In this and a subsequent article, Dr. Louis Praamsma, veteran church hist orian and retired CRC pastor living at Hamilton, Ontario, makes some pointed comments on the dual attack of Dr. Harry Boer on the Bible and on the Doctrine of Reprobation. In this issue he shows the fallacies of the charge that the Reformed view of an inerrant Bible is rationalistic. The rationalistic unbelief is on the other side. In the next article he makes similar observations about the fallacious attack on the doctrine we confess in the Canons of Dort.

“Rationalism” an Old Charge

Calvinism has often been accused of rationalistic-tendencies, of attaching too high a value to reason and indulging too much in reasoning. Such charges started already with Luther who accused Zwingli of rationalizing about the mystery of the Lord’s Supper, and they continued with persons who called themselves genuine Lutherans (GneseoLutherans) who mercilessly attacked Calvin on the same ground, although Calvin had taken issue with Zwingli and clearly taught the mystical union with Christ at His table. Calvin and the Calvinists have also been accused of reasoning too much in the area of predestination; the Arminians of the first hour and their most recent successors have never stopped saying, that Calvin built a colossal system, starting with a n eternal decree of God, and ending with consigning some of the creatures made in His image to heaven, but most of them to hell; that system, it is said, was not founded on Scripture but a product of the logical arguments of the scholar of Geneva.

Finally Calvin and the Calvinists have been accused of rationalistic tendencies in the area of revelation; liberal, modern and neo–orthodox theologians have asserted time and again that Calvinists are the people of a book-religion; that they have included the living Word of God in a book with propositional truths; that they have applied all their logical acumen in order to harmonize the disconnected and discordant words of that book. One of the last ones (to my knowledge) to make this kind of accusation has been Dr. Harry Boer, when he wrote: “We have learned that reprobation exegesis in the Reformed tradition is an unprincipled, ruthless exercise that bends any desired Scripture in its fore-ordained meaning” (Acts of Synod of the C.R.C., 1977, p. 678).

It is at this point that I would ask the question: rationalism—on which side? Bending of Scripture on which side? And I would like to point out two things that are presently under discussion among us and are referred to as ‘problems’ nowadays, firstly that of the authority ofHoly Scripture and secondly that of predestination (election and reprobation).

Historic Faithfulness to Scripture

As far as the first point of doctrine is concerned, I would stress the fact that Calvinism in general and the Christian Reformed churches in particular, thus far have been marked by their faithfulness to Scripture. Without any hesitation the Bible was called an “‘infallible rule’ (Belg. Conf. art. VII), and faith was considered ‘a sure knowledge,” whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in His Word” (Cat. ans. 21). Even more significantly, our churches owe their identity to, have been fathered and mothered by courageous men and women, who seceded from larger and heterogenous churches, because the latter were infested by 18th and 19th century criticism of Scripture.

One thing was certain beyond any doubt: we stood upon the solid rock of Scripture and that Scripture could not be broken.

   

The Suggested Change

It seems that we now live in another climate. A distinction is being made between infallibility and inerrancy; it is said that we certainly have an infallible Bible, which, however, contains many errors.

Dr. Harry Boer wrote a book about this topic1 which has been largely discussed by Dr. Alexander De Jong2; I need not repeat what has been said by these two able men; I would recommend that every reader study t he brochure of Dr. DeJong.

Alleged Discrepancies

In his book Dr. Boer adduces mainly in parallel columns, some ten passages or groups of passages in which the Bible seems clearly to contradict itself with respect to specific data of circumstance, time, place, person, number and phraseology. As a point in case he refers (in his reply to Dr. DeJong) to the account of the death of Judas lscariot both in Matt. 27 and Acts 1.

Apparently he is convinced of the fact that both stories cannot be true; one of them must be in error; if the logic of Dr. Boer holds, it might be even assumed that both Matthew and Luke may have been in error; each one of them may have jotted down some rumor from the many stories circulating in the first congregations; but who is qualified to say what really happened?

