The Origins
What are some of the main results, in reference to biblical criticism, from a popular point of view, which recent inquiry has for the moment accepted? The inquirers are, I cannot too clearly and impressively repeat, our friends and companions in the kingdom and patience of Jesus, and their supreme object is not negative but positive, not destructive but constructive. They are not excelled by any of us in their ardent love of those parts of the Bible which they believe to be inspired. Less and less, as life advances, am I disposed to wrangle with antichristian or infidel critics, even though they come from a foreign country and overbear us with rugged names. I am not afraid of them. They come and go like epidemics. It is infinitely otherwise with brethren whom we love and honor, and whose holy example is amongst us like a light from heaven. What, then, are some of the main positions which our friends invite us to accept? In a popular and general form they may be stated thus:
I: Some biblical books are either
anonymous or pseudonymous.
2. Inspiration does not guarantee
historical accuracy.
3. Some biblical books are wrong in date, wrong in numbers, wrong in chronology, and misplaced in canonical order.
4. Biblical authorship, or editorship, is composite: Bible representations of some great events are dual and even conflicting, as, for example, the two accounts of the Creation and the two genealogies of Christ.
5. The Bible is “the inspired record of the Word of God.”
If we had to deal with experts only, no difficulty of an insurmountable kind need arise in connection with these positions; but as preachers we have to deal largely with novices whose instinctive judgments ought to be regarded, lest in treading them down we do violence even to some rude form and expression of the kingdom of God. These judgments may be generally indicated thus:
If the Bible is wrong in history,
what guarantee is there that it is
right in morals?
If the Bible is not a reliable guide
in facts, how do we know that it is
a trustworthy guide in doctrines?
If there are two creations, why may
there not be two resurrections?
If there are two genealogies, why
not two Christs?
If the Bible is untrustworthy upon
points which we can definitely test,
how do we know that it is to be
depended upon in matters we cannot prove?
These inquiries may be crudely put as to form, yet they are neither unreasonable nor unnatural, nor are they to be treated with professional haughtiness or contempt. Pedantry may sneer at them, but scholarship never sneers; scholarship often pities, and always helps. Scholarship is patient. To patience scholarship owes its riches. The inquiries, then, are popular, perhaps rude, perhaps shallow, but not, therefore, insincere. In view of such inquiries, and in the very degree in which they express an excitement which may cool into unbelief, may not popery claim to have a good defense when it insists upon revelation passing to the people only through the channel of the priest? Popery says, in effect, “The Bible is literature; only scholars can understand it; it is written in many languages absolutely locked against the populace; let the priest deal it out discreetly; do not throw pearls before swine; let the Church keep all the keys.” And does not Protestantism pass the Bible to the people, in some instances, through a kind of popery of its own, even through a kind of monastic uniqueness of learning, which can only be understood by experts and specialists? I ask the question in the hope that it can be answered in the negative. I am jealous lest the Bible should in any sense be made a priest’s book. Even Baur or Colenso may, contrary to his own wishes, be almost unconsciously elevated into a literary deity under whose approving nod alone we can read the Bible with any edification. It is no secret that when Baur rejected the Epistle to the Philippians as un-Pauline Christian Europe became partially paralyzed, and that when Hilgenfeld pronounced it Pauline Christian Europe resumed its prayers. Have we to await a communication from Tiibingen, or a telegram from Oxford, before we can read the Bible? The Bible is not the Bible to me because Herr Baur countersigns it, but because it reveals, as no other book has yet revealed, the almightiness and the all-love of the Eternal God.
We are cautioned, however, against calling the Bible the Word of God. It is said to be so mixed up with human error that such a designation might give a false impression. But is not a false impression of exactly the same kind given about the earth when we say
“THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S “?
