Kanamori's life-story

by Paul M. Kanamori

In the same way, when you are going to make experiments with these poisonous doctrines of the enemy of the Gospel, you must take perfect precautions not to absorb their poisons, as I did. Moreover, I like to caution my orthodox brothers and sisters against handling these poisonous books except under the urgent necessity of making important experiments. Though we have to provide deadly poisons in our chemical laboratories for the purpose of experiments, it is not at all necessary or advisable to put them in our kitchens and dining-rooms; no, it is not wise to handle them too often.

However, I am not going to discuss at present the question of New Theology. I am simply going to show you how baneful and destructive was its influence upon my own spiritual life. That is all I intend to do here.

Some of the professors of New Theology said to me, after hearing my lecture, “You have the facts which no theory can refute.” Yes, I have the facts, or rather I myself am the fact, and I am going to give this fact, and not theory, or argument. Now let me proceed to tell the processes and steps by which these studies destroyed my evangelical faith.

I was a lover of the Bible. I loved it and revered it as the Word of God. I was converted by reading the Bible. I believed the Bible was the Word of God, given by the Holy Spirit through the holy men of old; that the Bible contained truth only, and no error. The Holy Spirit cannot be the author of error. God cannot make mistakes. I believed, therefore, that all the historical facts of the Bible were true facts, and all the biographical narratives true narratives, and not made up by men, and all the Biblical heroes true persons, and not fabulous ones. I believed that its doctrines and teachings were all true, good, and perfect and “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” In fact, I believed that the Bible was a perfect revelation of the will and wisdom and love of God, that we have only to dig into it and find out the precious truth of its deep meaning, and honor it by belief and obedience. If I found any difficult passage in the Bible, which I could not understand, or reconcile with my reason, I always put the blame of the doubt upon my own imperfect intellect, and believed that the Bible was all right, though I could not understand it. Thus I believed in the absolute divine authority of the Bible, and on this divine Book, as on the rock of ages, I built my faith in Christianity as the absolute religion. Not a religion, but the religion of the world.

Now came the higher critics and said, “No,” to all of these my beliefs in the Bible. In the first place, they said, “the Bible is not the Word of God, given through the Holy Spirit, in any such sense as you have believed. The Bible is a book written by men, just as all other books are written. Therefore the words contained in it are not the words of God himself, but the words of men, perhaps pious men, good men, devout men, and religiously-minded men. But they are all men and nothing more. And as all men are liable to make mistakes, and are apt to invent stories, and manufacture the facts, so the Bible contains many untrue narratives, and made-up stories. Many of the historical personages of the Bible are imaginary heroes and not true persons. Moreover, the doctrines propounded in the Bible are not all sound doctrines. Some are quite unsound. The teachings of the Bible are not all wise and profitable, and some are not applicable to modern times at all. They may have been good enough in the dark ages of the ancient world, but are not suitable to this modern age. So the Bible does not contain truth only, but it contains error also.

“In fact, the Bible is a mixture of truth and error, good and bad, wise and unwise. It contains myths, legends, and fables, just as all the so-called sacred books of the world religions contain such a mixture. The Bible must in many cases be interpreted allegorically and figuratively, deducing only moral and spiritual lessons. You must not swallow everything in the Bible as true, but must make careful discrimination. You must separate what is true from what is untrue, and what is good from what is bad. You must search and find out for yourself what part of the Biblical history is authentic, and what part of it is not, who are the true persons, and who are the imaginary ones, using reason and common sense, just as when reading all other books written by men.” This is what I was taught by Higher Criticism and New Theology.

According to my orthodox faith I had looked upon the Bible as the perfect, revealed Word of God, and as a supreme Judge sitting on the bench giving an infallible judgment upon all matters pertaining to the spiritual as well as the moral welfare of man. This judgment I had looked upon as final, with no one to dispute it. I sat before the Bible as a client or petitioner waiting for a final decision.

Now came Higher Criticism and turned everything upside down and said, “No, you are not the petitioner, you yourself are the judge. You must sit upon the bench of the supreme judge and pronounce your judgment upon the contents of the Bible, as to whether it is true or untrue, good or bad, applicable or inapplicable. The Bible, as all other books, must become a petitioner before you, and your reason.”

So you see the Bible was in this way dragged down from the seat of the supreme judge to the place of the petitioner, and man with his reason and common sense was exalted to the seat of the judge.

What authority can such a Bible have over a man when he has to choose from its contents whatever seems good or suitable for his purpose, and whatever does not seem so he has a right to discard? Do you think such a Bible can command us to “meditate therein day and night,” and “turn not from it to the right hand or to the left”? What becomes of those precious promises of God in the Bible if they are not the word of God in a true and exact sense? In the Old and New Testaments there are more than thirty thousand promises, and they have been life and joy and strength to Christians for nineteen centuries. But if these are not really the promises given by God himself, but only the opinions and conjectures of human beings, how can we trust them? Do you think we can build the absolute religion of the world upon so fickle and unstable a foundation as this? The Bible of the Higher Critics is not rock, but sand, and a house built upon it must fall, and great will be the fall thereof.