CHAPTER 14
THE DOCTRINAL VALUE OF THE FIRST
DYSON
HAGUE, M. A.,
Vicar Of The Church Of The Epiphany; Professor Of
Liturgics, Wycliffe
College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
The Book of Genesis is in many respects
the most important book in the Bible. It is of the first importance because it
answers, not exhaustively, but sufficiently, the fundamental questions of the
human mind. It contains the first authoritative information given to the race
concerning these questions of everlasting interest: the Being of God; the
origin of the universe; the creation of man; the origin of the soul; the fact
of revelation; the introduction of sin; the promise of salvation; the primitive
division of the human race; the purpose of the elected people; the preliminary
part in the program of Christianity. In one word, in this inspired volume of
beginnings,
we have the satisfactory explanation
of all the sin and misery and contradiction now in this world, and the reason
of the scheme of redemption.
Or, to put it in another way. The
Book of Genesis is the seed in which the plant of God’s Word is enfolded. It is
the starting point of God’s gradually unfolded
plan of the ages. Genesis is the
plinth of the pillar of the Divine revelation. It is the root of the tree of
the inspired Scriptures. It is the source of the stream of the holy writings of
the Bible. If the base of the pillar is removed, the pillar falls. If the root
of the tree is cut out, the tree will wither and die. If the fountain head of
the stream is cut off, the stream will dry up. The Bible as a whole is like a
chain hanging upon two staples. The Book of Genesis is the one staple; the Book
of Revelation is the other. Take away either staple, the chain falls in
confusion. If the first chapters of Genesis are unreliable, the revelation of
the beginning of the universe, the origin of the race, and the reason of its
redemption are gone. If the last chapters of Revelation are displaced the
consummation of all things is unknown. If you take away Genesis, you have lost
the explanation of the first heaven, the first earth, the first Adam, and the
fall. If you take away Revelation you have lost the completed truth of the new
heaven, and the new earth, man redeemed, and the second Adam in Paradise
regained. Further: in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. you have the
strong and sufficient foundation of the subsequent developments of the kingdom
of God; the root-germ of all Anthropology, Soteriology, Christology, Satanology, to say nothing of
the ancient and modern problems of the mystery and culpability of sin, the
Divine ordinance of the Lord’s Day, the unity of the race, and God’s
establishment of matrimony and the family life.
We assume from the start the
historicity of Genesis and its Mosaic authorship. It was evidently accepted by
Christ the Infallible, our Lord and God, as historical, as one single
composition, and as the work of Moses. It was accepted by Paul the inspired. It
was accepted universally by the divinely inspired leaders of God’s chosen
people. (See Green’s “Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch.”) It has validated
itself to the universal Church throughout the ages by its realism and
consistency, and by what has been finely termed its subjective truthfulness. We
postulate especially the historicity of the first chapters. These are not only
valuable, they are vital.
They are the essence of Genesis. The
Book of Genesis is neither the work of a theorist or a tribal annalist. It is
still less the product of some anonymous compiler or compilers in some
unknowable era, of a series of myths, historic in form but unhistoric in fact.
Its opening is an apocalypse, a direct revelation from the God of all truth.
Whether it was given in a vision or otherwise, it would be impossible to say.
But it is possible, if not probable, that the same Lord God, who revealed to
His servant as he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day the apocalypse of the
humanly unknown and unknowable events of man’s history which will transpire
when this
heaven and this earth have passed
away, would also have revealed to His servant, being in the Spirit, the
apocalypse of the humanly unknowable and unknown events which transpired before
this earth’s history began. It has been asserted that the beginning and the end
of things are both absolutely hidden from science. Science has to do with
phenomena. It is where science must confess its impotence that revelation steps
in, and, with the authority of God, reveals those things that are above it, The
beginning of Genesis, therefore, is a divinely inspired narrative of the events
deemed necessary by God to establish the foundations for the Divine Law in the
sphere of human life, and to set forth the relation between the omnipotent
Creator and the man who fell, and the race that was to be redeemed by the
incarnation of His Son.