We may not, according to some teachers, say the Bible is the Word of God, but we may say the earth is the Lord’s. How do we know that the earth is the Lord’s? Who told us? We ought to produce our authority for the bold assertion. Astute observers have not hesitated to say that whoever made the world, whatever else he might be he certainly was not almighty. John Stuart Mill (“Theism”) says that the Kosmos is marvelously ingenious, “but,” he adds, “nothing obliges us to suppose that either the knowledge or the skill is infinite.” He thinks the human body is an artful contrivance, but he is of opinion that it might “have been made to last longer” (page 181). Yet we go on saying that the earth is the Lord’s regardless of Mr. Mill’s tender bringing up. He thinks that the groveling condition of the human race is an argument against the omnipotence of the Creator, yet he thinks — and his magnanimity should be appreciated — that “the divine power may not have been equal to doing more” (page 182). Yet we go on saying that the earth is the Lord’s. We dare not say that the Bible is the Word of God, because some infidel will point to chapter four or verse twenty-one and ask if such and such words could have come from lips divine; and we ‘dare not say that the earth is the Lord’s because John Stuart Mill would be shocked by the suggestion that such a faulty world could have been created by an almighty agent. Probably in setting up such opponents as the portal through which alone we can properly approach any proposition we are hampering our inquiries by needless conditions.
Sometimes the enemy should be consulted last, not first.
We are wisely cautioned against reading meanings into the Bible. We should be also cautioned against reading meanings out of it. If books are rigidly human, we have no right to force upon authors meanings which never entered into their thoughts. The meanings may be vast and brilliant, yet we have no right to treat arithmetic as an effort in poetry. When a man has made a plain turnpike through his estate we have no right to credit him with having seduced the Ganges through his private grounds. But when books are of another quality altogether — if they are in any way inspired — if they, by the very nature of their contents, can only partly express the authors’ thought and feeling, and if the authors themselves say so, such books may be justly treated from the point of suggestiveness, and thus there may be found in them the seed of many thoughts, as a forest may repose in an acorn. In the case of the Bible we have a book which deals with infinite subjects only by way of indication, never by the method of exhaustion. As the Spirit helps our infirmities in prayer, so he will help our infirmity in. reading, and thus he may show us wondrous things even in familiar places. I do not want to know what Moses said; I want, as before explained, to know what God said through Moses. He may tell the reader more than he told the amanuensis, yet all the larger meanings may be in the very words of the original dictation! The amanuensis is dead: the Author cannot die! We do not believe the revelation because it is signed, we believe it because of what it is in itself. It is of small consequence to me who wrote the Book of Genesis, but it is of infinite significance to me that its very first sentence is a compendium of the total revelation of the Bible. Minds are variously constituted, so much so that it is sometimes almost impossible for one man to understand another. I cannot expect, therefore, to be universally understood when I say that there is nothing substantial and far-reaching in the whole Bible which is not anticipated and implicated in its very first sentence. To some minds this will be rhetoric, poetry, fancy, fantasy; yet to my own mind, and provable to my austerest moods, it is the simplest and most convincing logic. In the first
THE ORIGINS. yj
verse of the Bible I find the message of the whole volume. That first verse may be represented in various ways. As a manner of announcement it is sudden thunder. As a revelation it is morning dawning through gathered darkness. As an answer to mute but hopeful wonder it is like sunrise on the sea. This is the infinite speech:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth.”
Taken as a mere sentence, can it be exceeded in grandeur? Taken as a conjecture, can any addition be made to its sublimity? Taken as an inspired thought, who can heighten its elevation? Taken as a direct voice from Eternity, who can charge it with apology or incertitude? If this sentence is not the very Word of God I dare not, I cannot, I will not, say it is the word of man. Let us listen:
“In the Beginning, — The remotest date that has yet been suggested. Science has its slow-rising and slow-falling centuries, yet “the beginning” — the dateless date — includes them all and drowns them in a deeper sea. On that ocean millenniums are tufts of foam.
“GOD, — Personality, Will, Thought, Purpose: an
undefined Definition — matching the unbeginning beginning — an impersonal Personality — the shapeless Shape. God! He
enters his own Book instantaneously. He
comes not as a spectacle, but in the very
glory and supreme purpose of Action.
