Ancient Landmarks - Glenn Conjurske

Ancient Landmarks

by Glenn Conjurske

“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” (Prov. 22:28).

God made the earth without landmarks. Whatever landmarks exist have been placed by men. Our fathers have set them. Yet God forbids us to remove them.

There are, of course no landmarks in the sea. The man at sea knows not where he is. Everything is unsettled. We have no means by which to get or keep our bearings, except only from the sky above us. When that is invisible we know not where we are, so that the man who has lost his bearings on the land is said to be “at sea” or “all at sea.”

Landmarks, then, are most useful things, and though they are not of divine origin, yet they have divine sanction. We are forbidden to remove them, and this in spite of the fact that many of them have been placed improperly. In our own country the land is laid out in sections of one square mile. There is a right angle at each corner. Each section line is straight, and one mile long. This is so in principle and theory, but it is rarely so in fact. Any man may convince himself of this by a glance at a county map, which exhibits the section lines, or a plat book, which exhibits the property lines. The following cut exhibits the actual section lines in the southeastern corner of the county in which I live.

Such the ancient landmarks are, whatever they ought to be, and yet God forbids us to remove them. We would, however, expect every restless liberal who views such a map immediately to raise the cry for revision. It is inaccurate. It is wrong. It is full of errors. Our fathers doubtless did the best they could with their limited knowledge and abilities, but they were really incompetent blunderers after all. There is no reason in this age of superior knowledge and advanced techniques to adhere to the mass of blunders which our fathers made with their antiquated means. They did as well as they could in their day, but their primitive means and equipment were often baffled by swamps and woods and hills and lakes and streams, and for all their labor and diligence, the sorry job which they did now appears on every map in our hands. Our fathers themselves would have placed the landmarks differently than they did, if they had had our superior knowledge and equipment in their hands. To adhere now to the mistakes which they made is only stubborn bigotry.

So speaks the liberal, but how speaks the Bible? “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance.” God does not concern himself with whether the landmarks were properly set. He simply forbids us to remove them.

And why does God forbid this? He forbids it because it would do a great deal more harm than good, if indeed it did any good at all. The gain in having square corners and straight lines is so small that it is not for one moment to be compared to the loss involved in upsetting every man’s property lines. Do you suppose that John Smith will much rejoice in the accuracy of the “new” plat book, when he finds that his house is now a part of old MacDonald’s farm? Will widow Jones love the “new” plat book, which has robbed her of her raspberry patch?

But “Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes?” (I Cor. 9:9-10). Doth God take care for landmarks? As to the oxen, it is certain that God does take care for oxen. On the word “altogether” in the verse just quoted, Hodge says, “This is not the meaning here; for this would make the apostle assert that the command in question had exclusive reference to men. The word (ðÜíôùò) should be rendered assuredly, as in Luke 4,43. Acts 18,21. 21,22, and frequently elsewhere.”1 God takes care for oxen. “Should I not spare Nineveh,” he says in the last verse of Jonah, “that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?” God takes care for oxen, but this is not his primary concern. The purpose for which the scripture was written was not merely to teach men to feed their oxen, but to teach them to support the servants of the Lord, who labor to tread out the corn for the flock of God. The spiritual purpose is the primary one, or in other words, the application of this scripture takes precedence over its interpretation.

So in the case before us. God concerns himself even with physical and temporal landmarks, but these scriptures were written with a higher purpose than that. The spiritual landmarks are his primary concern.

But what are the spiritual landmarks? Probably not doctrine. If our fathers taught error, we are bound to teach truth. We are bound to correct every scintilla of doctrinal error, so soon as ever we perceive it to be wrong. The young, the proud, and the liberal commonly perceive that to be wrong which is in fact right, but this is irrelevant. When a faithful and sober man, taught of the Holy Ghost and Holy Scripture, perceives any part of his doctrine to be wrong, he is bound to abandon it without delay, and regardless of the cost, though it were taught by Darby and Baxter and Luther and Augustine. We must be extremely careful, then, in any application of the old landmarks to doctrine.

What then? I know of nothing to which the figure may be so appropriately applied as the old and settled spiritual and theological language of the church. Observe, we speak not of the land, but of the landmarks. The landmarks may be of little significance in comparison with the land itself, but they enable us to keep our bearings. They mark the divisions of the land. The terminology may be insignificant in comparison to the doctrine, but the terminology gives us the reference points by which we keep our bearings. It gives stability, even to our thinking. When a man begins to substitute new terms for old ones, he is doing what he has no business to do. He is removing old landmarks, and the effect of this is always to unsettle the minds of the people. We may surely rectify all that is erroneous in a doctrine without renaming it.

