus divinely ordered that we should be enabled to know the exact limits of those Scriptures upon which has rested the sanction conveyed by the usage and blessing of our Divine Master, and of which He spake, ’ these are they which bear witness of Me ’ (John v. 39). Thus, too, an effectual barrier was raised to protect the Scriptures of the Apostles against the encroach-Uohn X. 35. ‘’Matt. v. 18.
merits of any unauthorised additions. The use of the LXX. version familiarised the Christian Church with writings that never found a place in the Hebrew Canon; but through the action of the Jewish doctors at the close of the first century A. J)., there was never any doubt what the limits of the Hebrew Canon were.”
Let it be kept clearly in view, then, that the Scriptures, declared by our Divine Lord to have Divine authority, were identical with those contained in the Old Testament of the Christian’s Bible.
For eighteen centuries the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ was held to be decisive by Christians of every name. Indeed the mere refusal to accept His teaching placed anyone outside the pale. But now all this is changed. His testimony to the Divine authority of the Hebrew Scriptures is full and clear; but the new theology of the Kenosis bids us disregard it. For, we are told. He so completely “emptied Himself” that He held the position of a Jew of His time and shared the prevailing ignorance and error respecting the very Scriptures which it was His mission to fulfil.
This, moreover, is enforced by catch questions, as, for example, whether our Divine Lord could have solved problems in higher mathematics. To some of us such questions seem quite as irrelevant as they are irreverent. As the Bishop of Durham writes: —
“The most cautious, the most worshipping, theology may hold that He consented, in His Humanity, to limitations of
Kenosis is a Greek word meaning an emptying. The verb is used in Philippians ii. 7.
His conscious knowledge, and to silence outside those bounds. But here He appears as ignorant with that sort of ignorance which so profoundly impairs the whole value of a teacher — the ignorance of the man who does not know where his knowledge ends, and so makes confident affirmations, and draws confident inferences, where his basis as to facts is unsound.”
In contrast with these weighty words, the following is a statement of the pseudo-Critics’ views, taken from their most accredited text-book: “Both Christ and the Apostles or writers of the New Testament held the current Jewish notions respecting the Divine authority and revelation of the Old Testament.” In all their treatises this profanity is either expressed or implied.
I want the intelligent reader to realise what it means. When he opens the Gospels he is no longer to read the words which fell from the lips of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as being the authoritative declaration of Divine truth, but merely the expression of “current Jewish notions.”
If this canon be accepted, no free and fearless thinker will allow its application to be arbitrarily limited. It must apply not merely to His teaching about Judaism, but equally to His teaching about Christianity. If the teaching was unreliable as regards the past, it must be still more worthless as regards the future. And if His words were false when He spoke of earthly things, how can we take them as true when He spoke of heavenly things? The whole foundations of our faith are thus destroyed.
* Preface to the author’s “Bible and Modern Criticism.” ‘Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, article “Old Testament,” p. 6oi.
But, it will be said, the Apostles and Evangelists were inspired. Will the objector again refer to the Critics’ confession of unfaith. “The Apostles or writers of the New Testament” shared the “current Jewish notions” of their Master. They were not the inspired heralds of His truth, but the dupes of His false teaching.
But the objector possibly may plead that the Critics overstate their case; that the Kenosis ended with the Cross, and that after Pentecost the Apostles spoke, and the Evangelists wrote, in the light of inspiration. But this explodes the Kenosis theory altogether. First, because their testimony to the Divine authority of the Hebrew Scriptures was as explicit as that of the Master Himself. And secondly, because (to waive all other questions) from the beginning of the Lord’s public ministry the Spirit was given to Him “without measure.”
But more than this, there are three great facts which the Critics here ignore — and, as we have seen, it is their way to ignore anything that does not fit in with their preconceived conclusions. The first is the Temptation, the second is the Transfiguration, and the third is the Resurrection and the ministry of the Forty Days.
In one respect at least “the current Jewish notions “of nineteen centuries ago might shame the ignorance and error of” the Christian religion.” If “they called the Master of the House Beelzebub “it was because the Devil of Jewish theology was the Satan of Scripture, and not the monster of old Babylonian paganism. The Satan of the Temptation was the false Messiah, the God of this world — the awful Being who directs, not its crimes, but its religion; who” fashions himself as an angel of light “; who comes to us, as Luther says, with an open Bible. How Satan would have triumphed if, when the true Messiah quoted Deuteronomy, he could have shown Him to be the dupe of” current Jewish notions respecting the Divine authority of the Old Testament “!” Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God “was the Master’s estimate of the Hebrew Scriptures. ‘’ It is written” was with Him an end of controversy on every point.
“When we were with Him in the Holy Mount,” the inspired Apostle writes, “we were eye-witnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honour and glory.” Here at least there could be no question of the Kenosis. For as Moses and Elias “talked with Him “of the Scriptures He had come to fulfil, ‘’ the law and the prophets” were in very touch with Him. And “from the excellent glory there came such a voice to Him, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” And the words were added, “Hear ye Him.”
