From: REXLEX@linac.fnal.gov
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Limits to Criticism/4
Date: 27 Aug 92 06:43:19 GMT
Organization: Fermi Lab


 LIMITS OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND OPPOSITION TO 
                   PLENARY INSPIRATION

A.  LIMITS OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND OPPOSITION TO 
     PLENARY INSPIRATION
B.  THE IMPOSSIBILITY THAT A FALLIBLE MESSAGE COULD
     BECOME THE WORD OF GOD

    1)  CRITERIA FOR DISCERNING THE WORD OF GOD
    2)  ESCAPING THE TRAP OF SUBJECTIVISM
    3)  MYTH-HUNTING
*   4)  GOD WITHOUT GOD-GOD Is DEAD-MAN Is GOD
*   5)  WHAT FINALLY REMAINS
*   6)  ILLOGICALNESS

C.  EVANGELICALS SUPPOSEDLY NONSCIENTIFIC IN REGARD TO
     THE BIBLE

Excerpts from "The Inspiration & Authority of Scripture"  by Rene Pache,
copyright 1969, Moody Press.  Used by permission.

B.  THE IMPOSSIBILITY THAT A FALLIBLE MESSAGE COULD
     BECOME THE WORD OF GOD

4)  GOD WITHOUT GOD-GOD Is DEAD-MAN Is GOD

      This step has, in fact, been taken. The book Honest to God, written by
the Anglican bishop John A. T. Robinson, became an instant best seller
throughout the whole world. Translated into nine languages, by the beginning of
1966 it had sold more than a million copies. According to the author, twentieth
century man has become of age. He can no longer believe in a God outside
himself, "up there," "out there," or "on the other side," to whom one might
address himself as one would an "old grandfather in the sky," presiding over
the world like a "heavenly dictator."  Robinson calls up Dietrich Bonhoeffer as
his authority and even more Paul Tillich, well-known professor at Union
Theological Seminary in New York.  According to Tillich: "God is not a
projection 'out there,' outside ourselves and our created world, 'an Other'
beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the
Ground of our very being."  Tillich speaks here of "this infinite and
inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," for, adds Robinson, the word
*God* signifies "ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and
meaning of all our existence."  Martin Buber, very popular Jewish philosopher
today, has expressed the idea like this: "When he who abhors the name [of God]
and believes himself to be godless gives his whole being to addressing the
'Thou' of his life as a 'Thou' that cannot be limited by another, he addresses
God."
     Does not this way of thinking signify "the end of theism" (according to
Webster: "belief in the existence of one God, transcending, yet immanent in,
the universe")? Robinson replies:

     It [this way of thinking] would not naturally use the phrase "a personal
God," for this in itself belongs to an understanding of theology and of what
theological statements are about which is alien to it.... To say that "God is
personal" is to say that "reality at its very deepest level is personal." . . .
If this is true, theological statements are not a description of "the highest
Being," but an analysis of the depths of personal relationships- or, rather, an
analysis of the depths of all experience "interpreted by love."

It follows that Feuerbach (German philosopher) was definitely right when he
wanted to transform "theology" into "anthropology" (what Bultmann, answering
Karl Barth, declared he also was trying to do!) .

     As for Jesus Christ, Robinson goes on to say that the traditional way of
presenting Him is also mythical:

     "A God in the form of a man.... He looked like a man ... but underneath he
was God dressed up-like Father Christmas. . . . I am aware that this is a
parody, . . . and probably an offensive one; but I think it is perilously near
the truth.... The whole notion of "a God" who "visits" the earth in the person
of "his Son" is as mythical as the prince in the fairy story.... The belief
that we are at this point and in this person in touch with God has increasingly
been left to the religious minority that can still accept the old mythology as
physically or metaphysically
true."