And so far as we are able to tell, when men cast away old and settled terminology, and replace it with new, it is generally their design to unsettle the minds of the people. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses struck out the word “cross” from the Bible, and replaced it with “torture stake”—-when the modernists cast away “Jehovah” and replaced it with “Yahweh”—-it was their design to unsettle the minds of the people. It was their design to divorce the minds of the people from old and familiar associations, and substitute new in their place. It was their design to convict all our forefathers of incompetence and error, and replace both our fathers and their religion with themselves and their own notions. It may be that these liberals and cultists honestly supposed that their new terms were “more accurate” than the old ones, but that is entirely beside the point. It is not worth the weight of a feather. No man who loves the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ either would or could contemplate for one moment turning that cross into a “torture stake,” any more than he could submit to the turning of “Jehovah” into “Yahweh.” Such an operation gives such a wrench to all the most sacred feelings of the heart that it is simply intolerable, upon any considerations whatsoever, to any man who loves the things of God. If “torture stake” is “more accurate” than “cross”—-if “Yahweh” is “more accurate” than “Jehovah”—-then “accuracy” must give place to something immeasurably more important. It must give place to love, to devotion, to sacred ties, to heart feelings—-in short, to everything that is near and dear to loving and loyal hearts. That modern passion for “accuracy” and technical correctness, which values the dicta of Hebrew points more than the emotions of the soul, is so petty a thing when standing next to the associations of the heart that it is utterly contemptible. It is the passion of heads divorced from hearts, which are the creation of unspiritual intellectualism, and not of God. Observe now, I am not speaking of the substance of any fact or principle or doctrine, but only of the terminology which is employed to speak of it.

A review of the Revised Version (from the Standard, quoted in the Guardian) says, “Where no material change in the sense or substance of the Authorised Version has been shown to be required by the proper construction of the original, the Revisers have, nevertheless, thought themselves justified in mending the English and improving the grammar of passages which have struck deep root in the hearts and memories of the English people. One word has been substituted for another, at the whim of the New Testament Company. Moods and tenses have been shifted about to satisfy some pedantic scheme of syntactical symmetry. A sentence treasured up in the popular mind, and enriched beyond description by the pathetic associations of hundreds of years, has been tortured and crucified into precise grammatical accord with the latest refinements of critical labour, upon the comparision of early manuscript texts, and has thus been robbed of all its true value. The system upon which the Revisers appear to have acted is, in our judgment, altogether erroneous and deplorable. It is rash and reckless to shake this noble growth of centuries [the attachment of the people to the Authorised Version] by attempting to harmonise it with the correctness of self-opinionated scholarship, or to regulate it by the doubtful standard of taste accepted by a motley combination of theologians and professors. Their work of restoration, with its standards of grammatical and linguistic exactitude, has disfigured some of the noblest and best known passages in the English Bible. It has introduced a jarring note in phrases associated with spiritual comfort, intellectual emotion, and the strongest affections of the human heart.”2

This language is not a whit too strong. It affirms the undoubted fact that when the old familiar language is cast aside, this gives a serious jar to the heart, for which no grammatical exactitude can begin to compensate. And what I wish to point out is that when new terms are substituted for old, though it be with “no material change in sense or substance,” not only is a serious jar given to the heart, but the mind is unsettled also. This is so in every sphere. We who are accustomed to think in terms of inches and feet and miles, pints and quarts, and Fahrenheit degrees, cannot think with any efficiency in metric terms, and a generation of attempts to coerce us to do so has left us just where we were. A trip is the same length, whether we measure it in miles or kilometers, but all the associations of our minds are in miles, and kilometers mean nothing to us. And if the liberals can convert our heads from miles to kilometers, what then? Will they re-survey the land also, or must we drive in kilometers through land laid out in miles? The whole business is asinine, but not one whit more so than the attempts to remove the old language from the Bible.

Rename a dozen or a score of the common elements, and this will unsettle the mind of the chemist who has been long familiar with those elements. The mind works with ease, with security, with comfort, and with efficiency on familiar ground. All of this is sacrificed when old landmarks are removed. This may have little effect on the young, who never knew the old landmarks, or cared anything about them, and if there is one thing which is evident in the new Bibles, which have removed so many of the old landmarks, it is that these Bibles were not made for the saints of God. They were made for the spiritually illiterate, for the young people, for the ungodly, who knew little and cared less for their spiritual inheritance. Having lost their hold upon their young people, and failed to awaken the interest of the ungodly, the ill workmen quarrelled with their tools—-blamed the old Bible, and therefore made some dozens of new ones.

It may be that the young student of chemistry, just learning the table of the elements, will suffer no inconvenience at all if half or all the elements are renamed—-no inconvenience, at any rate, until he begins to consult the works of his predecessors. When he does that, he will find that they speak a foreign language. He will find himself “all at sea,” with no landmarks. And this is one of the greatest evils of removing the old spiritual and theological language of the church. It breaks the ties between the modern church and the old men of God. Remove “baptize” from the Bible, and still it will live in the theological literature of five centuries. If the landmark is misplaced, that may be unfortunate, but it cannot be helped. To remove it now is to break the ties with all of our fathers. That this is no concern of those who remove the old landmarks is evident. The chemist who renames the elements proclaims by the very act that he has little use for the works of his predecessors. Their work is a mass of blunders. Their system is antiquated. We know better. Why would anyone at this date wish to consult the works of our forefathers? That this, in general, is the spirit of the makers of the new Bibles is proclaimed by the nature of their work itself. If they esteemed and valued their spiritual inheritance, they would at any rate spare the old landmarks. God forbids their removal, not because they were perfectly set, but because they are old, and our whole inheritance has grown up around them.

