Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 90:358 (Apr 1933)
Article: Religious Education And God
Author: John E. Kuizenga

BSac 90:358 (Apr 1933) p. 210

Religious Education And God

John E. Kuizenga

“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profit able that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works”—2 TIMOTHY 3:16, 17.

It is a curious situation that one should have to point out, that you can not have religious education without assuming and teaching that God exists, and that personal relations to God are of first importance in life. Yet those who know the pedagogy and the psychology dominating so much of our American education, and even invading the literature of the Sunday school, know full well we are under the painful necessity of asserting even these simple and primary truths. Definitions of religion in general, however vague and unsatisfactory they may be from the Christian point of view, may nevertheless have the merit of pointing out that to define religion without God is to convict ourselves in advance of folly that is fatal,—fatal not only to religious education, but also, as we have contended, fatal to all education worthy of the name. But even if we succeed today in America in re-establishing that primary truth, we are still face to face with a question which is at least fully as important, the question of what sort of God we shall teach, and where we shall get a satisfactory conception of him.

Professor J. Y. Simpson says somewhere, that Henry Drummond in later life frequently lamented the mistake he had made in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, in looking for evidence of God only in the gaps that could not be explained by natural law. What Simpson meant will be clear if we remind ourselves of Drummond’s chapter on Abiogenesis. in which he contends that exactly as natural science has no explanation of the origin of life, so it can have no explanation of the origin of spiritual life, both gaps being an evidence of the special activity of God. The reason for the lament, so we are meant to infer, was that Drummond had come to the conclusion that natural science will surely reduce all gaps to the operation of natural law, and so the evidence of God will disappear.

BSac 90:358 (Apr 1933) p. 211

I am sure that Drummond’s method in this respect was not a mistake. A certain type of science still claims absolute sway for the causal principle, refusing to admit gaps, and so refusing miracle in every form. Now to claim the privilege of working with the principle of admitting no gaps, is one thing, even though it may not be the wisest thing; but to claim that the principle of admitting no gap has been triumphantly vindicated is quite another matter. In the game which science is playing with the causal principle, the op...