What is questioned is that our Lord's words foreclose certaincritical positions as to the character of Old Testamentliterature. For example, does His use of Jonah's resurrection asatypeof His own, depend in any real degree upon whetherit is historical fact or allegory?... Once more, our Lord usesthe time before the Flood, to illustrate the carelessness of menbefore His own coming.... In referring to the Flood Hecertainly suggests that He is treating it as typical, for Heintroduces circumstances—"eating and drinking, marrying andgiving in marriage "—which have no counterpart in the originalnarrative. (pp. 358-9).
While insisting on the flow of inspiration through the whole of the Old Testament, the essayist does not admit its universality. Here, also, the new apologetic demands a partial flood:
But does the inspiration of the recorder guarantee the exacthistorical truth of what he records? And, in matter of fact, canthe record with due regard to legitimate historical criticism,be pronounced true? Now, to the latter of these two questions(and they are quite distinct questions) we may reply that thereis nothing to prevent our believing, as our faith stronglydisposes us to believe, that the record from Abraham downwardis, in substance, in the strict sense historical (p. 351).
It would appear, therefore, that there is nothing to prevent our believing that the record, from Abraham upward, consists of stories in the strict sense unhistorical, and that the pre-Abrahamic narratives are mere moral and religious "types" and parables.
I confess I soon lose my way when I try to follow those who walk delicately among "types" and allegories. A certain passion for clearness forces me to ask, bluntly, whether the writer means to say that Jesus did not believe the stories in question, or that he did? When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that "the Flood came and destroyed them all," did he believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? It seems to me that, as the narrative mentions Noah's wife, and his sons' wives, there is good scriptural warranty for the statement that the antediluvians married and were given in marriage; and I should have thought that their eating and drinking might be assumed by the firmest believer in the literal truth of the story. Moreover, I venture to ask what sort of value, as an illustration of God's methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of "Wolf" when there is no wolf? If Jonah's three days' residence in the whale is not an "admitted reality," how could it "warrant belief" in the "coming resurrection?" If Lot's wife was not turned into a pillar of salt, the bidding those who turn back from the narrow path to "remember" it is, morally, about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away. Suppose that a Conservative orator warns his hearers to beware of great political and social changes, lest they end, as in France, in the domination of a Robespierre; what becomes, not only of his argument, but of his veracity, if he, personally, does not believe that Robespierre existed and did the deeds attributed to him?
Like all other attempts to reconcile the results of scientifically-conducted investigation with the demands of the outworn creeds of ecclesiasticism, the essay on Inspiration is just such a failure as must await mediation, when the mediator is unable properly to appreciate the weight of the evidence for the case of one of the two parties. The question of "Inspiration" really possesses no interest for those who have cast ecclesiasticism and all its works aside, and have no faith in any source of truth save that which is reached by the patient application of scientific methods. Theories of inspiration are speculations as to the means by which the authors of statements, in the Bible or elsewhere, have been led to say what they have said—and it assumes that natural agencies are insufficient for the purpose. I prefer to stop short of this problem, finding it more profitable to undertake the inquiry which naturally precedes it—namely, Are these statements true or false? If they are true, it may be worth while to go into the question of their supernatural generation; if they are false, it certainly is not worth mine.
Now, not only do I hold it to be proven that the story of the Deluge is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the same thing of the story of the Creation.12Between these two lies the story of the creation of man and woman and their fall from primitive innocence, which is even more monstrously improbable than either of the other two, though, from the nature of the case, it is not so easily capable of direct refutation. It can be demonstrated that the earth took longer than six days in the making, and that the Deluge, as described, is a physical impossibility; but there is no proving, especially to those who are perfect in the art of closing their ears to that which they do not wish to hear, that a snake did not speak, or that Eve was not made out of one of Adam's ribs.
The compiler of Genesis, in its present form, evidently had a definite plan in his mind. His countrymen, like all other men, were doubtless curious to know how the world began; how men, and especially wicked men, came into being, and how existing nations and races arose among the descendants of one stock; and, finally, what was the history of their own particular tribe. They, like ourselves, desired to solve the four great problems of cosmogeny, anthropogeny, ethnogeny, and geneogeny. The Pentateuch furnishes the solutions which appeared satisfactory to its author. One of these, as we have seen, was borrowed from a Babylonian fable; and I know of no reason to suspect any different origin for the rest. Now, I would ask, is the story of the fabrication of Eve to be regarded as one of those pre-Abrahamic narratives, the historical truth of which is an open question, in face of the reference to it in a speech unhappily famous for the legal oppression to which it has been wrongfully forced to lend itself?