“Created,” — A process; slow, quick, deliberate, infinite
—before all speech, therefore baffling it; before all form, therefore without comparison — the beginning of Action, therefore without parallel.
Man never spake that Word on his own motion. He was told to speak it. Eternity delivered the secret to him, and whispered it in fit syllables. There is no mark of man upon it. It is a planet he never molded. It is the Morning Star.
Yes; I find everything there. Now that I go back upon it how clear it is that this is the protoplasm of revelation. Within how small a compass can the Eternal dwell! What comes after this will be the attenuation of itself. To meet our ignorance God goes into the very detail in which man has lost him. To create is not a stopping-point in the divine action. “Created” is a pregnant word. It is necessarily initial and incomplete as a mere term. If God “created” he did everything which that word can imply:
To create is to PROTECT;
To protect is to REDEEM;
To redeem is to PRIZE;
To prize is to COMPLETE;
To complete is to GLORIFY.
Creation, therefore, is a complex and multitudinous act, not an ostentatious and dazzling display of mere might. Man begins much and finishes little. His broken columns stud the cemeteries of the ages. He may be tracked by his abortions. Even a woman may forget her sucking child. The subcreator, proud and wanton, selfish and shortsighted, may be a monster, and may judge the Creator by his own littleness. That is our continual temptation. We infinitize ourselves and call the issue God! Man can leave his plow in mid-furrow, and abandon his tower when half built, but God having “created” will accomplish the fullness of his purpose and place the approving crown upon the perfected miracle of his grace.
As to processes needful for the detailed evolution — processes of many kinds, natural, social, military, imperial, personal, disciplinary — they will come and go in infinite variety of combination, and when rightly grasped they will all be seen to help the central and dominating purpose. The danger is that we may be lost amidst the incessant and cross-moving details. The moment we lose hold of the unit the fractions may make inroad upon our faith. When we are troubled by the second verse we should instantly return to the first. There we have read of the creation of the earth, but we have heard nothing of man. Yes we have. Man is in the first verse. The house implies the tenant. No man builds a house that it may stand empty. There is an unwritten logic even in commonplace daily life. The earth has no meaning in itself. In itself it was not worth creating. Does a lock suggest nothing beyond itself? Is the bride a picture self-complete? Does she fill and satisfy the altar before which she stands? Even a palace is ghastly emptiness until inhabited. One little child would turn its gilt into gold. One human look would soften its glare into a home. Thus I see man, and all God’s dealings with man, in the one word “created.” The account of the creation has been called a poem — a convenient term for the concealment of unbelief and the flattery of ignorance; but to my mind no drearier prose can be read if Man is omitted from the stately action. Grass and herb, and trees and waters, and sun and moon and stars, and great whales and flying fowl, cattle and creeping things, so moves the ponderous monotony, until the unseen image of God is revealed and humanized, and God and man stand face to face in the fellowship of love. Then we begin to understand. Then the future begins to grow out of the seed of the present. Then sunbeams are smiles. We have seen a Vision, and it has made all things new. We know what it is to have seen our own other life: that thrilling moment the heart can never mingle with the common time; the sight of Destiny is the date at which the exultant soul passes its transfiguration. At that point what to me is the Word of God begins, and at that point it might end if I had eyes to see. In the spirit created by that experience — that first sight of the meaning of things — I must watch all the detail, or it may bewilder and unsettle me. The immeasurable spaces of time that may separate the events no imagination can compute and designate. I do not know what a “day” is or a “word.” I only know that God and man are in conference, and so infinite is the stoop of heaven that the terms of conference are practically equal. By and by I shall see how man dresses his garden and keeps it. If man should fall from “our image and our likeness” all that he does will bear the shameful stigma of his guilt. His language must be tainted by his deceit. The shadow of death will lie along the whole way of his life. Yet I shall not on that account undervalue the created heavens and earth. The earth is still the Lord’s, though loaded and burdened by the cities of man. The moon and the stars shine by God’s ordination, though an unholy reek, hot with human wickedness, veil their placid luster. My suspicion of man need not shock my faith in God. I will hide myself in the first sentence of the Bible as in an appointed place.
