Falling Between Two Stools

Charles is a typical middle-aged Englishman. Most people like him, because he's a friendly sort of chap. Good hearted, good living and public spirited, too.

He stood for the local council last year, but failed to get in. He never goes to church, but he would be hurt if you suggested he was not a Christian. He believes in keeping the Ten Commandments (or at least, as many as he can remember), and in being kind to other people.

Of course, he doesn't believe in the Bible, except for a few bits that he approves of. Like most people, he follows the fashion and assumes that the Bible has been shot full of holes by scientists and other experts. And anyway, he says he can live a perfectly good life without the Bible, thank you.

Yet Charles has suddenly become a worried man. His tranquil life has recently taken a very nasty knock. He has two teenage sons who are worrying him stiff. They stoop to every kind of petty dishonesty they can get away with, and the way they behave with girls makes Charles' hair go grey.

The worst of it is that Charles feels so powerless. Whenever he says anything, he comes up against a stone wall. "But why not, Dad? We're not hurting anybody. Why shouldn't we do what we like?"

Poor Charles has no answer for them. If he says, "Because I say so!" they merely retort, "And who do you think you are?"

He knows how his father made him toe the line, forty years ago. The old man simply said, "Charles, pack this up! It's wrong. The Bible says so." In those days Charles knew that to his father the Bible was authoritative. So Charles did as he was told.

But Charles cannot talk to his own sons like that. They know he doesn't accept the authority of the Bible. Charles believes in keeping the Commandments, and it upsets him to see his sons breaking them. But he doesn't know why he keeps them. So how can he hope to persuade his sons to keep them?

Charles is not alone in this. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of fathers in the same uncomfortable position.

The fact is that there always was only one good reason for keeping the Commandments. They are introduced by the statement: "And God spake all these words, saying..."1

And they are immediately followed by a passage that says:

"And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking... And the Lord said unto Moses, Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven."2

That is why a hundred generations of God-fearing Jews have respected the Ten Commandments. They believed that the whole book of Exodus was true. They believed that God really did appear on Mount Sinai and thunder out those commandments to their ancestors.

Jesus Christ endorsed that belief. Several books of the New Testament refer directly to it as a historical fact.3 That is why many generations of Bible-believing Christians like Charles' father have had a profound respect for the Commandments.

Thin End of the Wedge

There is a big lesson to be learnt from this.

If you believe that God led Israel to Mount Sinai by a succession of mighty miracles, and there gave them His Law, the Commandments will have supreme authority. They will be a power in your life. They cannot be anything else, if you really believe they came down from heaven.

But suppose you listen to the wrong kind of expert. Suppose you lap up the misguided philosophy that says: "Miracles are impossible. Much of the book of Exodus is fiction. The Commandments were made up by a group of pious men, not thundered out from heaven."

Then what? All the power and authority is gone. "Keep the Commandments if you want to; break them if you don't. If God didn't give the Commandments He won't punish you for breaking them." This is the inevitable reaction.

Where moral standards are concerned there is no permanent halfway house. The whole Bible stands or falls together, and moral standards stand or fall with it. If it is what it claims to be, inspired by God and authoritative from beginning to end, then it demands our obedience. But if not, there is no real reason why we should not do what we like.

More and more people are realising this now. That is why more and more people are casting off all restraint. We ought not to be surprised by the rocketing statistics of crime, immorality, drug-addiction and violence. Far-sighted men and women saw it coming, more than a hundred years ago. They knew the thin end of a wedge when they saw it.

Until about the middle of the last century practically all Christian scholars accepted the Bible's own claim to be the words of God. There were some scholars who attacked the Bible, but generally they made no claim to be Christian. For some time their attacks on the Bible had little effect. But soon after the middle of the nineteenth century they made a breakthrough.

Around that time there was a great leap forward in human knowledge. The foundations of modern science were being laid. The two great offshoots of science, medicine and engineering, were working wonders undreamed of a few years before. Historians and archaeologists were busy unravelling the secrets of the past.

The result of all this was a great epidemic of swollen heads in the universities of the world. Few scholars had the humility to think, "Now we are a little less ignorant than we were before." The general reaction was, "Look how wise we are now! Within a few years we shall know practically everything worth knowing."

