John Alexander Dowie and the Old Testament "Permissive" Tense

Every time I get to thinking that Kenneth Hagin was the first to teach on a subject, or at least to widely promote it, I often find out that someone long before him did it. John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), who was a strong proponent of Divine Healing even before the Pentecostal Movement had a book of sermons on divine healing titled "Leaves of Healing."

In this book he mentions the ever famous Word-Faith belief that those passages that speak of God inflicting sickness upon people in the Old Testament (and other determinative OT passage blaming God for evil) should have been written in a permissive tense rather than a causative one. Check out what he says on page 140 of this book:

You may say that further on the prophecy says, verae 10, ' Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him.' I read these words, 'to permit Him to be bruised i' and for many good and sufficient reasons I cannot enter into the matter now and here, but we have entered into it very largely in our teaching. There has been a good deal of difference of opinion amongst eminent scholars upon this subject. I hold that all through the Old Testament there is a mistranslation of the permissive into the causative. If what Peter says, namely, that He was crucified 'by the hands of wicked men,' be true, then his crucifixion could not be the Father's action in any sense, although it was his permission. But the awful guilt of that diabolical crime rests upon the Jews, for it was their sinful action, and Satan's work, of whom they were the blind slaves, through the ' envy' of their deceitful rulers.

"And so, throughout the whole of the Old Testament, I venture to say you can only rightly understand many passages by altering the causative into the permissive. For instance, ' Shall there be evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it ?' Amos 3 : 6. Will any of you say that God creates, is the doer of, every iniquity in San Francisco? Again, 'I make peace, and create evil.' Isa. 45 : 7. If God creates evil, then where is our responsibility, should we fall into sin ? Again, ' The Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophets.' 1 Kings 22 :23. Does God put a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophet? Then he would be a father of lies, like the devil; and I want to see where the respon sibility is, if we are led astray by a false revelation. Change the verb from causing to permitting, and the difficulties in these and hundreds of passages in the Old Testament vanish in a moment, and God justified from one of the foulest charges brought by infidelity, namely, that He is the author of innumerable crimes. He permits the existence of evil, but permission is not commission. On the contrary, does He not say, Isa. 5 :20, ' Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweety and sweet for bitter?' The New Testament is abundantly clear upon the matter, and I think that we, as ministers of the New Testament, ought to interpret the Old by the New, and not the New by the Old. I lay it down as a canon of interpretation that when we are listening to the Christ we should say, ' A greater than Solomon is here.' And we are not going to Isaiah or Moses or David in preference to Chris!;. When he says, ' I say unto you,' it settles the question. He says, 'A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.' Matt. 8:17. God is not a tree of good and evil. God is good, infinitely holy and infinitely pure, and nothing corrupt can ever come to us through His hands. Disease is evil, the product of Satan and sin, hence it can never come from God.

All emphasis are mine of course. I just thought this was interesting and something I might share with this group here. Ciaio.

Thanks for sharing that

I've heard it said that Believers under the OT were not looking for "second causes". This being why much was wrongly attributed to God.

There was very little revelation given of the devil during Old Covenant times, and because men were spiritually unregenerate, had they gained much knowledge of him they would have been spiritually inclined to follow him (their father).

Thanks, VW. That will be my bedtime reading tonight!

Speaking of Bullinger, are you familiar with his book "Word studies on the Holy Spirit"? If you have and you are aware of the 50 occasions in the NT when the definite article "the" should not have been added to "holy spirit" (pneuma hagion), I would like to know what you would have to say about it in detail at your convenience.

Thanks