Taking this view of the first sentence of the Bible, I find no difficulty in discerning in it Jesus Christ and all his work. This “God” is a plural Deity yet One; plural because One; in arithmetic one may be solitariness, in life it may be completeness. The discerning of Christ in this verse would to some minds be what is called spiritualizing; to my mind it is the true literalism. So variously are we constituted, though the humanity is the same! Paul had no difficulty in seeing Christ in all the action and purpose of creation. Nay, more, of creation the incarnate Christ was the first-born —
“the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creation; for in
him were all things created, in the
heavens and upon the earth, things
visible and things invisible; ... all
things have been created through
him, and unto him, and he is before all things, and in him all
things hold together.”
Where did Christ claim this for himself, except by implication? How did Paul come into the possession of this mystery except by that Spirit which brooded upon the waters when “the earth was without form and void “? Let us indeed take care lest we read meanings out of texts as well as into them. Where God has been, all beauty has been, all music, all light: the sermon can never hold all the text.
Christ is here and I knew it not, and Calvary, yet I did not understand. The Atonement is older than the Creation, not in historical time, which is of yesterday, but in the divine thought, which is from Eternity. Christ is the “Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.” He was before all history. Moses wrote of him, and Abraham saw his day. His visible personality was but a parenthesis in a movement of infinite sweep. We will perversely live in the bare, bleak wilderness of history when we might revel amidst the riches of the Ineffable, and thus we starve the soul, and stifle prayer at the very point where it might have become praise.
As certainly as Redemption was involved in Creation, Ascension was involved in the Resurrection. It is curious, and full of profitableness, to watch how the flower is involved in the seed. Curious, too, to observe how everything is something more than itself, looking backward and reaching forward so as to complete its identity. When Christ rose from the dead the rising was the beginning of the Ascension; its foretoken and hostage. Christ did not rise that he might establish a miracle and then die again.
“Death hath no more dominion over him.” He “was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father.” “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” This is the full meaning of Resurrection. “In Christ shall all be made alive.” The Ascension is not a separate and independent act. All such acts go back to the multifold word “created.” It must be more than a word to us; it must be many words in one. Creation is ever a movement toward life, larger life, life more abundantly, life that floods out death. Interruptions will stand in its way, but they will be overborne and abolished. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” But has death no antecedent? Is it a word cut off, and standing apart without explanation? Nay, verily. The same law prevails here. Death is the fruit of sin. And is “sin” in the word “created”? It is. We put many things in a wrong light if we deny this. We de-centralize the Eternal Throne. We must not dissociate sin from the forethought of God, and start some rival providence. But is God the author of sin? There we begin to be deceitful with ourselves. We stand on the brink of a mean quibble. We do not realize the infinite immensity of the occasion, so we cannot bring in the relieving lights, the healing compensations, the far-away totality. Some questions must be reserved. Enough for my immediate faith that there is but One Creator, and that he is able to work the final reconciliation. Sin troubles me as a problem, and if I could not set God above it, and hand it over to his sovereignty, I could no longer pray. Not here but there, not in little time but in boundless eternity, shall we see death and hell cast into the lake of fire.
Prayer is another action involved in the term ‘’created.” Creation implies creaturedom. Creaturedom implies — it does more, it necessitates — Prayer. Creaturedom means limitation, and limitation means necessity, and necessity is unspoken prayer. The question is not, Whether we will pray. We cannot help it. Once realizing the veriest rudiments of civilization — once above the line of savage life — we must pray; perhaps not intelligently, not definitely, not reverently, but prayer cannot be stifled by adverbs; the prayer will be there. It may be only a fear, a hope, a look, a superstition, but there it is. It may be degraded into idolatry, or it may be invested as a hypocrisy, yet it remains and operates in the life. We may even change the word without changing the thing signified; we may speak of aspiration, longing, wishing, yearning, desiring, but we do not shake the reality we have not courage to avow. When we pray we are true to our creation. We get back to God’s first thought of us. When he created man his purpose was fellowship. That fellowship began in conversation; on man’s side it passed into a cry for pity. Creation explains prayer. Creation, rightly understood, compels prayer. We have lost something and must find it. To-day, to-morrow, or the third day, we must somewhere, be it on the hill where the light laughs, or in the valley where the graves are cut, somewhere, in garden or wilderness or furnace of fire, we must pray — in our soul’s burning fever we must find a God or invent one.