Swinburne captured the spirit of the age in verse:

"Glory to Man in the highest!

For Man is the master of things."

In this climate of opinion scholars jumped recklessly to conclusions, without waiting for proper evidence. And a large part of the general public jumped blindly after them.

Darwin's Origin of Species was sold out on the day of publication. Before they had even read it, some people started to believe that Darwin had disproved the existence of a Creator.

Archaeologists decided that writing was not invented until after Moses was dead, and that consequently Moses could not possibly have written any part of the Bible. Historians decided that nearly all the books of the Bible were full of historical blunders, and therefore could not have been written by eye-witnesses.

We know now that all these gentlemen were, in fact, talking through the back of their learned necks. Modern scholars regard nineteenth-century scholarship as a hotchpotch of truth and error. But this realisation came too late to avert a tragedy. Very many Christian ministers of that time were taken in by the great flood of over-confident nineteenth-century scholarship. They accepted the view that the Bible was a collection of pious forgeries, written at a late date and palmed off on an ancient public as the works of famous men.

By the turn of the century this view was held by the majority of Christian scholars. By then it was being taught in many theological colleges as if it were the unquestionable truth. And, of course, the young students at those colleges lapped it up without question. (They had to, if they wanted to pass their exams.) The fact that a very different viewpoint was still being taught at other colleges was quietly overlooked.

From Bad to Worse

It took a little time before it dawned on the average man what these views meant. If the Book of Isaiah did not even contain the words of Isaiah, you could hardly expect it to contain the words of God. If the four gospels were not written until long after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were dead, you could not rely on what they said about Jesus. Some of it might be true, some untrue. Each man was free to choose how much he would believe.

It was obvious where this would lead. Gradually men would choose to believe less and less of the Bible, until finally they believed nothing at all.

What was a little more unexpected was the way religious leaders gradually became more and more extreme in their statements. At first they expressed their views moderately. In the nineteen thirties Archbishop Temple wrote:

"There is no single deed or saying of His [Christ's] of which we can be perfectly sure that He said or did precisely this or that."4

Though this makes sad reading, at least the language is restrained. It contrasts strikingly with a more recent statement by another religious leader. In ig6~ Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, one-time President of the Methodist Conference, was reported as saying that he would like to go through the Bible with a blue pencil and blot out various portions. He called the Old Testament out of date and completely outmoded. He described many of the Psalms as nonsense.5

The end of the road was reached in 1966, when the following letter appeared in a leading British newspaper.6

"Sir,

I do not believe in the existence of God; I believe that love, or 'agape', as exemplified in the life of Jesus, is the key to human relationships.

John Smith

(Methodist Minister)

Wallsend."

What a sad confession. The "Reverend" John Smith (the name has been altered) admits he does not believe in God.

At least you have to admire his courage. In the same newspaper a week before, a well known unbeliever, John Gilmour, had thrown Out a challenge. He declared that many leaders of the Church no longer believed in God. All they had, he said, was a general belief in Christian love as the key to human relationships. He dared them to come clean, and admit it. This Methodist minister accepted the challenge and owned up.

And why not? He has only gone one short step further than many of his colleagues. The existence of God was just about the only Bible teaching left that had not been denied by some minister of religion.

The Unhappy Medium

Of course, not all those Biblical scholars who reject the Bible's claims go to such wild extremes. There are still many who take a more moderate position. Between them they hold many different shades of opinion. Some think the Bible contains a lot of truth and only a little error; some think it is the other way round. It would be impossible in a single chapter to do justice to all their views.

But their most common approach to the Bible can be expressed quite simply. They say that the Bible is "reliable in matters of religion, but unreliable in historical matters".

What does that mean? Simply this. That when John wrote that Jesus said, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another"7-and suchlike thing-we can accept them as true. But that when we read how the baby Moses' life was saved because his mother hid him in the bulrushes,8 we are at liberty to say, "A likely story!"

If we hold these views, we shall believe that this story about Moses

-and hundreds of other Bible stories-are fiction, not fact. We shall say, "What does it matter, anyway, whether these things happened or not? We can learn useful lessons from these stories, just as we can from the parables of Jesus. Nobody regards His parables as true stories."

