NOTES
NOTES
FOREWORD
1 James Barr: Fundamentalism (London, 1977, 2nd ed.1987). see also his Escaping from Fundamentalism (London, 1984)
CHAPTER 2
1 The Lambeth Conference 19 j 8 (London, 1958), 1, 33.
2 Confessions, xiii, 29.
3 C. Hodge: op. cit. (London, 1873), Vol. I, p. 162.
4 Wellhausen’s theory has been damagingly criticized by conservative scholars such as W. H. Green: The Higher Criticism of the Fentateuch (New York, 1895); J· Orr: The Problem of the Old Testament (London, 1900); R. D. Wilson: A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament (New York, 1926); Ο. T. Allis: The Five Books of Moses (Philadelphia, I943); G. Ch. Aalders: A Short Introduction to the Pentateuch (London, 1949); E. J. Young: Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 1949; London, 1954); R. K. Harrison: Introduction to the Old Testament (London, 1970). Roman Catholic scholars often reject it, as does the modern Scandinavian school, but it keeps the field in most Protestant circles because no alternative theory seems to account for so many of the phenomena so neatly. It is admitted, however, by most scholars today that its truth is an open question, not a closed one, as was once thought. See D. A. Hubbard in The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas, N. Hillyer,
F. F. Bruce, J. I. Packer, R. V. G. Tasker, D. J. Wiseman, D. Guthrie, A. R. Millard (Leicester, 1980), s.v. ‘Pentateuch’.
5 J. Baillie: op. cit. (London, 1956), p. 109.
6 D. E. Nineham: The Church’s Use of the Bible Past and
Present (London, 1963), p. 162, referring to The Revised Catechism (1961). Nineham seems to think that human nature so changes from one age and cultural milieu to another that modern Westerners simply cannot grasp what the New Testament in particular was written to convey; see The Use and Abuse of The Bible (London, 1976), and my comments on Nineham’s view in ‘Infallible Scripture and the Role of Hermeneutics’: Scripture and Truth, ed. D. A. Carson and J. B. Woodbridge (Leicester, 1983), pp. 3 3 if.
7 The accusation, often made, that evangelical (and, for that matter, most pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic) biblical scholarship does just this is misguided. What it does, rather, is to face frankly the problems about the Bible which scientific and historical enquiry raises, and then to live with them until such time as satisfying solutions appear, on the principle, stated by Augustine, that ‘if we cannot reconcile such a contradiction (sc., between the apparent results of secular study on the one hand and Bible study on the other) we are to suspend judgment, not doubting either the Holy Scripture or the results of human observation and reasoning, but believing that it is possible, given sufficient knowledge and understanding, to reconcile the apparent contradiction.’
8 The Homilies, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1850), pp. 370, 378, 383.
CHAPTER 3
1 Westminster Theological Journal, May i960 (XXII, ii), pp. 127L
2 Our Faith (London, 1936; 1949 edn.) p. 12.
3 Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, II,ii, 18.
4 Among good surveys of non-Christian faiths are J. N. D. Anderson (ed.): The World's Religions (2nd. ed., London, 1951); H. D. Lewis and R. L. Slater: The Study of Religions (London, Pelican Books, 1969); G. Parrinder: The World's Living Religions (London, Pan Piper, 1964); N. Smart: The Religious Experience of Mankind (London, 1969). For model approaches to them, see J. N. D. Anderson: Christianity and Comparative Religion (London, 1970); A. K. Cragg: Christian and Other Religions (Oxford, 1977); S. C. Neill: Crises of Belief (London, 1984). Currently in progress is a debate, prompted by the ‘anonymous Christians’ idea of the late Karl Rahner and the universalist speculations of John Hick, as to whether the world’s major religions really converge and whether there is salvation in Christ for adult adherents of non-Christian faiths. For an orientation see H. A. Netland'.Dissonant Voices (Leicester, 1991); J. Sanders: No Other Name (Grand Rapids, 1992).
5 The statement in the text reproduces Barth’s own: see Church Dogmatics, I.2.528L (Edinburgh, 1956). It should be said, however, that Barth’s method throughout the 7,000-odd pages of the Church Dogmatics is to establish each point by his own characteristic biblical exegesis, and at no point does he dissent from what he finds in the text.
CHAPTER 4
1 This emphasis, characteristic of the British ‘biblical theology’ movement and the continental ‘Heilsgeschichte’ theologians (cf., on the latter, Alan Richardson: The Bible in the Age of Science [London, 1961], pp. i22ff.), found typical expression in such books as Gabriel Hebert: The Bible from Within (Oxford, 1950); William Neil: The Rediscovery of the Bible (London, 1954); Oscar Cullmann: Christ and Time (Eng. tr., London, 1951); G. E. Wright: God Who Acts (London, 1952); and in the Committee Report on the Holy Bible at the 1958 Lambeth Conference (The Lambeth Conference 1958, 2, 2ff., especially pp. 9-12). B. S. Childs: Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia, 1970), tells how, for alleged exegetical, critical, linguistic and hermeneutical naiveties, biblical theology went under a cloud in the 1960s. It has re-emerged in strength, however, in such work as William Dumbrell: Covenant and Creation (Nashville, 1986).