The New Testament interpreted like this, he says, has never claimed that Jesus
Christ is God, and nobody knows whether He affirmed Himself to be the Son of
God. The doctrine of redemption is not, as viewed by the supernaturalists
(those who believe in the supernatural) a highly mythological and somewhat
nebulous transaction between "God" on the one hand and "man" on the other. In
particular, the notion that the Father punished His Son in our place is in any
case a perversion of what the New Testament teaches. Even if its content is
Christian (?), the whole scheme of a supernatural Being coming down from heaven
to "save" humanity from sin, as one puts his finger into a glass of water to
rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man "come of age," who no
longer believes in such a deus ex machina. The same is true of the myths of
Christmas and the resurrection.
     Let us bring to a close the analysis of all this gibberish. It shows most
painfully that a man can be a bishop of a church which has its membership in
the World Council of Churches, or be a famous theologian in Europe or in
America and yet completely deny the message and authority of the Holy
Scriptures.  When the Scriptures have ceased to be the infallible expression of
revealed truth, man, even if he claims to be religious and a doctor of
divinity, is apt to be carried away by every wind of doctrine and finally into
apostasy.
    *God is dead.*  The myth of a "God in the sky" having been exploded, one
group of American professors of theology and laymen has made itself famous by
declaring *dead* the God of the Bible, of creation and of history.
     A century ago Nietzsche, just before becoming entirely mad, uttered this
cry of despair: "God is dead!" Even leaders of some denominations traditionally
regarded as sound now label themselves "Christian atheists." We must recognize
the death of God, they say, as a historical fact.  God is dead in our times,
our history and our existence. In Look magazine for February 22, 1966, an
Episcopal bishop declared that for his part he had rejected the incarnation and
the supernatural birth of Christ.  He had, moreover, abandoned the idea of God
as a Supreme Being and the concepts of prayer, the miracles, and the divinity
of Christ.  Yet he remained a bishop!  Billy Graham comments on all this as
follows:

     Men are not saying that we are dead toward God; they are actually saying
that God *himself* is dead. These radical and ridiculous statements are only
symptoms of what is happening in many of our Christian colleges and seminaries
today.... I want to assure you that these radical views do not represent the
majority view of the church. They represent only a small, vocal group that is
being given publicity because their views are so far-out and so radical.

     *Man is God.*  The above-mentioned tendency cannot be denied or ridiculed.
 It underlies the whole vast movement which, ever since the fall, had been
leading man farther and farther away from the knowledge and the adoration of
God, toward the exaltation and adoration of the creature (Rom. 1:18-25).  The
insidious promise of the tempter is always the same: "Ye shall be as gods!"
(Gen. 3:1, 5).  Man, as Buffon said, is "a religious animal."  It is his
capacity to believe and to worship which differentiates him from the beast.  If
he abandons the Creator and His Word, he will keep forging false gods for
himself until he ends up worshiping himself in the person of the Antichrist. 
Nietzsche's superman, man "divine in the depth of his being," is only a
prefiguration of the super-dictator who shortly will get himself worshiped by
all that dwell on the earth (II Thess. 2:3- 2 Rev. 13:8).  In the political
sphere, the exaltation of man has brought to such individuals as Hitler, Stalin
and Mao Tse-tung homages strikingly akin to worship, if not the equivalent of
it.  On the religious and theological plane, except for the unshakable rock of
the fully inspired Scriptures, there reigns nothing but the most alarming
confusion. we would not be surprised now to see an immense final syncretism
develop, ending up in the Great Babylon: the establishment of the *religion of
man* over the whole earth, just as the prophets so clearly foretold.

5)  WHAT FINALLY REMAINS

    If all the criticism of the critics were to be added together, there would
be left very few "authentic" verses in the Scriptures, few trustworthy books
and few acceptable doctrines.  There is, furthermore, nothing new under the
sun. Over a hundred years ago now, Gaussen summed up as follows the attitude of
the rationalists, those who put their own reasoning above the Bible:

     There is a mixture, they will tell you, in the Word of God. They sift it,
they correct it, and it is with the Bible in their hand that they come to tell
you: There is no divinity in Christ, no resurrection of the body, no Holy
Ghost, no devil, no demons, no hell, no expiation in the death of Jesus Christ,
no native corruption in man, no eternity in punishments, no miracles in facts
(what do I say, even?), no reality in Jesus Christ.

