Notes
78. "When Scientists Play the Role of God," London Times, November 16, 1978.
79. H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967).
80. We would like to include a word about rationalism. The Enlightenment was a revolution in thought which took place in the eighteenth century in Europe. One of its main ideas was that man is autonomous; that is, man starts out from himself and measures all things by himself. Thus, there was no place for revelation. The philosophers felt that reason (man's) should be supreme, rather than any communication from God.
Looked at from this viewpoint, this movement is called rationalism. This word means that its proponents assumed that man (though finite and limited) can begin from himself and gather all the information needed to explain all things. Rationalism rejects knowledge outside of man himself, especially any knowledge from God. Rationalism led naturally to the present predominant world view we have described at the beginning of this chapter: that is, materialism (only matter exists) or naturalism (no supernatural exists).
Having this as their world view, the rationalists had increasingly no place for things which were said to be "supernatural," such as miracles, the raising of the dead, and Christ's Transfiguration. These things were, therefore, first said to be beyond knowledge and thus of little of no value. Later they were arbitrarily said to be impossible. This view did not come because of scientific facts, but was rooted in the rationalist world view which they accepted.
Influenced by this thinking, the philosophers and rationalistic theologians made a division in the Bible between those things which fitted in with their rationalistic ideas and those which did not. Their attitude can be summed up simply: God cannot be known as One who acts in history. Therefore, they tried to divide the Bible roughly into natural and supernatural parts. They felt that the supernatural parts were unworthy to be accepted by "modern man," that they belonged necessarily to the realm of primitive superstition, that there was nothing objectively true about them.
An example of one who took this approach is the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss who wrote The Life of Jesus in 1835. In it he said that most of the material in the Gospels is "mythical." Speaking of the Transfiguration, he wrote, "It is impossible to maintain this historical, supernatural interpretation which the New Testament sanctions." So what he proposed was a thoroughgoing demythologizing of the Gospel story. The real history, he said, had to be separated from this mythology.
Strauss was not the first scholar to state such opinions, but you can see from the date of The Life of Jesus - 1835 - that the revolution took place a long time ago. The movement as a whole has been called "religious liberalism," because of its "free" approach to the Bible. It grew in momentum during the nineteenth century, and its assumptions are still the assumptions of many scholars in the Protestant world today and of an increasing number of Roman Catholic theologians, too.
What is most disturbing about this approach to the Bible is not that it disagrees with past traditions, but rather that it claims to be "scientific." We must be clear that Christianity has nothing to fear from modern science. Indeed, Christianity was instrumental in the origin of science. Tradition and authority should not be just blindly accepted, but examined to see if the things previously believed are indeed true. What is dangerous is the misuse of the claim to be "scientific." We do not think it is too strong to speak of this as "deception."
By using the word scientific, the religious liberalists gave the impression of the same type of certainty and objectivity that had become accepted in regard to the physical sciences. Using this claim, they proposed their various theories of how the Bible had actually come into existence, and on the basis of these theories altered the teaching that Christians had previously accepted. They rejected the Bible's accounts of miracles, such as the feeding of the 5,000 or Jesus' walking on the water. But they went much further than that. For example, they rejected the idea of a coming judgement for mankind, of salvation through the substitutionary work of Christ, of the divinity of Christ, of the Resurrection, of the Virgin Birth, and so on. What was left was a religion of morality, called by some the "Religion of the Sermon on the Mount" (though this itself was a serious misrepresentation, for the Sermon on the Mount, as well as teaching a very high moral code, also teaches quite explicitly such things as future judgement by Jesus Himself).
To ordinary people, these developments were bewildering. However, for many the radical conclusions of the scholars seemed to be irresistable, for they were presented as the result of careful and objective scientific scholarship. To disagree with the scholars was to be obscurantist. To maintain the traditional ideas simply indicated a refusal to follow the truth wherever the truth led.
From where we stand today, it is easy to see how naive these views really are. For what has happened since that time is, first, that the internal weaknesses of the so-called scientific theories have become apparent. Second, literally tons of archaeological materials have been unearthed from the periods and the geographic locations covered by the Bible. Archaeology as a science has made huge strides in the last hundred years.
The scholars fail at this point because they are not scientific enough! They have fallen into the same trap which they accuse those who preceeded them of falling into - of bringing preconceived ideas about God's revelation to bear on the discipline of biblical criticism. Because of their world view they refuse to accept the possibility that God could have communicated to man in such a way that what is contained in the Bible is reliable. They caricature this idea with such terms as the "dictation theory of inspiration." By this they act as though the scholars through the centuries (who have held that God has given us truth through the Bible) have taught (and must teach) that God used the human writers of the Bible like typewriters, simply typing out what He wanted man to understand. But, while some may have taught the dictation theory of inspiration, it was not the generally held concept.
