“MARAN-ATHA’S” VIEW OF SCRIPTURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23688, 21 December 1938, Page 19

“MARAN-ATHA’S” VIEW OF SCRIPTURE

to tHE EDITOR Sir,—As the correspondence initiated by “ Maran-atha ” drags on one feels that the impression is being created that my senior colleagues and I in the Theological Hall of the Presbyterian Church are teaching in an underhand and secretive way a view of Scripture which, if our church only knew about it, would be indignantly repudiated by the church. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing very new about the view of Scripture which, for want of better names, we call “ modern ” or “ critical.” It has been prominently before the Presbyterian churches for the last 60 years at least; it has been extensively investigated and debated, and the general result has been the rejection of the view championed by “Maran-atha” and the acceptance of the view I represent. The matter was brought very prominently before the Scottish churches in 1881, when Professor W. R. Smith was removed from his chair in the Free Church College in Aberdeen for his view of the Old Testament, but from that time on the tide turned, and all attempts to condemn ministers and professors for holding critical views of Scripture proved pathetic failures, Attacks in the spirit of “Maran-atha’’ were made on Marcus Dodds, who had spoken of the errors and immoralities in the Scripture narratives, and was one of the most profoundly devout and spiritually minded expositors of Scripture that our Presbyterian Church has produced; on A. B. Bruce and George Adam Smith, expositors who have put preachers of the Gospel under a great debt of gratitude. These attacks were simply brushed aside. James Denney, that staunch and vigorous upholder of the essentials of the evangelical position, once declared in the Assembly of the Free Church that “ for verbal inerrancy hte cared not one straw, for it would be worth nothing if it were there and it was not,” and the assembly applauded, and later appointed him to a chair. This is typical of what has happened for the great body of Presbyterianism in Scotland: the older verbal inerrancy view has been increasingly laid aside'under the influence of scholars who were great men of God. earnest evangelicals and beyond question deeply spiritual. This attitude to Scripture our Presbyterian Church in New Zealand has largely adopted.

I say. then, that as a result of more than naif a century of investigation and discussion, the reunited Church of Scotland and our church under its influence have turned deliberately away from “ Maran-atha’s ” view 'of Scripture. as a view spiritually deadening and not true, to a view which gives a freer, fuller, deeper grasp of what the Bible really is as the book in which God’s Word is found, not indeed conveyed with verbal inerrancy (which is unnecessary and irrelevant), but with infallible power to save (which is the only infallibility that matters). In this I believe that the Church has been led by the same Spirit Who uses the Bible for our salvation. This view of Scripture I hold and teach, as I believe do my honoured colleagues, and I confidently assert that we hold and teach this view with the knowledge and approval of our church. In order to make clearer the general nature of the view of Scripture so vehemently denounced by “Maranatha,” let me give two quotations. No one can question the evangelical fervour or general soundness in the Faith of the late Dr James Denney. Here is what he writes oi the opening chapters of Genesis: —“The beginnings of man’s life on earth lie far behind all records and all traditions, too Yet here in the beginning of Genesis we have what purport to be accounts of these inaccessible things. What are we to call them? Some would say ‘supernaturally communicated history.’ But this would be a thing not only without analogy in the rest of Scripture, but utterly incapable of proof. I should not hesitate to say that the man who cannot hear God speak to him in the story of creation and the fall will never hear God’s voice anywhere. But that does not make the first chapter of Genesis science; nor the third chapter history. And what is of authority in these chapters is not the quasi-scien-tiflc or quasi-historical form, but the message, which through them comes to the heart, of God’s creative wisdom and power, of man’s native kinship to God, of his calling to rule over Nature, of his sin, of God’s judgment and mercy."• And of the Gospels, Dr Denney writes:—“ The Gospels have every Quality which they need, to put us in contact with the Gospel; they do put us in contact with it. and the Spirit makes it sure to our faith; why should we ask for more from them? . The evangelists may make mistakes in dates, in the order of events, in reporting the occasion of a word of Jesus possibly in the application of a parable . . . but we ought to be able to say boldly that, even though in any number of cases of this kind the gospels should be proved in error, the Gospel is untouched: the Word of God the revelation of God to the soul in Christ, attested by the Spirit, lives and abides. It is to Christ we give our trust, and as long as the gospels make us sure of what He is, they serve God’s purpose and our need.” The general altitude to Scripture here expressed I commend to members of the Presbyterian Church who may be following this correspondence, as being far truer to the mam line of thought, life and witness in our church than the view held by “ Maran-atha.' and as the only view which really honours God’s Word by full reverence for the truth.—l am. etc., John A. Allan.