110 The Fundamentals. that is the way it appears, too, to such an illustrious scholar and critic as Dr. Emil Reich. (Contemporary Review, April, 1905, page 515.) It is not possible then to accept the Kuenen-Wellhausen theory of the structure of the Old Testament and the Sanday- Driver theory of its inspiration without undermining faith in the Bible as the Word of God. For the Bible is either the Word of God, or it is not. The children of Israel were the children of the Only Living and True God, or they were not. If their Jehovah was a mere tribal deity, and their religion a human evolution; if their sacred literature was natural with mythical and pseudonymous admixtures; then the Bible is dethroned from its throne as the exclusive, authoritative, Di vinely inspired Word of God. It simply ranks as one of the sacred books of the ancients with similar claims of inspiration and revelation. Its inspiration is an indeterminate quantity and any man. has a right to subject it to the judgment of his own critical insight, and to receive just as much of it as inspired as he or some other person believes to be inspired. When the contents have passed through the sieve of his judgment the inspired residuum may be large, or the inspired residuum may be small. If he is a conservative critic it may be fairly large, a maximum; if he is a more advanced critic it may be fairly small, a minimum. It is simply the ancient lit erature of a religious people containing somewhere the Word of God; “a revelation of no one knows what, made no one knows how, and lying no one knows where, except that it is to be somewhere between Genesis and Revelation, but probably to the exclusion of both.” (Pusey, Daniel, xxviii.) NO FINAL AUTHORITY. Another serious consequence of the Higher Critical move ment is that it threatens the Christian system of doctrine and the whole fabric of systematic theology. For up to the pres ent time any text from any. part of the Bible was accepted as
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog