The Church, the Schools and Evolution

by J. E. Conant

To be a believer in the Word puts rationalism out of business, for no one can reason himself into the acceptance of truth he already believes. And on the other hand, to be a rationalist regarding the Word puts faith out of business, for faith is the acceptance of the bare Word of God without further evidence, and the rationalizer is compelled to reject that attitude toward the Word so that he may have the way left open to reason his way to what he is willing to accept as evidence. This is why so many of those students who sit in the classes of the rationalists in our colleges and seminaries lose their faith. Rationalism makes Scriptural faith impossible. Rationalizing and believing, when the Bible is in question, are mutually exclusive.

The reason for this is not that the facts of Scripture contradict each other, and certainly not that these facts are one thing to faith and another thing to reason. The antagonism does not arise over the facts [p 59] of the Word but over the interpretation of them. The rationalist, accepting no interpretation except that furnished by his own puny and incompetent reason unillumined by faith, reaches conclusions absolutely contradicted by those arrived at by the man of faith. The fact is, he could not hope to arrive anywhere else. For how can finite man relate and interpret the few and scattered facts he discovers in the realm of infinite truth? How can a man by searching find out God?

“By whose interpretation, yours or mine?“ is a favorite question which the rationalist asks the believer when the meaning of some Scripture passage is in question. By no one’s interpretation except the Holy Spirit’s! He alone can interpret the Bible, for He alone knows what He meant by what He wrote. And even the Holy Spirit is able to interpret the Bible to no one but the believer. For the rationalist, the unbeliever, rejects faith, and thereby completely closes “the eyes of the heart” to the illumination of the Spirit; while the faith of the believer is the very thing that opens the heart to an understanding of the Word. Spiritual apprehension begins only at the point where faith begins.

This is why it is that when the rationalist tries his hand at interpretation he is sure, sooner or later, to bring perfectly harmonious facts into confusion and contradiction.

Take, for example, the facts regarding the development of the human embryo. The rationalist notes that as it develops it bears a striking resemblance, successively, to the more mature forms of some of the lower animals, in an imagined orderly progress from [p 60] lower to higher. That this resemblance is a fact no one disputes. There is no controversy over the fact. But when the rationalist attempts to explain this fact, he interprets it to mean that man is the product of evolution, rather than a special creation, as the Bible says he is, and thus he thrusts such confusion and contradiction before us that we are compelled to make a choice between his interpretation and the statements of the Bible. The controversy that results is caused altogether by the rationalist thrusting himself into that place that belongs to the Holy Spirit alone. “He shall lead you into all the truth,” said Christ, and it is presumptuous in the extreme to seek to do the Holy Spirit's work for Him.

We are forewarned of the methods of the modern rationalist in his approach to the Bible by what Christ said to the Jews who were finding fault with what He taught: "For had ye believed Moses," He said, "ye would have believed Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?"

This is precisely the pathway modern rationalism has followed. It began by discrediting what Moses wrote, and it has now gone to the length of denying final authority to what Christ said.

Rationalism is both irreverent and destructive when it seeks to do anything with the Word of God. For that Book is to be handled as no other book is. Behind the historical, and the literary, and the textual, and the philosophical criticism must be a spiritual discernment, born of faith alone, which both dominates [p 61] and regulates all the rest. For just as a blind man may turn the eyes of his head to the sun and see no physical light, so the rationalist may turn the eyes of his mind to the Bible and see no spiritual truth. It takes the eyes of the heart to see spiritual truth, and they can function only through faith.

b. The Method of the Believer.

In order clearly to understand the method of faith, we need right here to guard against another extreme. By the contrasts we have drawn in the last few pages, it is not at all meant that there is no place in the exercise of faith for the exercise also of the intellect at the same time and toward the same object. For, in the nature of things, the intellect must be exercised in a mental apprehension of that which is to be believed before the way is even open for faith to begin.