To take one illustration only from among scores of them, the old Bible says, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” (Matt. 6:6). The term “closet” will be found literally everywhere in the literature of the English church—-in every age and every denomination—-and of course the term is merely used, and not explained. What occasion could there have been to explain what every child was familiar with? The closet is the well known symbol for prayer and private devotion. We might indeed fault the King James translators for abandoning “chamber,” which had stood in the English Bible since William Tyndale, but it is four centuries too late to undo that. The fact is, in the nearly four centuries which have passed since the King James Version was published, the closet has become the universally recognized symbol for prayer, in constant use in all devotional and theological literature of every description. And must we now have a generation of young people to whom all of these references are unintelligible? They have never heard the term. They have been raised on the new Bibles, which never use the term “closet” at all.

And this, as said, is but one example among scores of them. Our “inheritance” is dotted everywhere with such ancient landmarks, which are laden with a vast amount of spiritual, emotional, historical, and theological substance. These terms strike a familiar chord in both the heart and the mind of all who are familiar with their spiritual heritage. Such terms are the church, the cross, baptism, the world, the flesh, disciples, apostles, prophets, the high priest, the wilderness and the wilderness wanderings, the soul, the spirit, the gospel, preaching, justification, the vail in the temple, the serpent of brass or brazen serpent, the passover, propitiation, the mercy-seat, grace, signs and wonders, repentance, faith, the manger, miracles, and no doubt scores of others. These are all old landmarks, the very mention of which immediately conveys a well defined spiritual or doctrinal content to the mind.

Many of these terms, by very necessity, have been retained in modern theological language, and in the modern Bibles, but many of them have been removed and replaced by one modern version or another, and many have been cast away by Neo-evangelical theologians and preachers, whose design is to break the ties with the past. When we hear these Neo-evangelicals speak of “sharing the good news” or “sharing their faith” (!) instead of “preaching the gospel,” we well understand that they mean not only to abandon the old language, but to forsake the old ways also. Preaching is a great deal too “confrontational” for this soft and man-pleasing age. They want a different kind of evangelism—-”friendship evangelism,” or “lifestyle evangelism”—-indeed, anything but preaching. “Sharing” just suits them, while anything so strong or direct as “Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” would scare them out of their very wits.

Others, we grant, remove the old landmarks with less sinister designs. They do so under the pleas of accuracy and intelligibility. Yet we suppose that a sounder understanding of the issues involved would move them in another direction. They gain no more of accuracy by turning the serpent of brass into a bronze serpent, no more of intelligibility by turning the vail in the temple into the curtain in the temple, than they would by turning signs and wonders into tokens and marvels. The gain in such alterations, if any, is so minute that it bears no comparison to the immense loss involved in wrenching the heart, unsettling the mind, and breaking the ties with the past. Whatever the motives, reasons, or excuses for such alterations, we affirm categorically that the modern revisers and theologians have no right thus to remove the ancient landmarks.

It will likely be said that on my principles no revision of the Bible would ever be possible, but this is certainly not true. It is quite possible to remove everything of any importance that is actually erroneous or unintelligible from the English Bible, and yet to leave the old landmarks untouched. It would be foolish to contend that the tense of every verb in the old version, or the rendering of every noun, adverb, or preposition, is an old landmark. We speak only of those terms which by long and common usage have acquired a weight of spiritual or theological content, and become the vehicles of the thought and expression of the whole church of God, and which therefore cannot be abandoned without serious loss.

We grant that the use which we make of the Scriptural prohibition to remove the old landmarks is a spiritual application of the principle, not its primary interpretation, and it is not to be pressed in too rigid a manner. If it can be shown that some theological term which has acquired the status of an old landmark will actually lead people positively astray from important truth, then that landmark ought to be removed. If “everlasting fire” conveys a fundamentally false idea, let us give up the term, but if it speaks the truth, there can be no possible good reason to alter it to G. Campbell Morgan’s “age-abiding fire.” Our modern revisers would be hard pressed to find many of the old terms which ought to be altered. If some are less intelligible than we could wish, a marginal note would remedy that. But the most of the old landmarks are certainly neither erroneous, nor inaccurate, nor unintelligible. Their removal is just restlessness and love of change, coupled with that pride which always supposes itself more competent than its forefathers. We may remove weeds, brush, rocks, thorns, and briars from the land, without ever touching the landmarks.

Glenn Conjurske