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T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
October 1926
r~ O f u Q T • . The A u tho r ity o f the Holy May the Bible be Accepted as an Infallible o f a Divine Revelation? DR. CLARENCE EDWARD MACARTNEY Former Moderator Presbyterian General Assembly Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Scriptures Record i i l i i
Dr. Macartney (whose picture appears on the cover page of this issue) has certainly conferred a great favor upon The King's Business Family in send ing us for publication this address which was originally delivered at the “ Quadrennial World Convention o f the Alliance of Reformed Churches hold ing the Presbyterian System’ at Cardiff, Wales, June 29, 1925. He is one of the outstanding Defenders o f the Faith, and we know that every loyal believer will be glad to take him upon their hearts for prayer.
Dr. Sanday says of the traditional Protestant view of the Bible, as expressed in the great confessions of Protestant ism: “ This was the view commonly held fifty years ago. And when it comes to be examined it is found to be sub stantially not very different from that which was held two centuries after the birth of Christ.” Facing the Facts We must face the fact that a Bible which is childish, gro tesque and absurd as to its astronomy, geology and biology can never exert the moral authority over the minds of men that the Bible did exert over those heroic souls who estab lished the Reformed Churches and built up the civilization of the Protestant nations. You can never open the door to the reception of the Bible as a spiritual authority and guide by first of all describing it as a collection of myth and folk lore, silly notions of the earth and of man, with here and there very low ideas of God. Yet this is the impossible task that many of our so-called “ liberal” Protestants are at tempting. But it can never be done until the east meets the west. The solution of the scientific difficulty lies elsewhere. What we are so sure is experimental and established fact today, may assume a different aspect tomorrow, and the last word will be God’s. The remarkable thing is that in a book written so many ages ago there should be any ground for a dispute as to whether or not this book is in agreement with the latest findings of physical science. The grand steps in crea tion outlined In the Bihle are so in keeping with those out lined by science that, as a President of the British Associa tion, Sir William Dawson, once put it, “ It would not be easy, even now, to construct a statement of the development of the world in popular terms so concise and so accurate.” Danger from Within The most dangerous attack on the Bible is made by those within the Churches who claim that only by such reinter pretations can we mediate between the Bible and the “ mod ern mind,” that terrible monster which now threatens to destroy Christianity after it has survived the shocks and the storms of the ages. Perhaps the best key to the whole liberal and modernistic method with the Bible is what is called “ Progressive Revelation." That has a good sound. We all believe in progress and we all believe in revelation. Therefore, Why not Progressive Revelation? But, as used by the Modernists, "Progressive Revelation” is not the true Biblical teaching that God has revealed His will successively and increasingly through patriarchs, prophets and the Gospel, culminating in Jesus (Continued on page 605)
HE liberal Protestant churches are slowly losing their faith in the Scriptures and as they lose their faith In the Scriptures they are slowly losing their religion. The Protestant churches came Into exis tence as a sublime witness to the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice. That was many centuries ago. But now it has come to pass in the strange revolutions of the wheel of history that some of the Protestant churches and many Protestant scholars and theologians are the most deter mined and dangerous enemies of the Bible. It is four cen turies since our noble pioneers of the Reformed Churches gave to the world the Bible as the only rule of faith. Today no one will deny that at a meeting of representatives of the churches throughout the world holding to the Presby terian system the question of the authority of the Bible is timely and critical. Has God Spoken? The whole issue of Christianity and the spiritual destiny of mankind depend upon the answer to this question, Has God spoken to man? This fundamental question of religion is admirably stated by Bishop Gore in his book, Belief in God: “ This then is the question— Has the Divine Mind, or Spirit, taken action on His side to disclose or reveal Him self to those who are seeking after God?“ Prom the very beginning the unfaltering answer of the Christian Church has been that God has spoken to man, and that we have an infallible record of that revelation in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. This has been the ground upon which the Church, Catholic as well as Protestant, has stood from the very beginning. The only alternative for an Infallible record of a divine revelation for our salvation is human reason, and human reason is as the eloquent American agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, declared it to be, “ a flickering torch, borne on a starless night, and blown by the winds of prejudice and passion.” Enemies of the Bible today within the Protestant Church are trying to create the Impression that the idea of an infallible Bible goes back only to the Reformation, and was foisted upon Christianity by extreme Protestants who set up an infallible Bible in the place of an infallible Pope. Nothing could be more preposterous. The Roman Catholic view of the Scriptures is summed up by the declaration of the Vatican Council of 1870, which, having named the books of the Bible, declares them to be sacred and canonical, not because approved by the Church, nor because they contain a revelation with no admixture of error, but “ because having been written by the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost they have God for their author." In his Bampton Lectures of 1893,
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