Several things are very wrong with this approach. First of all, Jesus presented his parables as parables. Many of them are introduced by the words, "He spake a parable unto them." Every one of them is worded in what you might call "a parable style".

If the parable of the Good Samaritan had begun, "Last week Simon Peter's cousin was going down from Jerusalem .. ." we should have known that Jesus was telling a true story. But it didn't. It began, "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho . ."9 Everyone knew at once that this was a parable.

Now when Jesus and the apostles referred to Old Testament history, they never spoke about it in "parable style". They always treated it as accurate history. True, they did draw lessons from it, but they made it plain that these were lessons drawn from real life. When Paul based some lessons on a series of episodes from the history of Israel,

he said:

"These things happened unto them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition."10

These things happened. Actually happened. Could words be plainer than that?

As for Jesus, He spoke of many incidents in the Old Testament, including:

The story of Adam and Eve11

The murder of Abel by Cain12

Noah and the flood13

The destruction of Sodom and the death of Lot's wife14

Moses and the burning bush15

The manna that fell from heaven16

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba17

Elijah and a miracle18

Elisha and another miracle19

Jonah and the whale20

Turn up these passages in your own Bible. See for yourself how Jesus obviously believed that all these events really did occur.

There is another big snag about saying the Bible is "religiously true but historically unreliable". The historical and religious strands of the Bible are intertwined like the threads in a Persian carpet. How are we going to separate them? In fact, no two scholars seem to agree on which bits are "historical" and which are "religious".

Take the story that Jesus rose from the dead. We meet it in all four gospels, in the books of Acts and Revelation, and in several of the epistles. It is presented to us in these books as a historical fact. For this reason many scholars feel free to reject it as a myth.

But it is more than a historical fact. It is also presented to us as a foundation stone of the Christian religion. Listen to the apostle

Paul:

"How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen, and if Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.... If Christ be not raised your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins!"21

Then there is the problem that if Christ really was wrong in His teaching about the Old Testament, how can we be sure of anything else He taught? He backed up His claim to be the Son of God with a quotation from the Psalms, saying as He did so, "And the Scripture

cannot be broken!"22 If He was wrong about Scripture, how do we know that He was not wrong about being Son of God?

He said that resurrection and eternal life could be relied upon because of what the book of Exodus said.23 If He was wrong about the book of Exodus, how do we know that He was not wrong about eternal life?

Lots of Bible-believing theologians have asked this kind of question.24 But so far as I know, nobody has ever given them a reasonable answer.

It is not surprising there has been a steady drift away from this "half and half" position. The drift has mainly been in the direction of complete unbelief, but quite a number of scholars have moved in the opposite direction towards complete belief. There may be some difficulties connected with wholehearted belief. But there are far greater problems facing those who try to believe only parts of the Bible. There is an increasing awareness of this fact among thinking Christians today.

cleverness and Commonsense

Everybody has heard of absent-minded professors. But in fact there can't be very many of them about. Quite a few of my friends are professors, and none of them is what I would call absent-minded. They are all men of very keen intellect.

Yet there is a certain element of truth underlying the legend of the absent-minded professor. Brilliant men are often lacking in plain common sense. Many an uneducated wife has said to a husband with twenty letters after his name, "But even I wouldn't do a silly thing like that, darling!"

So it behoves us to remember that in everyday matters, very learned men often do silly things. And the Bible tells us that in religious matters also they often do silly things. The apostle Paul was a man of tremendous intellect; this is very obvious to anyone who studies his writings. But he had the humility to admit that cleverness can easily become more of a liability than an asset to a would-be Christian.

The highest social class in Israel consisted of the highly educated religious leaders. Paul belonged to that class. But he was no snob. He became ashamed of his own class, and left it to become a Christian, when he realised that this intellectual elite had crucified the Son of God.

So he warned his own age-and our age, too-not to be overawed by the learning of the learned:

"Where is your wise man now, your man of learning, or your subtle debater-limited, all of them, to this passing age? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. As God in His wisdom ordained, the world failed to find Him by its wisdom . . . Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man, and divine weakness stronger than man's strength. My brothers, think what sort of people you are, whom God has called. Few of you are men of wisdom, by any human standard; few are powerful or highly born. Yet, to shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame what is strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness.