Have ye not read, that he which made them from the beginningmade them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a manleave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and thetwain shall become one flesh? (Matt. xix. 5.)
If divine authority is not here claimed for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a "type" or "allegory," what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology?—
For since by man came death, by man came also theresurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also inChrist shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians xv. 21, 22).
If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul's dialectic?
While, therefore, every right-minded man must sympathise with the efforts of those theologians, who have not been able altogether to close their ears to the still, small, voice of reason, to escape from the fetters which ecclesiasticism has forged; the melancholy fact remains, that the position they have taken up is hopelessly untenable. It is raked alike by the old-fashioned artillery of the churches and by the fatal weapons of precision with which theenfants perdusof the advancing forces of science are armed. They must surrender, or fall back into a more sheltered position. And it is possible that they may long find safety in such retreat.
It is, indeed, probable that the proportional number of those who will distinctly profess their belief in the transubstantiation of Lot's wife, and the anticipatory experience of submarine navigation by Jonah; in water standing fathoms deep on the side of a declivity without anything to hold it up; and in devils who enter swine—will not increase. But neither is there ground for much hope that the proportion of those who cast aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of that repudiation, are, for some generations, likely to constitute a majority. Our age is a day of compromises. The present and the near future seem given over to those happily, if curiously, constituted people who see as little difficulty in throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic Scriptural narrative, as the authors of "Lux Mundi" see in sacrificing the pre-Abrahamic stories; and, having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine honours to the residue. There really seems to be no reason why the next generation should not listen to a Bampton Lecture modelled upon that addressed to the last:—
Time was—and that not very long ago—when all the relations ofBiblical authors concerning the whole world were received with aready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith acceptedwith equal satisfaction the narrative of the Captivity and thedoings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the account of theApostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians, and that ofthe fabrication of Eve. We can most of us remember when, in thiscountry, the whole story of the Exodus, and even the legend ofJonah, were seriously placed before boys as history; anddiscoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt orthe history of the Norman Conquest.But all this is now changed. The last century has seen thegrowth of scientific criticism to its full strength. The wholeworld of history has been revolutionised and the mythology whichembarrassed earnest Christians has vanished as an evil mist, thelifting of which has only more fully revealed the lineaments ofinfallible Truth. No longer in contact with fact of any kind,Faith stands now and for ever proudly inaccessible to theattacks of the infidel.
So far the apologist of the future. Why not?Cantabit vacuus.
1 (return)[Bampton Lectures(1859), on "The Historical Evidence of the Truth of the Scripture Records stated anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times," by the Rev. G. Rawlinson, M.A., pp. 5-6.]
2 (return)[The Worth of the Old Testament,a Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on the second Sunday in Advent, 8th Dec., 1889, by H. P. Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's. Second edition revised and with a new preface, 1890.]
3 (return)[ St. Luke xvii. 32.]
4 (return)[ St. Luke xvii. 27.]
5 (return)[ St. Matt. xii. 40.]
6 (return)[Bampton Lectures,1859, pp. 50-51.]
7 (return)[Commentary on Genesis,by the Bishop of Ely, p. 77.]
8 (return)[Die Sintflut,1876.]
9 (return)[Theologie und Naturwissenschaft,ii. 784-791 (1877).]
10 (return)[ It is very doubtful if this means the region of the Armenian Ararat. More probably it designates some part either of the Kurdish range or of its south-eastern continuation.]
11 (return)[ So Reclus (Nouvelle Geographie Universelle,ix. 386), but I find the statement doubted by an authority of the first rank.]
12 (return)[ So far as I know, the narrative of the Creation is not now held to be true, in the sense in which I have defined historical truth, by any of the reconcilers. As for the attempts to stretch the Pentateuchal days into periods of thousands or millions of years, the verdict of the eminent Biblical scholar, Dr. Riehm (Der biblische Schopfungsbericht,1881, pp. 15, 16) on such pranks of "Auslegungskunst" should be final. Why do the reconcilers take Goethe's advice seriously?—
"Im Auslegen seyd frisch und munter!Legt ihr's nicht aus, so legt was unter."]