04.12 - Pfleiderer's View Criticised

(12) Pfleiderer s View Criticised

Modern criticism wishes to know whether we are quite sure that these recorded experiences were the actual experiences of Israel, and not the glosses of some prophetic or priestly editor of a later age, who, in working over the patriarchal narratives, wrought in the ideas and truths of his own times? Professor Pfleiderer thinks this was so; he says: “ From the hands of prophetic revisers How those traits in the history of the origin of Israel, which throw back into the earliest foretime the Messianic hopes, an1 the though of a universal purpose of grace, which were but in reality and mental achievements of the later 1 Acts 15:1. Acts 15:25-28. centuries. We include under these particulars the treatment of the patriarchal age, and, above all, the life of Abraham. On the territory of dawning prehistory the prophetic narrator has operated with greatest freedom.” 1 We must remember this is the utterance of one who has made no attempt to conceal his hostility to the supernatural element in religion, and who aims at excluding all traces of supernaturalism from religious history, that it may the better accord with the principle of a natural evolution. If we accept the supernatural as an element of Divine revelation, and admit that God did make known His will and gracious purpose to Abraham, then is it not reasonable to suppose that revelation did anticipate distant stages in the accomplishment of the Divine purposes to be unfolded in the course of fulfilment? To say these truths belong to a later time, and could not have been known to Abraham, is to ignore that they are a revelation from God, and declared the mind and purpose of Him who knew the end from the beginning, and gave to His servants fore gleams of that which should be here after. Christ said to the Jews in His day: “ Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day; and he saw it, and was glad.” 2 1 “Die Religion,” vol. ii, pp. 337, 338:

2 John 1:8.