The German rationalistic idea, which
has passed over into thousands of more or less orthodox Christian minds, is
that these earliest chapters embody ancient traditions of the Semitic-oriental
mind. Others go farther, and not only deny them to be the product of the
reverent and religious mind of the Hebrew, but assert they were simply oriental
legends, not born from above and of God, but born in the East, and probably in
pagan Babylonia. We would therefore postulate the following propositions:
The residuum of dubious truth, which
might with varying degrees of consent be extracted therefrom, could never be
accepted as a foundation 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 opportunity, said the Oxford
professor, of gauging the skill of those on whose faith the old-fashioned
belief in the authenticity 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 appraising the skill, but of gauging also the
spiritual qualifications of a critical school that has been characterized
notoriously by an enthusiasm against the miraculous, and a precipitate adoption
o 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 if they allow them to go out of their specific provinces without
protest. Their assumptions ought to be watched with the utmost vigilance and
jealousy. (See Gladstone, “The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,” pp. 62-83).
But to resume. The Book of Genesis
is the foundation on which the superstructure of the Scriptures rests. The
foundation of the foundation is the first three chapters, which form in
themselves a complete monograph of revelation. And of this final substructure
the first three verses of the first chapter are the foundation.
In the first verse of Genesis in
words of supernatural grandeur, we have a revelation of God as the first cause,
the Creator of the universe, the world and man. The glorious Being of God comes
forth without explanation, and without apology. It is a revelation of the one,
personal, living, God. There is in the ancient philosophic cosmogony no trace
of the idea of such a Being, still less of such a Creator, for all other
systems began and ended with pantheistic, materialistic, or hylozoistic
conceptions. The Divine Word stands unique in declaring the absolute idea of
the living God, without attempt at demonstration. The spirituality, infinity,
omnipotence, sanctity of the Divine Being, all in germ lie here. Nay more. The
later and more fully revealed doctrine of the unity of God in the Trinity may
be said to lie here in germ also, and the last and deepest revelation to be
involved in first and foremost. The fact of God in the first of Genesis is not
given as a deduction of reason or a philosophic generalization. It is a
revelation. It is a revelation of that primary truth which is received by the
universal human mind as a truth that needs no proof, and is incapable of it,
but which being received, is verified to the intelligent mind by an
irresistible force not only with ontological and cosmological, but with
teleological and moral arguments. Here we have in this first verse of Genesis,
not only a postulate apart from Revelation, but three great truths which have
constituted the glory of our religion.
(1) The Unity of God; in contradiction
to all the polytheisms and dualisms of ancient and modern pagan philosophy.
(2) The Personality of God; in
contradiction to that pantheism whether materialistic or idealistic, which
recognizes God’s immanence in the world, but denies His transcendence. For in
all its multitudinous developments, pantheism has this peculiarity, that it
denies the personality of God, and excludes from the realm of life the need of
a Mediator, a Sin-Bearer, and a personal Saviour.
(3) The Omnipotence of God; in
contradiction, not only to those debasing conceptions of the anthropomorphic
deities of the ancient world, but to all those man-made idols which the
millions of heathenism today adore. God made these stars and suns, which man in
his infatuation fain would worship. Thus in contradiction to all human
conceptions and human evolutions, there stands forth no mere deistic
abstraction, but the one, true, living and only God. He is named by the name
Elohim, the name of Divine Majesty, the Adorable One, our Creator and Governor;
the same God who in a few verses later is revealed as Jehovah-Elohim, Jehovah
being the Covenant name, the God of revelation and grace, the Ever-Existent
Lord, the God and Father of us all. (Green, “Unity of Genesis,” pp. 31,32;
“Fausset’s Bib. Ency.,” p. 258).
One of the theories of modernism is
that the law of evolution can be traced through the Bible in the development of
the idea of God. The development of the idea of God? Is there in the Scriptures
any real trace of the development of the idea of God? There is an expansive,
and richer, and fuller revelation of the attributes and dealings and ways and
workings of God; but not of the idea of God. The God of Genesis 1:1 is the God
of Psalm 90; of Isaiah 40:28; of Hebrews 1:1; and Revelation 4:11.