Hear ye whom? An ignorant Jew, the dupe of “current Jewish notions about the Divine authority and revelation of the Old Testament” — a teacher whose apprehension of the Scriptures was less intelligent than that of present-day professors in our theological colleges — than that of any of the lads who have the inestimable benefit of their teaching!
But this is not all. The same Gospels which record
*Matt. iv. I -10.
*2 Pet. i. 16-18; Matt. xvii. 1-5; Luke ix. 28-35.
the Ministry of the Humiliation contain also the record of words uttered by our Divine Lord after the resurrection, when He spoke in all the fulness of Divine knowledge. And in those words He adopted and confirmed all His previous teaching about the Hebrew Scriptures.
Here are some of them: —
“* O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?’ And beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself.”
And again: —
“‘These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me.’ Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, and said unto them, * Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.’ “*
What answer, what explanation, do the Critics offer us here? Absolutely none. With astounding profanity and folly they declare that the teaching of the Humiliation was marked by ignorance and error. And the teaching of the Resurrection they ignore altogether.
“Then opened He their mind that they might understand the scriptures.” Upon the truth of that statement, and upon the reality of the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing to their remembrance all His
Luke xxiv. 25-27. ‘Luke xxiv. 44-46.
teaching, depends the vahie of the New Testament and of the whole Christian revelation.
If acquaintance with the text of Holy Scripture carried with it an intelligent apprehension of its meaning, the Jewish leaders who crucified the Lord would stand incomparably above the ablest of the modern Critics. There was not one of them who could not have corrected a slip in the public reading of the sacred books. But because they knew not “the voices of the prophets” — or, in other words, their true meaning — “they fulfilled them in condemning Him.” 1
In the very nature of things error is absurd. And the absurdity of the figment that the Lord’s estimate of the Scriptures was derived from His contemporaries is apparent from the fact that none of His contemporaries understood the Scriptures as He interpreted them. Not even His own disciples “knew the voices of the prophets “; therefore it was that the Cross was the death-blow to all their hopes. Hence the words, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” But now “He opened their understanding.” And all their after testimony, whether in preaching or in the inspired Scriptures of the New Testament, was the outcome of that enlightenment.
“He opened their mind that they might understand the scriptures.” Not so, the Critics tell us; He left them still deceived by His erroneous teaching — the dupes of “current Jewish notions about their inspiration and authority.” His estimate of the Hebrew
Acts xiii. 27.
Scriptures was a false one; and its falseness, the Critics aver, is of such a kind that it is both dishonouring to God and mischievous in its evil influence upon men.
In the days of His humiliation, so ignorant and deceived was He about the very Scriptures which it was His mission to fulfil, that any one of us can now revise and correct His teaching. And though after the resurrection He had full knowledge of the truth, yet, from motives of policy, He commissioned His Apostles to promulgate the error, thus leaving Church and world to be deluded by the fraud until, after eighteen centuries, German Rationalists discovered and exposed it!
This is the issue raised by the pseudo-Criticism. Let no one try to evade it by quibbling about “verbal inspiration “or the like. We have got far beyond all questions of that kind now. What concerns us here is not the method of the inspiration, nor even the character of the revelation it has given us; but whether we have a Divine teacher. It is not the Bible that is at stake, but the Christ of the Bible. If ‘* criticism has won its war,” the “indemnity” must include the unreserved acknowledgment that the Christian faith is mere superstition.
If we hold the Church of Rome to be outside the pale, it is not because its creeds are tainted by error — for no intelligent Protestant pretends that his own Church is perfect in this respect — but because the distinctive errors of Rome disparage and dishonour the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Therefore it is that they are rightly held to be vital.
But let us be honest and fair in this matter. How can we brand the Church of Rome as an apostasy so long as we acknowledge any Church which publicly endorses this Kenosis blasphemy, or allows it to be taught in its colleges or preached from its pulpits.^
And this is the issue which in 1902, by a majority vote, was decided by the successors of the men who, in 1843, under the leadership of Chalmers, seceded from the Church of Scotland because they believed that personal loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ demanded a sacrifice so tremendous. Through personal regard for a popular colleague they have now done a dishonour to the Lord so terrible that, in comparison with it, the “disruption” controversy sinks into insignificance. And I write as one who before even he left the nursery felt a thrill of enthusiasm as he heard the record of that struggle. Those noble men, like the old Patriarchs, went out not knowing whither they went. But their degenerate successors, enervated and corrupted by prosperity, seem to have inherited neither their heroism nor their faith.
The pseudo-Criticism has thus “won its war” in the United Free Church of Scotland. But when the laity awake to understand the issue, the majority who voted for the heresy may yet find it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Were not the Lord’s words in Matthew x. 32-38 spoken for such a time as this? Let every true-hearted Christian ponder them, and act on them by giving encouragement and support to clergymen and ministers who “think upon His Name,” while sternly shutting his purse-strings against every man who takes sides against the Master in this controversy.