. . And so there is no place for human pride in the presence of God."25

Jesus said much the same, but more briefly:

"At that moment Jesus exulted in the Holy Spirit, and said, 'I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and wise, and revealing them to the simple. Yes, Father, such was Thy choice."26

In view of these warnings it should carry very little weight that the majority of Christian scholars view the Bible as a mixture of truth and error. They do not form an overwhelming majority, although they sometimes try to give that impression. Nevertheless they are a large majority. But what of that? A large majority of the leading Biblical scholars in Israel voted to reject Christ.

If we had lived in the first century and had chosen to follow the great bulk of scholars, we should have joined the mob and shouted, "Crucify Him!" Christians who choose to take the majority path today are in danger of making a similar tragic mistake. "Tear up the Bible!" is the modern counterpart of "Crucify Him!"

Why They Do It

It would be interesting to know why so many Biblical scholars take the line they do. There must be many reasons. The desire to conform, the fear of seeming ridiculous, too much uncritical respect for what "the experts" say, an exaggerated view of the difficulties of accepting the Bible wholeheartedly, a failure to appreciate the limitations of subjects outside their own sphere (such as history and science)-all these must play their part.

But there is a more important reason than any of these. So much depends upon the attitude a scholar has towards the object of his studies.

Dr. Jane Goodall, while still in her twenties, came to know more about chimpanzees than anyone else in the world. Her brilliant re. search work is one of the great scientific success stories of the 1960s. She succeeded where others had failed because she adopted an entirely new attitude.

Previous research workers had brought chimpanzees into their laboratories and studied them from every conceivable point of view. They taught them tricks and observed how they solved puzzles. They studied the effect of drugs and surgical operations upon them. They killed them, cut them up into little bits, and looked at the pieces under the microscope. And still they had a poor understanding of chimpanzee behaviour, and quite a few wrong notions about them.

Then Dr. Goodall tried a different approach. She went into the heart of the African bush and camped Out for several years among a colony of chimpanzees. After a while they accepted her almost like one of themselves. For the first time a scientist was able to observe chimpanzees behaving absolutely naturally. She was able to see things from a chimp's point of view.

She came home at last and published her findings. The title of her report is revealing: My Friends the Chimps.27 Instead of standing detached from the objects of her studies, looking down upon them with a superior air, she came down to their level. She met them on their own terms. Hence her remarkable success.

Similarly, there were two very different ways of approaching Jesus of Nazareth. On one occasion, what we should call a commission of enquiry came to watch Him at work. Its members were eminent scholars, drawn from all over the country.28 They studied Him critically for a while, no doubt conscious of their own scholarship and full of confidence in their ability to judge Him. Then they announced their decision. "Who is this which speaketh blasphemies?"29

The other way was the way of Mary of Bethany. She "sat at Jesus' feet and heard His word."80 Where the committee of scholars had looked down on Him, she looked up at Him. From their different viewpoints they beheld the same man. But the scholars saw a "blasphemer"; the humble woman saw the Son of God.

There are the same two alternative ways of approaching the Bible. Some scholars-all too many of them-look down at the Bible with a cool, detached air. A "scientific" attitude they like to call it, just as the biologists who studied chimpanzees in cages thought their methods were the height of good science. They dissect the Bible into little bits, and examine each bit under the microscope of their specialist knowledge.

But there are other men, just as scholarly, as well as a whole host of ordinary folk, who look up at the Bible instead of down at it. They follow the Jane Goodall technique, by studying the Bible on its own terms. Because she was a friend to the chimps, she quickly became the world's foremost chimpanzee scholar.

Similarly, the wisest Bible scholars-those whose conclusions are most likely to be right-are those who can speak of "my friend, the Bible." They follow the example of Mary, who sat at the feet of Jesus to hear Him. They sit down before the Bible to learn from it, not just to learn about it.

Think how different things might be if all scholars had possessed the spirit of Dr. Goodall and of Mary of Bethany. It would have made them no less scholarly, no less scientific. But it would have made them far more humble and far more balanced. It would have preserved their common sense. And thus this strange, incredible idea of a "true-false" Word of God would never have come to undermine the foundations of the Christian faith.