“In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.” Here in a sublime revelation is the doctrinal foundation
of the creation of the universe, and the contradiction of the ancient and modern
conceptions of the eternity of matter. God only is eternal. One can well
believe the story of a Japanese thinker who took up a strange book, and with
wonderment read the first sentence: “In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.” It struck him that there was more philosophy of a theological
character, and satisfying to the mind and soul, in that one sentence than in
all the sacred books of the orient. That single sentence separates the
Scriptures from the rest of human productions. The wisest philosophy of the
ancients, Platonic-Aristotelian or Gnostic, never reached the point that the
world was created by God in the sense of absolute creation. In no cosmogony
outside of the Bible is there a record of the idea that God created the heaven
and the earth, as an effort of
His will, and the fiat of His
eternal, self-existent Personality. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The highest point
reached by their philosophical speculations was a kind of atomic theory; of cosmic
atoms and germs and eggs possessed of some inexplicable forces of development,
out of which the present cosmos was through long ages evolved. Matter was
almost universally believed to have existed from eternity. The Bible teaches
that the universe was not causa sui or a mere passive evolution of His nature,
nor a mere transition from one form of being to another, from non-being to
being, but that it was a direct creation of the personal, living, working God,
who created all things out of nothing, but the fiat of His will, and the
instrumentality of the eternal Logos. In glorious contrast to agnostic science
with its lamentable creed, “I believe that behind and above and around the
phenomena of matter and force remains the unsolved mystery of the universe,”
the Christian holds forth his triumphant solution, “I believe that in the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (John 1:1-3; Hebrews 1:1;
Colossians 1:16). The first verse of the Bible is a proof that the Book is of
God.
And so with regard to the subsequent
verses. Genesis is admittedly not a scientific history. It is a narrative for
mankind to show that this world was made by God for the habitation of man, and
was gradually being fitted for God’s children. So in a series of successive creative
developments from the formless chaos, containing in embryonic condition all
elemental constituents, chemical and mechanical, air, earth, fire, and water,
the sublime process is recorded, according to the Genesis narrative in the
following order:
These three points where the idea of
absolute creation is introduced are the three main points at which modern
champions of evolution find it impossible to make
their connection.
Next we have in this sublime
revelation the doctrinal foundation for the beginning of mankind. Man was
created, not evolved. That is, he did not come from protoplasmic mud-mass, or
sea ooze bathybian, or by descent from fish or frog, or horse, or ape; but at
once, direct, full made, did man come forth from God. When you read what some
writers, professedly religious, say about man and his bestial origin your
shoulders unconsciously droop; your head hangs down; your heart feels sick.
Your self-respect has received a blow. When you read Genesis, your shoulders
straighten, your chest emerges. You feel proud to be that thing that is called
man. Up goes your heart, and up goes your head. The Bible stands openly against
the evolutionary development of man, and his gradual ascent through indefinite
aeons from the animal.
Not against the idea of the
development of the plans of the Creator in nature, or a variation of species by
means of environment and processes of time. That is seen in Genesis, and throughout
the Bible, and in this world. But the Bible does stand plainly against that
garish theory that all species, vegetable and animal, have originated through
evolution from lower forms through long natural processes. The materialistic
form of this theory to the Christian is most offensive. It practically
substitutes an all-engendering protoplasmic call for the only and true God. But
even the theistic supernaturalistic theory is opposed to the Bible and to
Science for these reasons.
1:26,27. These verses give man his
true place in the universe as the consummation of creation. Made out of the
dust of the ground, and created on the same day with the highest group of
animals, man has physiological affinities with the animal creation. But he was
made in the image of God, and therefore transcendently superior to any animal.
“Man is a walker, the monkey is a climber,” said the great French scientist, De
Quatrefages, years ago. A man does a thousand things every day that a monkey could
not do if he tried ten thousand years. Man has the designing, controlling,
ordering, constructive, and governing faculties. Man has personality,
understanding, will, conscience. Man is fitted for apprehending God, and for
worshipping God. The Genesis account of man is the only possible basis of
revelation. The revelation of fatherhood; of the beautiful, the true, the good;
of purity, of peace; is unthinkable to a horse, a dog, or a monkey. The most
civilized simian could have no affinity with such ideas. There is no
possibility of his conceiving such conceptions, or of receiving them if
revealed. It is, ... moreover, the only rational basis for the doctrine of
regeneration in opposition to the idea of the evolution of the human character,
and of the great doctrine of the incarnation. Man once made in the image of
God, by the regenerating power of the Holy Ghost is born again and made in the
image of God the Son.
Further, we have in this sublime
revelation of Genesis the doctrinal foundation of:
1. The unity of the human race.
2. The fall of man.
3. The plan of redemption.
1. With regard to the first, Sir William Dawson
has said that the Bible knows but one Adam. Adam was not a myth, or an ethnic
name. He was a veritable man, made by God; not an evolutionary development from
some hairy anthropoid in some imaginary continent of Lemuria. ... The Bible
knows but one species of man, one primitive pair. ... This is confirmed by the
Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:4. ... It is re-affirmed by Paul in Acts 17:26,
whichever reading may be taken, and in Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21,47,49.