2 The London-Edinburgh express named the ‘Flying Scotsman’ dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. The steam locomotive named ‘Flying Scotsman’ (an A3 Pacific) was built in 1923, and has been preserved.
3 See Temple: Nature, Man and God (London, 1934), Lecture xii, and his essay in Revelation, ed. D. M. Baillie and H. Martin (London, 1937); Hodgson: The Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1943), Lecture i.
4 Nature, Man and God, p. 317.
5 Thus, for instance, George Every wrote of Herbert Kelly:
Tn his own reflections on the Old Testament Father Kelly had a way of going directly to the event, without even noticing the interpretation given by the prophet or the prophetic historian’ (H. Kelly: The Gospel of God [London, 1959 ed.], p. 34). In this Kelly was showing himself less a prophet to our time than a child of it. D. B. Knox comments: ‘It will be seen that if revelation is in the event rather than in the interpretation, revelation becomes like a nose of wax to be reshaped according to every man’s whim’ (‘Propositional Revelation the Only Revelation’: Reformed Theological Review, February i960 [XIX, 1], P. 5)·
6 Hammond was England’s premier batsman in the thirties.
I recall a moment of fearful ecstasy in Gloucester when he lifted a beautiful six over the square-leg boundary. I was watching there and I thought the ball was going to hit me.
7 The Authority of the Bible (London, i960 ed.), p. 83.
8 See further my ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (London, 1958); ‘Revelation and Inspiration’: The New Bible Commentary (2nd ed., London, 1954), pp. 2iff.; ‘Revelation’: The New Bible Dictionary (London, 1962).
9 Commentary on Hebrews, ad loc. (London, 1840 ed., Vol. II, pp. 19, 20).
10 Institutes, I, vi. 2.
CHAPTER 5
1 See pp.3 5-43 above.
2 Modern Roman Catholic achievement in this field may be gauged by two books which, apart from their inevitable weaknesses regarding justification and the Church, are in the main very fine: C. Charlier: The Christian Approach to the Bible (Eng. tr., London, 1958); L. Bouyer: The Meaning of Sacred Scripture (Eng. tr., Indiana and London, i960). The Jerome Bible Commentary, ed. R. E. Brown, J. A. Fitzmyer and R. E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), was and remains a landmark of Roman Catholic scholarship. It must be noted, however, that the Constitution on Revelation of the Second Vatican Council has opened the floodgates for much sceptical biblical criticism among Roman Catholics. Section 11 of the Constitution says: ‘the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation’. Leading Roman Catholic theologians expound this as meaning that only truths necessary to salvation are guaranteed inerrant, and these (some of the theologians add), are few. Thus Roman Catholics are now joining Protestants in giving up the axiom that what Scripture says, God says. See J. I. Packer, ‘Encountering Present-day Views of Scripture’: The Foundation of Biblical Authority, ed. James M. Boice (Grand Rapids, 1978), pp. 6iff., especially pp. 74-76; John W. Montgomery, ‘The Approach of New Shape Roman Catholicism to Scriptural Inerrancy: a Case Study’: God's Inerrant Word, ed. John W. Montgomery (Minneapolis, 1974) pp. 263ff.; David F. Wells: Revolution in Rome (London 1973), pp. 26ff.
3 J. A. T. Robinson: Honest to God, p. 25; text of letter in ed. D. A. Edwards: The Honest to God Debate (London, 1963), pp. I38f.
4 B. B. Warfield: The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (London, 1951), p. 155.
5 See, for proof of this, and discussion of the passages in Christ’s teaching which some take as showing His rejection of Old Testament authority, J. W. Wenham: Our Lord's View of the Old Testament (London, 1953), especially pp. 28ff.; Christ and the Bible (London, 1972), ch. 1; ‘Christ’s View of Scripture’: Inerrancy, ed. N. L. Geisler (Grand Rapids, 1980); R. V. G. Tasker: Our Lord's Use of the Old Testament (London, 1953); Chapter II of The Old Testament in the New Testament: (2nd. ed., London, 1954); N. B. Stonehouse: The Witness of Matthew and Mark to Christ (Philadelphia, 1944); J. I. Packer: Our Lord's Understanding of the Law of God (London, 1962).
6 See N. Geldenhuys: Supreme Authority (London, 1953), especially pp. 45ff.
7 J. D. Wood: The Interpretation of the Bible (London, 1958), pp. if.
8 A. Kuyper observes that the standpoint of the inspired poets who wrote these Psalms was that of ultimate spiritual reality, where distinctions are absolute and ‘everything that sides with God lives and has our love, and everything that chooses eternally against God bears the mark of death and rouses our hatred’. This is the standpoint that we shall all occupy in heaven, though we cannot consistently attain to it here. Seeing things from this standpoint, says Kuyper, ‘the rule, “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?” becomes the only applicable standard, and whatever departs from this rule, falls short of love for God .. . [the imprecations] are solemnly true and holy when you take your stand in the absolute palingenesis [i.e., the order of new creation, eschatologically viewed], where God’s honour is the keynote of the harmony of the human heart’ (Principles of Sacred Theology [Grand Rapids, 1954], p. 524). It will help us progressively to appropriate these Psalms and enter into their outlook if we learn to use them as prayers against Satan and his hosts, and against our own besetting sins. Cf. C. S. Lewis: Reflections on the Psalms (London, 1961 ed.), pp. 113
9 See the phrase quoted from The Homilies (‘An Information . . .’) on p. 36 above. Archbishop Cranmer and Bishops Ridley and Jewel also used the word. John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century called the Bible infallibilis regula fidei (an infallible rule of faith).
