Unbelieving Scholars

with the pure You show Yourself pure; but with the perverse You show Yourself shrewd.

— 2 Samuel 22:27

Dr. Maurice Roberts, minister of the Church of Scotland once said about unbelieving scholars:

Till their eyes are opened by faith [the critics] will go on with the age-old mischief of cutting the Jesus of the Gospels down to a size they can cope with. They grace their [so-called] science with the title of “scholarship”; in reality it is nothing but hatred of Christ’s authority and Godhead [emphasis mine] … . The Higher Critics and the liberal theologians … have placed Christ on their Procrustean bed and lopped off his Godhead, glory and grace.

A “Procrustean bed” is part of Greek mythology. In Procrustes’ inn he had a room with a metal bed. When anybody came to sleep in that bed, he wanted to make everything nice and neat and fit the way he thought it ought to, so he cut off their legs if they were too long. Or if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit his bed. This is a marvelous metaphor that describes the way a lot of people think and act. And so it is with skeptics and atheists down through the centuries.

When the skeptics are dead and gone, however, Jesus will be going on from glory unto glory. How wonderful, how infinite He is! As Roberts also said, “Jesus is not in the smallest degree diminished by their low opinions of him. He remains the Lord of glory still.”

Question to ponder:
If you have any questions, seek the answers. St. Augustine said, I believed, and then I understood (not visa versa). Are you disturbed by the skeptics?