Doctrinal Valúe of First Chapters of Genesis 77 is not inspired, it possesses to us no doctrinal value whatever. 4. The Book of Genesis is not direct from God if it is a heterogeneous compilation of mythological folklore by un- knowable writers. 5. If the Book of Genesis is a legendary narrative, anonymous, indefinitely erroneous, and the persons it de- scribed the mere mythical personifications of tribal genius, it is of course not only non-authentic, because non-authen- ticated, but an insufficient basis for doctrine. The residuum of dubious truth, which might with varying degrees of consent be extracted therefrom, could never be accepted as a founda- tion for the superstructure of eternally trustworthy doctrine, for it is an axiom that that only is of doctrinal value which is God’s Word. Mythical and legendary fiction, and still more, erroneous and misleading tradition, are incompatible not only with the character of the God of all truth, but with the truthfulness, trustworthiness, and absolute authority of the Word of God. We have not taken for our credentials cleverly invented myths. The primary documents, if there were such, were collated and revised and re-written by Moses by inspiration of God. A sentence in Margoliouth’s “Lines of Defence” deserves an attentive consideration today. We should have some op- portunity, said the Oxford professor, of gauging the skill of those on whose faith the old-fashioned belief in the authen- ticity of Scripture has been abandoned, (p. 293.) One would perhaps prefer to put the idea in this way. Our modern Christians should have more opportunity not only of ap- praising the skill, but of gauging also the spiritual qualifi- cations of a critical school that has been characterized notori- ously by an enthusiasm against the miraculous, and a precip- itate adoption of any conclusion from a rationalistic source which militates against the historicity of Genesis. Christians are conceding too much nowadays to the agnostic scientist, and the rationalistic Hebraist, and are often to blame
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