There are several faults which can be found in the reasoning of the serpent. Not the least of these is, of course, that he rejected the Word of God, thus making God a liar. This article picks out one particular fallacy and shows how it has been employed by the serpent’s spiritual descendants.
The fallacy
The serpent reasoned as follows: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4,5). His argument can be set out for analysis as follows:
The angels know good and evil;
You will know good and evil;
Therefore you will be as angels;
The angels do not die;
Therefore, because you will be as angels, you will not die.
The serpent identified a shared characteristic, but then proceeded to assert subtly that Adam and Eve would be identical in all respects. This fallacy has been described thus: “Where two propositions or expressions are deemed equivalent on some count, then it is false to slice them into segments and assert equivalence on all counts between each component”.1
The serpent seed
False reasoning did not cease with the death of the Edenic serpent. His seed have kept up the family tradition. The seed of the woman have had to contend with their subtle words. The Spirit through Paul wrote: “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him” (2 Cor. 11:2-4). One example of the serpent’s reasoning which crept into the ecclesia is the Trinitarian view of the Godhead.
The Trinity
The Trinitarian represents a challenge to the seed of the woman with his employment of the reasoning as follows:2
God is saviour,
Christ is saviour,
Therefore Christ is God.
A serpent fallacy is used, and the result is “another Jesus”. It is worth noting here that although the premises are correct, it is the reasoning that results in the wrong conclusion. In 1 Peter 4:11 we are told: “If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God”. The scope of this statement is large, but one point which emerges is that we must seek to reason in the
same way that God reasons. To have the sayings of God in our argument is not enough; we must use them correctly. To use them correctly is to use them as God uses them, and not the way the serpent would use them. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15) is what is required, not a subjective rehash. The key to the right approach is humility towards God’s Word:
” . . . but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word” (Isa. 66:2).
Rather than taking a Scriptural statement and then building our own edifice, held together by fallacies satisfying “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jno. 2:16), we must humbly compare Scripture with Scripture, allowing the newly formed thoughts to lodge in our minds just as the embryo cells divide and multiply in the womb: “being born again, not of corruptible seed,but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Pet. 1:23).
Constantine
The Trinity was formally introduced at the council of Nicea in A.D. 325 which was presided over by Constantine. The move to adopt it as standard doctrine was headed by Athanasius, but it was Constantine himself who actually formulated the wording which was acceptable to the majority present.
Constantine played his part in creating “another Jesus”, but his rise to power as the champion of the Catholic party also brought about a new doctrine of the Kingdom of God which arose from the fallacy we have already identified. This is brought out in Revelation 12. Interpretation of this chapter is not without its difficulties, but it is interesting to note that many of the arguments used to oppose the standard interpretation (that this chapter refers to the overthrow of pagan rulers by pseudo-Christians headed by Constantine in the 4th century A.D.) are themselves based on the serpent fallacy.
According to the standard historical interpretation, once the overthrow of pagan authority had been achieved by Constantine, a victorious cry goes forth with the serpent fallacy once again being employed: “And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ” (Rev. 12:10). This was not a true statement; the Kingdom of God had not come. The man in heaven the political firmament was Constantine, not Christ. How then was the claim supported? By the observation that “the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Rev. 12:10).
It is true that when the Kingdom of God comes the “accuser” will be “cast down” just as the pagan persecutors of the Christians were. Yet there are many other things which must also take place, not the least of these being the return of Christ to the earth. The seed of the serpent had used his father’s fallacious reasoning. Just as the serpent had identified a characteristic shared by Adam and Eve and the Elohim the knowledge of good and evil but then concluded that they would be “as gods” in other respects, so the followers of Constantine had established one common factor between their king and Christ and had been moved to assert that the Kingdom of God had come. The victory of Constantine and the Kingdom of God were equivalent on one count, but they were not identical in all respects.
Types
When we come to interpret Revelation 12 we must be careful not to be guilty of the same fallacy ourselves. Consider verse 5: “And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to His throne”. There is a quotation link between this verse and Psalm 2:9, which reads: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”. This psalm we know refers to Christ. Does the existence of the quotation imply that Revelation 12:5 applies specifically to the Lord Jesus Christ? A point of similarity is made between the subject of Psalm 2 and Revelation 12: they would both rule with a rod of iron. However, to presume on this basis alone that the two verses are talking about the same man would be to commit the serpent fallacy.
Of course the answer to our problem in Revelation 12:5 is that Constantine was a type of Christ. Just as Constantine exerted powerful and ruthless authority over those who opposed him, so Christ will show the same authority to the nations who oppose him at his return. It may seem odd that a character as bad as Constantine could be a type of Christ, but Revelation 12 is making an ironic comment upon the claims of the apostasy. If the fallacy is avoided then the points lifted out for comparison by the Spirit in the structuring of a type remain watertight. Once we assume that the existence of a comparison implies complete identity then the type will break down and false exposition will be the result
When we are studying types it is all too easy to be guilty of the fallacy unwittingly. We would never claim that any character ever matched the Lord Jesus in all respects, yet we sometimes press on regardless, as though in actual fact we believed there were similarities to be made which, although lying beyond the scope of Scriptural proof, nevertheless must surely be there by virtue of the similarities already Scripturally verified.3
Eschewing serpent-like tendencies in our expositions will help us to make them more rigorous and hence nearer to the mind of God. It must not be thought, however, that this will only serve to restrict the number of types which can be gleaned from Scripture. For, as we have seen with Constantine, once we have identified the fallacy it not only prevents us from extending types beyond their intended scope, but also allows us to appreciate the existence of types in passages where perhaps previously we never thought a type of Christ could possibly be intended.
Reference
- Gibson, Biblical Semantic Logic, p. 19. See also “Genesis or Geology?” by Elwyn Humphries in The Testimony, September 1965, pp. 351-2.
- For an example of extensive use of this argument see The Trinity by Edward Henry Bickersteth, where he attempts to prove “that Scripture, in the Old and the New Testament alike, proves the co-eternal Deity of Jesus Christ with that of the Eternal Father: by a comparison of the attributes, the majesty and the claims of the Father and the Son” (p. 38).
- For example, see C. C. Walker, The Ministry of the Prophets, p. 576, where, in the present writer’s opinion, the development of Cyrus as a type of Christ goes beyond the scope intended by the Spirit
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One