3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”[pg 234]5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”[pg 234]5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”[pg 234]5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”[pg 234]5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”[pg 234]5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
3. Errors in Morality.(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.
(a) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.
Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”
Instances of this sort are Noah's drunkenness (Gen. 9:20-27); Lot's incest (Gen. 19:30-38); Jacob's falsehood (Gen. 27:19-24); David's adultery (2 Sam. 11:1-4); Peter's denial (Mat. 26:69-75). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther's vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”
(b) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.
As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”
As Rehab's faith, not her duplicity (Josh. 2:1-24;cf.Heb. 11:31andJames 2:25); Jael's patriotism, not her treachery (Judges 4:17-22;cf.5:24). Or did they cast in their lot with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next paragraph)? Herder:“The limitations of the pupil are also limitations of the teacher.”While Dean Stanley praises Solomon for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in persecution.”
(c) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.
Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.
Ex. 20:25—“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses' permission of divorce and retaliation (Deut. 24:1;cf.Mat. 5:31, 32; 19:7-9;Ex. 21:24;cf.Mat. 5:38, 39). Compare Elijah's calling down fire from heaven (2 K. 1:10-12) with Jesus' refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (Luke 9:52-56);cf.Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, onMat. 17:8—“Jesus only”:“The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood of enemies requires less strength than to shed one's own blood, and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.”Hovey:“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally day.”George Washington once gave directions for the transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar's unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.“What did you say to him?”asked the teacher.“We didn't say nothing; we just punched his head for him.”This was Old Testament righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compareEx. 20:12withMat. 5:10; 25:46. The Old Testament aimed to fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other teaching was postponed. See Peabody,[pg 231]Religion of Nature, 45; Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April, 1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.
When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the prophetess (Judges 5:30), an allusion to the common spoils of war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man”or inProv. 31:6, 7—“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr. Fisher calls the latter“the worst advice to a person in affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.”They mark past stages in God's providential leading of mankind. A higher stage indeed is already intimated inProv. 31:4—“it is not for kings to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?”We see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men's“hardness of heart”(Mat. 19:8). The Sermon on the Mount is a great advance on the law of Moses (Mat. 5:21—“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time”;cf.22—“But I say unto you”).
Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual, and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is conceded in the common phrase:“the new dispensation.”Abraham Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-19) was a proper test of Abraham's faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman,“patria potestas”did not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but included the child in the parent and made the child equally responsible for the parent's sin. But that very command was givenonlyas a test of faith, and with the intent to make the intended obedience the occasion of revealing God's provision of a substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.
(d) God's righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or executors of his purposes.
Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).
Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (137:9;cf.Is. 13:16-18andJer. 50:16, 29); executors, as in the destruction of the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2, 16). In the former case the Psalm was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the denunciation of God's righteous judgments; the form was taken from the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist's time. See Park, in Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms, Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505;cf.2 Tim. 4:14—“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold, Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 11-24.
Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (c) above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command, though through it the purpose of God as to Christ's descent was accomplished.”John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls, 143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”
Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a[pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of“Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest”when stoned to death in the temple court:“Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus:“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34)and of Stephen:“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”(Acts 7:60).
(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.
InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.
InHosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compareJer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.”Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible,in loco. In2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In theSong of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.
Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles:Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”;10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.”In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts,“the powers that be”(Rom. 13:1)and“the king as supreme”(1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals withnationallife, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main withindividualsand with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.
4. Errors of Reasoning.(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”[pg 233](b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”
(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.
InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”
InMat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is“a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”
(b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation orad hominemarguments on the part of the Scripture writers.
By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.
By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. InHeb. 7:9, 10(Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. InGal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot,in loco). InGal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). InJohn 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,”the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.
(c) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular case.
InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.
InGal. 3:16—“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”Here it is intimated that the very form of the expression inGen. 22:18, which denotes unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew or Greek terms for‘seed’is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’”In1 Cor. 10:1-6—“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with his ancient people.Per contra, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories, 98-128.
(d) If it should appear however upon further investigation that Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.
Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”
Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.”If however the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof, we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration may have put them in possession of this truth without altering their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression. Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not materially distort or hide the Person”whose glory they sought to reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a certain argument in the epistle was“good enough for the Galatians.”
5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
(a) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.
InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.
InEph. 5:14,“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”is an inspired interpretation ofIs. 60:1—“Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”Ps. 68:18—“Thou hast received gifts among men”—is quoted inEph. 4:8as“gave gifts to men.”The words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for“thou hast taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.”Eph. 4:8agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of the Psalm. InHeb. 11:21,“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the top of his staff”(LXX);Gen. 47:31has“bowed himself upon the bed's head.”The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed's head. Jacob, too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that“the apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous”as to details. Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of“a reshaping of his own words by the Author of them.”We prefer, with Calvin, to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the form, the spirit rather than the letter.
(b) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint, the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.
Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).
Ps. 4:4—Heb.:“Tremble, and sin not”(= no longer); LXX:“Be ye angry, and sin not.”Eph. 4:26quotes the LXX. The words may originally have been addressed to David's comrades, exhorting them to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are needed to bring out the meaning of the original.Ps. 40:6-8—“Mine ears hast thou opened”is translated inHeb. 10:5-7—“a body didst thou prepare for me.”Here the Epistle quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally:“Mine ears hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is therefore given in the Epistle:“Thou hast made me thine in body and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.”A. C. Kendrick:“David, just entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ entering on his earthly mission. Hence David's words are put into the mouth of Christ. For‘ears,’the organs with which we hear and obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God, the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word‘body,’as thegeneralinstrument of doing God's will”(Com. onHeb. 10:5-7).
(c) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.
We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.
We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab (Josh. 2:18) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid her leaven (Mat. 13:33) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that“the loops of blue = heavenly grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams' skins dyed red = Christ's consecration and devotedness; the badgers' skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (John 1:14—ἐσκήνωσεν.2:19, 21—“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.
Mat. 25:1-13—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended persecution from the words inLuke 14:23—“constrain them to come in.”The Inquisition was justified byMat. 13:30—“bind them in bundles to burn them.”Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the laity, quotingHeb. 12:20—“If even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.”A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe on an evangelizing journey because he read inJohn 19:36—“A bone of him shall not be broken.”Mat. 17:8—“they saw no one, save Jesus[pg 235]only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham's 318 servants a prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All this is to make a parable“run on all fours.”While we call a hero a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond to the lion's mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.; Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.
(d) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration. The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men's moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship or exegesis.
In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”
In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory, allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another, its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings of their readers.”