But all this does not matter, in Dr. Boer‘s view, as far as the infallibility of Scripture is concerned. That infallibility, in his opinion, is “the massive idea of the unbreakable, ever-valid revelation of the creation, redemption, and consummation of all things in Christ.”

Echoes of Barth

It is small wonder that I, reading these things. was immediately reminded of the position of Karl Barth.

Barth, the man who with a mighty voice and great talent, once opposed the liberal theology of his days,also declared: “The prophets and apostles as such, even in their function of witnesses, even when writing down their witness, were real historical men as we are, and therefore sinful in their actions and indeed guilty of error in their spoken and written word.”3

Barth also once wrote: “As far as t he relativity of all human words, included those of Paul, is concerned, I share the opinion of Bultmann and of all intelligent people.”4

It was quite a remarkable, I am almost inclined to say. a most un-Barthian thing, to appeal to “intelligent”, i.e. critical people.

I was also reminded of something else.

A Much Older Problem

Is it only in our time, the time of refined historical methods, the time of endless hermeneutical problems, the time of an existentialistic relativism and loneliness without measure, that we are struck by “historical inaccuracies” and “discrepancies” in Holy Scripture? We should know by now that the fight for the Bible is by and large as old as the Christian church itself.

The first adversaries of the church were not blind, even as the church fathers were not blind.

Among those early adversaries was Celsus who knew the Bible. He claimed that it taught falsely that God changes His mind, that He chooses favorites among the human race, and that it is full of childish legends. There was also Julian the Apostate who claimed that the Bible teemed with contradictions, obvious at first sight by a comparison between the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.

How Augustine Met It

The great church father Augustine was, before his conversion, vexed by this same problem which he could not solve; in the New Testament Christ was introduced by long, and contradictory genealogies.

It is remarkable that although before his conversion Augustine was beset by intellectual doubts, after his conversion he believed the whole Bible as it was written. “For Augustine, the Bible was the only truly reliable history–book, because not written by men alone and because the choice of what is significant had been correctly made.”5

“Augustine teaches that, if we think to see a contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowed to say that the author was mistaken. There may be a defect in the manuscript or the translation is not correct or we don’t understand the right meaning.”6

Augustine was moved by the Spirit to accept the Word of the Spirit without making objections. He did not even object against the “discrepancy” between Matt. 27:7 and Acts 1:18. The different versions of Judas’ death were not first discovered by theologians of our time; they have always been recognized. Augustine found the obvious solution, writing: “He fastened a rope round his neck and, falling on his face, burst asunder in the midst.”7

Busken Huet versus Kuyper

Dr. Boer wrote differing Bible-passages in two columns. A man who did about the same was the 19th century minister Conrad Busken Huet. In letters. not columns, written to a lady-friend, he tried to make clear the incontestable incompatibility of several comparable parts of the Bible.8

Thirteen years afterward Busken Huet wrote scathing words at the address of a young minister who had dared to attack Modernism and taken a firm stand in favor of an unqualified belief in all the facts and figures of the Bible. That young minister was Abraham Kuyper and Busken Huet wrote about him that he was a courageous man but also a man behind the times; science had proved that orthodoxy was untenable.9 But what was the special feature of the stand made by Abraham Kuyper? It was the fact that he was a converted man; he had harbored the same doubts; he had had the same reverence for the power of modern science as shown by Busken Huet; he had applauded when one of his professors had dared to say that modern man can not believe any more that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. But the almighty hand of God had changed his heart and now he believed like a child all the words of God revealed in the Bible, as true and without error. This is what he wrote: “Each of the writers (of the Bible) was so moved and directed by the Holy Spirit that the page of Scripture which, after pencil and pen had been laid aside, lay before him, was as unalterably written down as though it had originated in an immediate divine creation.” He added: “The Scripture is God’s Word, both as a whole and in its parts” and: “Hence it was a verbal inspiration, not mechanically by whispering into the outward ear, but organically by calling forth the words from man’s own consciousness, that means by employing all those words that were on hand in the spiritual senses of the writer.”10