     Is this not a summary of all of the doubts set forth today, an amplified
echo of the old question of the tempter in Eden: "Yea, hath God said?" (Gen. 3
:1 ) .
     This is certainly the opinion of Professor Finlayson when he writes that
the present theological position has abandoned the historic faith of the
church.  It leaves the Christian religion deprived of "the divinely mediated
record" and the believer with no intelligent foundation for his faith.  One
characteristic of this movement is the setting aside of the authority of
Scripture for human experience and illumination.

     "This divorce of faith and factual reality lands us only in the cloud-land
of make-believe, and the Christian faith is as unsubstantial as a day-dream. It
can be seen that in reality this is an attempt to recover a basis of confidence
in certain of the spiritual facts and ideas of the Bible without accepting its
divine authority or even its historical trustworthiness.... All this does not
explain how, if the Bible record is untrustworthy, we can accept the
trustworthiness of a spiritual experience that is based on it.... In no other
department of human thought or research is truth based on subjective experience
that lacks objective reality; yet this is what is offered us as the basis of
religion." (Martin Buber)

6)  ILLOGICALNESS

     In practice, many of the critical theologians are far from being logical. 
Having decreed that so many pages of Scripture are mythical and erroneous, they
often do not hesitate to make it the object of an assiduous and profound Bible
study.  These men seem to have a watertight partition in the brain which
permits negations to cohabit with the most beautiful affirmations.  This is
part of the dialectic and the existential tension so much in vogue today. 
Professor Brunner says it is generally admitted that the accounts in Genesis 1
and 2 are not historical, but mythical.  But he insists that this in no wise
hinders our perceiving in them "the Word and the revelation of God."  Professor
Jacques Ellul published a study of about one hundred pages on the Prophet
Jonah.  Throughout the first part, he points out the nonhistoricity of the
account: Jonah is a legendary figure, the big fish did not exist, everything
given about Nineveh is certainly inexact, the city did not repent, God never
intervened like that; to believe in the miracle of Jonah is (in spite of the
Lord's confirmation of it, Matt. 12:39-41) to believe in a piece of paper more
than in Jesus Christ!  Then, abandoning the critical problem, Mr. Ellul devotes
the rest of the booklet to an edifying, positive Bible study of the four
chapters of the book.
     Modern theologians, especially Barth, it seems, can make this sort of
turnabout without the slightest difficulty.  They call up words and passages of
Scripture which "are not the Word of God" and which should not be used as
"proof texts."  We must not be surprised at this:  in fact, distinctions are
impossible, and nothing definite can be made out of this nebulous Word of God. 
Fortunately, the text of Scripture remains, which Barth, for example, often
uses in the same way that a defender of verbal inspiration would use it.
     By a singular turning of the tables, those who seem so lacking in logic
accuse us of rationalizing.  A hundred years ago the opposite was true. 
Liberalism boasted about infallible human reason and ridiculed evangelicals for
refusing to think and for mistrusting science.  Now they take pleasure in the
dialectical and the irrational.  Those who, because of their faith, are not
willing to sacrifice accurate logic and balanced reasoning are accused of
rationalizing.  This is confusion. God never intended to annihilate the reason
which He Himself gave us.  But this reason must be regenerated and submitted to
His Spirit, even as to His Word: "Whereas ye were servants to sin, ye became
obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered"
(Rom. 6:17).  God in fact does want us to love Him "with all our mind" (Matt.
22: 37).  We are to offer to Him a worship that is reasonable (logical, as the
Greek puts it; Rom. 12:1); He does indeed want us to be filled with spiritual
wisdom and understanding (Col. 1:9; II Tim. 2:7), and with truth and soberness
(II Thess. 2:2; Acts 26:25).  It is thus that we acquire good understanding
(Prov. 3:4).  We know the limits of the reason that is ours, and we purpose to
submit it entirely to revelation.  The divine wisdom is perfect; it illumines,
it imparts understanding, and it leads into all truth.  This wisdom is in
Christ and in the Bible, which is the "yea" of God.  It could not be at the
same time both "yea" and "nay" (II Cor. 1:19-20).

Next:  Evangelicals Supposedly Nonscientific
       In Regard To The Bible


(RexLex@fnal.fnal.gov)