After this review of the contents of the first verse of the Bible, I return easily and with fuller conviction to my first position, that the whole Bible, as to its supreme purpose, is by implication in that verse, and in the degree in which I grasp that thought the
Bible becomes to me the Word of God. As to how that Word may be written, or in any way set forth, how it may bear marks of editorial error as to authorship, dates, numbers, and details, that is a question which must be left to experts and specialists; but even they must be careful not to invert proportions and relations so completely as to give the idea that the divine element in the Bible is a little straggling rill feebly making its way around huge boulders and through hot sands of human ignorance and Jewish prejudice. From my point of view the disclosure of that divine element is the one reason for which the Scriptures were written. If it was the one reason for which the Scriptures were written, there can be no difficulty on my part in describing the Scriptures by their main and indeed sole purpose, and not by the mechanical execution either of authors, editors, or canonists. But what of the infidel who will point to some hard text and stumble at it? Nothing. Beginning at that text he begins at the wrong point, and beginning with him I should begin with the wrong man. I do not dismiss him from my consideration, yet I cannot accept him as the standard by which the Bible is to be judged.
But where does the Bible claim for itself that it is the Word of God? In its structure, in its unity, in its purpose. Again I would remind myself that the assertion or non-assertion of mere claim is nothing. Our friends claim that the Bible is a marvelous unity, but, we might retort, where does the Bible claim unity for itself? If argument is to be founded upon literal claim, the inquiry is as good in the one case as in the other. Viewed from their standpoint, it is simply impossible that the Bible can claim unity for itself. It is written by many writers. Its writers probably knew little or nothing of each other. It is a collection of pamphlets. The Scriptures spoken of by the apostles did not include their own writings; at best the reference is to the Old Testament, and now it is submitted by some that the Old Testament is but a record of what God did in the days of the ancient Jews, and that its claim upon our attention is remote rather than immediate and authoritative. What, then, of the marvelous unity, and where is that unity claimed in the Bible for the Bible? And is a book nothing more than it formally and expressly claims to be? Suppose we say that Blackstone’s Commentaries arc the highest authority upon the subjects they treat, where does Blackstone make any such claims for his Commentaries? If we find that he makes no such claim, shall we degrade the Commentaries into a secondary place? May not a book create its own standing, and become all but canonized by universal appreciation? I am not prepared to regard the Christian Church of all ages as an anonymous mob, nor am I prepared to deny continuous and direct inspiration; and putting these two things, and all they involve, together, I must treat at least with respect the estimate which has been placed upon the Bible by the Church universal. If I have to choose between the judgment of the Church, and the criticism of the infidel who is shocked by isolated texts, I will choose the judgment of the Church.
There are two passages in the New Testament which may greatly assist us in our reading of the Scriptures. Perhaps by following out all their meaning we may be able to see how a claim may be set up even within the Bible itself for its own unity and its own inspiration. One’ of these passages occurs in the narrative of our Lord’s Temptation in the Wilderness. When the tempter quoted a text, the tempted Saviour replied: “It is written AGAIN.” Scripture completing itself is the best commentary. And that is the best answer to the infidel who is horrified by Exodus iv. 24-26. Say to him: “It is written AGAIN.” Do not blot out the passage in order to calm his perturbation, but set another passage beside it. The Bible is self-interpreting. Where the pool is bitter, the tree of healing is close at hand. Here the concordance may be the best commentary. “Again, another Scripture saith” (John xix. 37), is the greatest answer that can be returned to any inquirer. Within the Bible you will find both the enigma and the answer. The second help to a right understanding of the Bible I find in such words as these:
“And his disciples remembered
that it is written.... When,
therefore, he was risen from the
dead, his disciples remembered...
and they believed the scripture.