Nor is there any ground for supposing that the word Adam is used in a
collective sense, and thus leave room for the hypotheses of the evolutionary
development of a large number of human pairs. All things in both physiology and
ethnology, as well as in the sciences, which bear on the subject, confirm the
idea of the unity of the human race. (Saphir, p. 206).
2. With regard to the fall of man. The foundation
of all Harmartology and Anthropology lies in the first three chapters of
Genesis. It teaches us that man was originally created for communion with God,
and that whether his personality was dichotomistic or trichotomistic, he was
entirely fitted for personal, intelligent fellowship with his Maker, and was
united with Him in the bonds of love and knowledge. Every element of the Bible
story recommends itself as a historic narrative. Placed in Eden by his God,
with a work to do, and a trial-command, man was potentially perfect, but with
the possibility of fall. Man fell, though it was God’s will that man should
rise from that human posse non peccari as a free agent into the Divine non
posse peccari. (Augustine, “De Civitate Dei”, Book 22, Chap. 30). Man fell by
disobedience, and through the power of a supernatural deceiver called that old
serpent, the devil and Satan, who from Genesis 3 to Revelation 19 appears as
the implacable enemy of the human race, and the head of that fallen angel-band
which abandoned through the sin of pride their first principality.
This story is incomprehensible if
only a myth. The great Dutch theologian, Van Oosterzee says, “The narrative
presents itself plainly as history. Such an historic fantastic clothing of a
pure philosophic idea accords little with the genuine spirit of Jewish
antiquity.” (Dog. ii, p. 403).
Still more incomprehensible is it,
if it is merely an allegory which refers fruit, serpent, woman, tree, eating,
etc., to entirely different things from those mentioned in the Bible. It is
history. It is treated as such by our Lord Jesus Christ, who surely would not
mistake a myth for history, and by St. Paul, who hardly built Romans 5, and 1
Corinthians 15, on cleverly composed fables. It is the only satisfactory
explanation of the corruption of the race. From Adam’s time death has reigned.
This story of the fall stands,
moreover, as a barrier against all Manicheanism, and against that Palagianism
which declares that man is not so bad after all, and derides the doctrine of
original sin which in all our Church confessions distinctly declares the
possession by every one from birth of this sinful nature. (See, e.g., Art. IX
of “Anglican Church.”) The penalty and horror of sin, the corruption of our
human nature, and the hopelessness of our sinful estate are things definitely
set forth in the Holy Scripture, and are St. Paul’s divinely-inspired
deductions from this fact of the incoming of sin and death through the
disobedience and fall of Adam, the original head of the human race. The race is
in a sinful condition. (Romans 5:12). Mankind is a solidarity. As the root of a
tree lives in stem, branch, leaf and fruit; so in Adam, as Anselm says, a
person made nature sinful, in his posterity nature made persons sinful. Or, as
Pascal finely puts it, original sin is folly in the sight of man, but this
folly is wiser than all the wisdom of man. For without it, who could have said
what man is. His whole condition depends upon this imperceptible point.
(“Thoughts,” ch. xiii-11). This Genesis
story further is the foundation of the Scripture doctrine of all human
responsibility, and accountability to God. A lowered anthropology always means
a lowered theology, for if man was not a direct creation of God, if he was a
mere indirect development, through slow and painful process, of no one knows
what, or how, or why, or when, or where, the main spring of moral
accountability is gone. The fatalistic conception of man’s personal
and moral life is the deadly gift of
naturalistic evolution to our age, said Prof. D. A. Curtis recently.
3. With regard to our redemption, the third
chapter of Genesis is the basis of all Soteriology. If there was no fall, there
was no condemnation, no separation and no need of reconciliation. If there was
no need of reconciliation, there was no need of redemption; and if there was no
need of redemption, the Incarnation was a superfluity, and the crucifixion
folly. (Galatians 3:21). So closely does the apostle link the fall of Adam and
the death of Christ, that without Adam’s fall the science of theology is
evacuated of its most salient feature, the atonement. If the first Adam was not
made a living soul and fell, there was no reason for the work of the Second
Man, the Lord from heaven. The rejection of the Genesis story as a myth, tends
to the rejection of the Gospel of salvation. One of the chief corner stones of
the Christian doctrine is removed, if the historical reality of Adam and Eve is
abandoned, for the fall will ever remain as the starting point of special
revelation, of salvation by grace, and of the need of personal regeneration. In
it lies the germ of the entire apostolic Gospel.
