Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 47:187 (Jul 1890)
Article: Brace’s “Unknown God.”
Author: Frederic Perry Noble

BSac 47:187 (July 1890) p. 511

Brace’s “Unknown God.”8

Frederic Perry Noble

Criticism, when it must confine itself to pointing out defects, is a task as unpleasant as it appears unlovely. This is especially the case when the book is a work of such catholicity and Christ-like spirit as “The Unknown God “of Mr. Brace. The sermon which he puts into the mouth of an ideal missionary is a model, deserving the study of every candidate for the foreign field. His closing prayer is of elevated and tender devoutness.

But Mr. Brace is not felicitous in his exegesis of the Scriptures which strike the keynote of his thought. His idea of biblical inspiration is nebulous. The interpretation of several forms of pre-Christian faith is in flat contradiction to the testimony of students and authorities. More than a few misstatements and apparently unaccountable errors occur.

1. Mr. Brace holds that in Acts 17:23 “the” with “unknown god” is equally correct with “an,” while agreeing better with Paul’s argument. Several considerations make this assumption at least doubtful. Hellenic usage did not require “the.” Meyer adds: “In public calamities of which no definite god could be assigned as the author, in order to propitiate the god concerned, by sacrifice, without lighting on a wrong one, altars were erected which were destined and designated agnosto theo.” This would seem to dispose of the fancy that this altar was “built, we may suppose, by pious Greeks to gain the protection of some foreign god or by some genuine worshipper of the ‘God of All.’ “The altar indicated no definite god, and bore witness to no deeper thoughts than those of the popular polytheism. Again, Paul’s next words are: “What accordingly ye worship in ignorance, that set I forth unto you.” He did not say “Whom … Him,” for the best manuscripts have a neuter and not a masculine pronoun. In other words, Paul refers not to a person but to a thing, and thus declares that the Athenians are ignorant of any personality in that power which here they call “divinity.” The effectiveness of the ensuing argument consists to some extent in this very contrast

BSac 47:187 (July 1890) p. 512

between the neuter and the masculine, the thing with the person. Since the adjective agnosto means not only “the unknown” but equally “the unknowable,” the inscription was virtually the affirmation of agnosticism.

2. Passing by the other instances of the incorrect interpretations, or the acceptance of the less likely renderings which characterize Mr. Brace’s exegesis, his understanding of inspiration requires not...