... When Jesus was glorified,
then remembered they that these
things were written of him....
Then remembered I the word of
the Lord.”
Thus the word may remain a dead letter until experience gives it vitality and force and claim. In the interpretation of many Scriptures, Experience is the efficient scholarship. We know the twenty-third Psalm because our souls have passed through it line by line. We do not supersede grammar; we pass into a region it cannot enter. I venture to think that if we read the Scriptures in the light of experience and history many an obscure or forgotten passage would become expressive and prophetic. We should be startled into many an exclamation. History is the amplification of Scripture. Experience is the corroboration of the Bible. “Then remembered they “! “When he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered “! So it is with ourselves. Memory is awakened within us every day. Deeds we had forgotten stand out in radiance. Words little heeded at the time have, years afterward, given up their secret as the sea gives up its dead. Some texts are for the far-off centuries to explain. The explanation of other passages we shall find in heaven.
Meanwhile what is to be our attitude in relation to Christian scholarship? It is to me very pitiable that the Christian scholar has so often to fight his way into recognition, all the while being suspected and distrusted by many people who have not a shadow of a right to sit in judgment upon him. It is also not a little discomforting that doctrines which have in England fought their way into popularity are to-day the occasion of almost martyrdom to some eminent leaders in America. Forty years ago men were expelled from professorial chairs in England for laying down dogmas and suggestions which men then unborn are now preaching to influential and applauding congregations. Christian scholarship has no other wish than to know the truth and to make it known. By all means let it be watched; by all means hold on to the old until the new has been proved; at the same time make ample room for Christian learning, and give our scholars to feel that we expect them to be thorough and independent. Any Bible that can be stolen from us is not worth keeping. If we hold revelation in the letter only, it may be corrupted by the moths, or thieves may break through and steal; but if we hold it in the spirit, if the heart knows and loves the meaning of the Word, we shall be safe in a great fortress, we shall feed on the bread of heaven. On the other hand, scholars must continually assure us of their well-defined and inexpansible limitations, knowing well that at many a point on the sacred way they must put off the sandals of grammar and lexicon, and stand before God in the nakedness and humiliation of absolute Necessity. This they know right well, and so long as they work in the spirit of that knowledge they must be held in honor and in reverence. Be the Bible what it may, we owe it to scholarship. Let us not smite the hand which has reaped and garnered our largest harvests. No one knows so well as the scholar himself that he can do little or nothing with the first verse in the Bible. Its main words stand infinitely out of reach of his apparatus. As the heaven is high above the earth, so is the word GOD above all other words. We can approach God only at the lower end of his ways — the whispering of his strength — less than an echo of the thunder of his power. Even when he clothes himself with the universe his figure cannot be descried — even in history there is a tumult rather than a presence — even in Christ the mystery is not lost. In thinking of God we have been compelled to think of him under the conditions of Personality. The Bible itself so represents him. What personality means who can definitely and finally say? Is it only a symbol to start from? Is it an indefinable term? Are we, notwithstanding all our claims and boasts and ambitions, mere outlines of personality, with just too little of its quality to know anything of its fullest meaning? Personality is a term we must not strain too much. If we use it aright, it will help us a little here and there; but if we overstrain it, possibly it may become the precipice narrowly separating between us and destruction. When we connect it with what we know of life, intelligence, and sympathy, it may be most helpful. But these words themselves require definition. Life is as mysterious a word as God. What is intelligence but a dimly lighted line lying between ignorance and omniscience? And sympathy is love in action. But what is low? What? Thus we are always kept outside — outside of our very selves; half-interpreters of our own words, self-menders, apologizing to ourselves to-day for having mistaken or misled ourselves yesterday. In this condition of things we are thankful for all the aid of learning, yet we feel that outside of it, above it, beyond it far, are many things which can only be “spiritually discerned.”