The point is not that the great theologian Abraham Kuyper wrote these words, but that the converted Christian Abraham Kuyper did so; as much as Augustine had done, he had been forced to conquer all the intellectual objections of his age to which his own heart had responded; and he had accepted the Bible as it was and is, the infallible Word of God. His wisdom appears in the four caveats which he adds to this lecture: A. We don’t have the original manuscripts. B. Scripture is not the book of a notary, but the work of a heavenly Artist who paints with a diversity of colors. C. If passages of Scripture seem to be contradictory, they should be brought into harmony, in a spiritual, not in an artificial way. D. If there remain “cruces”11, I should confess my ignorance.

Bavinck and Machen

Must I mention more names? Must I speak of Herman Bavinck who absorbed all the wisdom of liberal Leyden of his days and kept his faith; faith in an infallible Bible? Must I mention Gresham Machen who absorbed all the wisdom of liberal Germany in the beginning of our centur y and wrestled with it until he had conquered it and then became that outstanding champion of truth who wrote: “I hold that the Biblical writers, after having been prepared for their task by the providential ordering of their entire lives, received, in addition to all that, a blessed and supernatural guidance and impulsion by the Spirit of God, so that they were preserved from the errors that appear in other books and thus the resulting book, the Bible, is in all its parts the very Word of God, completely true in what it says regarding matters of fact and completely authoritative in its commands.”12

The point is again that not the valiant Machen wrote those words, but that Machen, who had wrestled with all the intellectual problems which then and now are brought in against inerrancy and had conquered them, wrote those words.

Must we draw the conclusion now that Augustine and Calvin, that Kuyper, Bavinck and Machen, not to mention many more, belonged to a certain kind of Reformed tradition which should be described in Dr. Boer’s words as “an unprincipled ruthless exercise that bends any desired Scripture in its fore-ordained meaning”?

Mind well what Dr. Boer means; he wants to tell us that those men made use of their own logical foreordination, not of that of God.

Escape from Unbelieving Rationalism

We should not draw that conclusion; we should say that those theologians had escaped from that rationalism which wants to mould and model Scripture after a pattern of time–bound human logic. Their eyes had been opened to the limits, the defects, often the arrogance of that human logic; they knew that even the best-informed human scholar does not know everything.

Those “best-informed scholarly theologians” are now referred to as form-critics; they always speak about documents which they can never produce; they always refer to a tradition-behind–a-tradition which they construct with all the ingenuity of first-class detectives; they are the professionals who know; know what?—next year they will tell you which hypotheses are more probable than those of last year.

1. H.R. Boer. Above the Battle: the Bible and its Critics.
2. A.C. De Jong. Christ’s Church, the Bible and Me.
3. K. Barth. Church Dogmatics. I. 2. p. 529.
4. K. Barth. Romerbrief 1923. p. XXXI.
5.  P. Brown. Augustine of Hippo. 1969. p. 322.
6. A.D.R. Polman. Art. “Augustinus” in Chr. Enc. I. p. 382.
7.  Against Felix the Manichaean. I. 4. Cp. F.F. Bruce. The Book ofActs. 1956. p . 49. Also A. Edersheim. L ife ofJesus II.p. 575.
8. In: Brieven over de Biibel 1858.
9. C. Busken Huet. Litterarische Fantasieen en Kritieken. XV. z.j. p. 167. (the article on Dr. Kuyper was written in 1871).
10. In his address: “De hedendaagsche Schriftcritiek in hare bedenkelijke strekking voor de Gemeente des levenden Gods.” 1881.
11. Baffling problems.
12. J. Gresham Machen. The Chris tan Faith in the Modern World. 1936. p. 36, 37.
13. Cp. esp. N .B. Stonehouse. J. Gresham Machen. 1954. ch. 7 and 8.