Finally, we have in Genesis 2 the
doctrinal foundation of those great fundamentals, the necessity of labor, the
Lord’s Day of rest, the Divine ordinance of matrimony, and the home life of
mankind. The weekly day of rest was provided for man by his God, and is planted
in the very forefront of revelation as a Divine ordinance, and so also is
marriage and the home. Our Lord Jesus Christ endorses the Mosaic story of the
creation of Adam and Eve, refers to it as the explanation of the Divine will
regarding divorce, and sanctions by His infallible imprimatur that most
momentous of ethical questions, monogamy. Thus the great elements of life as
God intended it, the three universal factors of happy, healthy, helpful life,
law, labor, love, are laid down in the beginning of God’s Book.
Three other remarkable features in
the first chapters of Genesis deserve a brief reference.
The first is the assertion of the
original unity of the language of the human race. (Genesis 11:1). Max Muller, a
foremost ethnologist and philologist, declares that all our languages, in spite
of their diversities, must have originated in one common source. (See Saphir,
“Divine Unity,” p. 206; Dawson, “Origin of the World,” p. 286; Guinness,
“Divine Programme,” p.
75).
The second is that miracle of
ethnological prophecy by Noah in Genesis 9:26,27, in which we have foretold in
a sublime epitome the three great divisions of the human race, and their
ultimate historic destinies. The three great divisions, Hamitic, Shemitic, and
Japhetic, are the three ethnic groups into which modern science has divided the
human race. The facts of history have fulfilled what was foretold in Genesis
four thousand years ago. The Hamitic nations, including the Chaidean,
Babylonic, and Egyptian, have been degraded, profane, and sensual. The Shemitic
have been the religious with the line of the coming Messiah. The Japhetic have
been the enlarging, and the dominant races, including all the great world
monarchies, both of the ancient and modern times, the Grecian, Roman, Gothic,
Celtic,
Teutonic, British and American, and
by recent investigation and discovery, the races of India, China, and Japan.
Thus Ham lost all empire centuries ago; Shem and his race acquired it ethically
and spiritually through the Prophet, Priest and King, the Messiah; while
Japheth, in world-embracing enlargement and imperial supremacy, has stood for
industrial, commercial, and political dominion.
The third is the glorious promise
given to Abraham, the man to whom the God of glory appeared and in whose seed,
personal and incarnate, the whole world was to be blessed. Abraham’s
personality is the explanation of the monotheism of the three greatest
religions in the world. He stands out in majestic proportion, as Max Muller
says, as a figure, second only to One in the whole world’s history. Apart from
that promise the miraculous history of the Hebrew race is inexplicable. In him
centers, and on him hangs, the central fact of the whole of the Old Testament,
the promise of the Saviour and His glorious salvation. (Genesis 11:3; 22:18; Galatians 3:8-16).
In an age, therefore, when the
critics are waxing bold in claiming settledness for the assured results of
their hypothetic eccentricities, Christians should wax bolder in contending
earnestly for the assured results of the revelation in the opening chapters of
Genesis. The attempt of modernism to save the supernatural in the second part
of the Bible by mythicalizing the supernatural in the first part, is as unwise
as it is fatal. Instead of lowering the dominant of faith amidst the chorus of
doubt, and admitting that a chapter is doubtful because some doctrinaire has
questioned it, or a doctrine is less authentic because somebody has floated an
unverifiable hypothesis, it would be better to take our stand with such men as
Romanes, Lord Kelvin, Virchow, and Liebig, in their ideas of a Creative Power,
and to side with Cuvier, the eminent French scientist, who said that Moses,
while brought up in all the science of Egypt, was superior to his age, and has
left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which verifies itself every day in a
reasonable manner; with Sir William Dawson, the eminent Canadian scientist, who
declared that Scripture in all its details contradicts no received result of
science, but anticipates many of its discoveries; with Professor Dana, the eminent
American scientist, who said, after examining the first chapters of Genesis as
a geologist, “I find it to be in perfect accord with known science”; or, best
of all, with Him who said, “Had you believed Moses, you would have believed Me,
for he wrote of Me. But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe
My words?” (John 5:45,46).
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