The generally held concept was that God used people in the writing of the Bible without destroying their individuality and their significance. What they finally wrote, however, was what God knew was necessary for people to have as a written authority. Each writer was "himself," so to speak, but as each wrote - in a different style from others, in a different historical context, in different literary forms, and sometimes in different languages - he was led by God to write what God intended to be written. Thus, truth was given in all the areas the Bible touches upon.
The critics have continued the tradition received from the last century, which argued that God could not work into the world supernaturally. As Strauss said, "It is impossible to maintain as historical the supernatural interpretations the New Testament sanctions." Strauss was correct on one point here. What the New Testament (including the teaching of Christ) teaches about the supernatural happenings in observable history is exactly what Strauss and the other liberal theologians have denied.
It is this sort of thinking which still underlies so much liberal scholarship. Why is it impossible, for example, for God to have effected the Virgin Birth when Jesus was born? After all, since God designed the birth process in the first place, why can He not in one case interrupt the normal action of cause and effect that He created and initiate something different? In the same way, if God created everything at the beginning, why can He not also give life to the dead and raise up Jesus' body from the tomb? The only reason these things and others like them are so categorically denied is that the rationalist or naturalist world view has already been accepted.
When you hear people being critical about the Bible, remember that what seems to be scientific is not always so, and what are claimed to be the "assured results of scholarship" are not always so assured.
Let us give a recent example relating to the dating of the New Testament documents. For over a hundred years the ideas has circulated among many scholars that the documents of the New Testament (or most of them) could not have been written at, or soon after, the time of Jesus' ministry. These scholars suggested in some cases that the Gospels were written about 150 years later and were therefore quite unreliable. In the same way, it was common for scholars to suggest that letters supposedly written by Paul or Peter of John were not written by them but by unknown writers who used the apostles' names many years after they died to gain acceptance for what they had written.
A New Testament scholar, the ex-Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, now dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, has written a book called Redating the New Testament (1976). What is striking is that previously this author had taken a very "liberal" position. At the outset of his book on the dating of the New Testament, he says he first began to question the late dates assigned to the New Testament writers when he realized how "much more than is generally recognised, the chronology of the New Testament rests upon presuppositions rather than facts." And he quotes the following from a letter from a famous New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd: "I should agree with you that much of this late dating is quite arbitrary, even wanton, the offspring not of any argument that can be presented."
81. Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).
82. Rene/ Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).
83. H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967).
84. Ibid.
85. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956).
86. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
87. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932).
88. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (New York: William Morrow, 1974).
89. Two important arguments for Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and those he convinced have now been almost totally abandoned by evolutionists. The first involves vestigial organs, which (it was supposed) had served useful functions in an earlier stage of man's evolutionary development, but which later became literally useless by the changes brought about through natural selection. Vestigial organs are like crutches one uses after being injured in an accident. They serve a purpose for a time, but when the leg is better the crutches are no longer needed. Certain organs were said to be "vestiges," that is, leftovers from a previous stage in evolution. The simple problem with the argument is that as medical science has developed, most of these organs have been found to serve useful functions in the body.
A second important argument for Darwin and those he convinced is the dictum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This idea is that the human embryo goes through the stages of evolution inside the mother's womb, resembling at one stage the fish and so on. The better we understand the embryo, however, the more dubious this argument is seen to be.
Yet, even if these two arguments have been largely given up, many still place their faith in the theory of an unbroken line from the molecule to man by chance. However, they are faced in modern discussions with at least two problems. First, the more fossil evidence we find, the more apparent it becomes that there have always been distinct breaks in the fossil record. Darwin admitted that the paleontological evidence in his day was slender, but, he said, as more is discovered the new evidence will support the hypothesis. This just has not happened.
The evidence of preman is sketchy, and recent discoveries in Africa and elsewhere have generated some difficult new problems in this area. But it is not just the so-called missing links between man and preman that constitute the problem, but all the missing links, right down the whole line. Not only are links missing; the chains themselves are missing. If one removes the speculative guesses, rather than links of different chains leading from simple to more complex organisms, one finds virtual explosions of mature life forms at different periods in geological time and many simple forms of life that remain unchanged for several millions of years up to their extinction or even to today.
The second major difficulty for today's evolutionist is that there is no sufficient mechanism to explain how lower life forms can be transformed into higher ones, no matter how much time is allowed. Natural selection cannot bear this weight. Current genetic theories seem even to point to natural selection as working against the direction of evolution. Despite the unlikely possibility of mutations that are advantageous, natural selection seems to simplify the genetic endowment of any group rather than lead it to higher orders of complexity.
90. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) is an example of this. He was a member of the Jesuit order and a French paleontologist and philosopher. His approach to evolution was an attempt to solve these problems through the use of mystical language, which did justice to neither clear Christian teaching nor scientific thought.
91. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (Magnolia, Massachusetts: Peter Smith).
92. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955)
93. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 248.