THE PROBLEM OF EVANGELISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23685, 17 December 1938, Page 21

THE PROBLEM OF EVANGELISM

TO THE EDITOR Sir,—Apropos of the present discussion, I have before me a little gem of a book, just published, entitled "Thrilling Voices, of the Past," by T. Christie Innes, M.A., M.R.A.S. One foreword is by the Very Rev. Professor Daniel Lamont, D.D., who is the recognised head.of the Church of Scotland. The New Zealand General Assembly has asked the Church of Scotland to send a delegate to New Zealand for the centenary, and asked that Professor D. Lamont be the delegate. In his foreword Professor Lamont says that during the last 50 years archaeology has "opened an avenue for Ji worthier appreciation, of the accuracy of the history recorded. in the Old Testament. Until recently," he writes, "scholarly critics of the Bible were much too apt to judge that history by standards set up within their own heads. The busy spade has now proved that some of these standards are intellectual cobwebs out of all relation to the facts. Scholasticism has been well defined as 'an elaboration of ideas which are not always corrected afresh by reference to experience,'and it is incontestable that we have had far too much scholasticism in Bible criticism. Let us ' sit down before the facts' which archaeology has brought to light, and we shall find that many scholastic theories have been far astray." In the preface by the author' one catches a glimpse of the fascinating nature of the pages to follow:—"One of the optional courses in Aberdeen University in my time was entitled ' Greek History. Literature and Art,' It was given to a lady assistant to conduct the class. I courted this, the Cinderella (the class, not the assistant) in the curriculum! And in that lecture room more than in the classics, the History, or even the geology departments, for me at least, the, world's earlier glories began to be revealed. Romantic Dr H. Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans had brought to light the glories of fabled Knossos, of Golden Mycenae, and of Troy itself. It was a kind of revelation. . . . Later on, however, in Cambridge, while reading Theology, my attention was drawn to what is for many theological students, I fear, a sadly neglected line of study—Biblical Archaeology. We had learned the disconcerting dynamic of the spade in its demolition of the theories of the critics of the ancient classics, not least of Homer. We were now to learn how devastating the spade had become for the ill-founded, though superlatively dogmatic fancies of ' Higher Criticism'." Then chapter by chapter, a marvellous story is unfolded, illustrated by beautiful plates, of the wonder v of our wonderful Bible. " The ' dead' past is, indeed alive; and the world's supreme treasure, the Holy Bible, is being floodlit!" To read such a book is very encouraging and heartening to those who have always loved and believed the Bible apart altogether from the science of archaeology. It reveals what t.-ue-scholarship really is, and makes our modernists and higher critics appear like puny, prancing pigmies.—l am,, etc. Cricket. '