Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a [pg 232]command to slay his son as a burnt offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority.”Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—i. e., putting some of his own sinful anger into God's calm predictions of judgment. Compare the stern last words of “Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the priest” when stoned to death in the temple court: “Jehovah look upon it and require it”(2 Chron. 24:20-22), with the last words of Jesus: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34) and of Stephen: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60).
(e) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations. Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature; appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the higher.
In Hosea 1:2, 3, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended only as symbolic: compare Jer. 25:15-18—“Take this cup ... and cause all the nations ... to drink.” Literal obedience would have made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible, in loco. In 2 K. 6:19, Elisha's deception, so called, was probably only ironical and benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were completely in his power. In the Song of Solomon, we have, as Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.
Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged both by Christ and by his apostles: Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”; 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Jude 23—“some save with fear, snatching them out of the fire.” In this respect the N. T. does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out that the royalists got their texts, “the powers that be” (Rom. 13:1) and “the king as supreme” (1 Pet. 2:13), from the N. T., while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty. While the O. T. deals with national life, and the discharge of social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main with individuals and with their relations to God. On the whole subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett, Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.
4. Errors of Reasoning.
(a) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.
In Mat. 22:32, Christ's argument for the resurrection, drawn from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed premise that the living relation to God which is here implied cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology. Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme, according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is “a syllogism in which the major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”
(b) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation or ad hominem arguments on the part of the Scripture writers.
By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and processes are correct, though not understood by us. In Heb. 7:9, 10 (Levi's paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature illustrates the organic unity of the race. In Gal. 3:20—“a mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable. Paul's argument here rests on Christ's divinity as its foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot, in loco). In Gal. 4:21-31, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham. Abraham's two wives, and the two classes of people in the two sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). In John 10:34—“I said, Ye are gods,” the implication is that Judaism was not a system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism, a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco). Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul's logic will do well first to suspect his own.