10 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, vii, 5.
11 The New Bible Dictionary (Leicester and Grand Rapids, 1980), the one-volume New Bible Commentary Revised (London and Grand Rapids, 1970), the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopaedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, 1975), the Tyndale and New International commentary series, D. Guthrie: New Testament Introduction (London, 1970), and J. W. Wenham: Christ and the Bible and The Goodness of God (London, 1972, 1974) and Gleason Archer: Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, 1982), are among the most helpful scholarly sources of light on challenged parts of Scripture.
12 For the first, see pp. 7iff. above.
13 Regrettably, this principle found its way into the Committee Report on the Bible at the 1958 Lambeth Conference.
‘The Anglican Communion appeals to the whole of that primitive tradition of which the Sacraments, the Creeds, the Canon of the Bible, and the historic episcopate are all parts. The New Testament is thus not to be seen in isolation: the Church preceded it in time, and it was within the Church, with its Sacraments, Creeds, and Apostolic Ministry, that the New Testament was canonized5 (The Lambeth Conference 1958, 2,4).
14 E. A. Litton: Introduction to Dogmatic Theology (London, i960 ed.), pp. 30
15 For more details on the formation of the New Testament canon, and the principles involved in it, see J. W. Wenham, op. cit., ch. 6, and Herman N. Ridderbos: ‘The Canon of the New Testament5 in Revelation and the Bible, ed. C. F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids and London, 1958), pp. 187ff.; The Authority of the New Testament Scriptures (Philadelphia, 1:963); J. N. Birdsall: ‘Canon of the New Testament5 in The New Bible Dictionary (1980); Bruce Metzger: The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987); F. F. Bruce: The Canon of Scripture (Leicester, 1988). The statement in Article VI that the books of the New Testament ‘as they are commonly received5 are those ‘of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church5 is a little too loose to be quite clear. The meaning apparently is that the authenticity and authority of these books was never doubted, not by individual theologians and congregations (the framers of the Articles were well aware that such a statement, if made, would be false), but by the catholic visible Church as a whole. So understood, the statement, so far as the available evidence goes, would seem to be true.
16 Two statements by John Calvin, who first formulated this concept of the ‘inner witness5 (picking up, as so often, hints dropped by Luther), merit quotation here. ‘Enlightened by him (the Holy Spirit), we no longer believe that Scripture is from God either on our own judgment or on that of others; but, in a way that surpasses human judgment, we are made absolutely certain, just as if we beheld there the majesty of God himself, that it has come to us by the ministry of men from God’s very mouth.’ ‘Scripture will ultimately suffice for a saving knowledge of God only when certainty about it is founded on the inward persuasion of the Holy Spirit (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I. vii. 5, viii. 13).
17 It is worth showing this. The problem concerns Jas. 2:18-26 as compared with Rom. 3:21-5:21 and Gal. 3, and particularly what is said of Abraham in these passages. The key is to see that (i) to be ‘justified’ is Paul’s technical term for being pardoned and accepted by God, whereas for James it means being vindicated in a claim one has made, or that has been made for one (in this case, evidently, the claim that Abraham was truly in fellowship with God); (ii) ‘faith’ is for Paul the responsive energy of the regenerate heart, whereas James uses the word as he imagines the person he addresses using it, for orthodox beliefs as such; (iii) ‘works’, which for Paul signify self-justifying self-effort, signify for James the service of God whereby faith finds appropriate expression: in other words, the same as Paul means when he says ‘good works’. James’ subject is not the way of salvation, but the proof of genuineness when one claims a relation to God, and his point is that orthodoxy alone means nothing - which is precisely Paul’s point in Rom. 2:17-29.
18 See on this R. T. Beckwith, G. E. Duffield, and J. I. Packer: Across the Divide (Basingstoke, 1978), containing text and exposition of the evangelical Open Letter to the Anglican episcopate about relations with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches. The three Anglican-Roman Catholic Agreements, on the Eucharist, the Doctrine of the Ministry, and Authority, all fail at key points to be biblical enough in the sense defined.
CHAPTER 6
1 Cranmer: Remains and Letters (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1846), p. 121.
2 The Lambeth Conference 1958, 2, 1-18.
3 Ibid. See also Ο15, note 13. Above, p. 116, note 1.
4 2,7.
5 I, 33 (Resolution 5).
6 I, 34 (Resolution 12).
7 I, 19·