The Bible and Modern Criticism

He following chapters have little need of

any prefatory remarks of mine. Alike

their subject, their material, and the author’s

handling of that material, will command the

attention of a wide circle of readers, and will

indeed repay it. But I am honoured by the

request to prefix these few paragraphs, and I obey.

I have the author’s full leave to say that there are details in the matter of the book, and even certain aspects of the treatment, from which I hold myself detached. For example, I cannot commit myself to concurrence with the whole of the important but incidental criticism of the Revised Version. I am in suspense on some main items of Sir R. Anderson’s discussion of outlines of the prophetic future, while I regard with profound respect the ability and the suggestiveness of the discussion. Again, I must

dissociate myself from certain passages which Vv vi PREFACE

reflect upon the axzzmus of some representatives of the New Criticism with a severity I cannot follow. Among both leaders and followers in that school I reckon some much-respected friends, of whose reverent and Christian aims I am sure; and that fact is continually with me in any expression of the profound anxiety with which I view the tendency of the school.

But when I have said this, I am amply free, as I am earnestly willing, to avow my mental and spiritual sympathy with the great exvoz of this remarkable book.

What is the book? It is the free and (to use the word in its best sense) popular presentation of the results of an independent study of the New Criticism, as actually put before us in representative works, done by a student entirely free from professional bias, and trained in a severe school of legal and judicial investigation to sift witnesses and weigh evidence. It is an example of exactly the sort of work which, in my opinion, the Church needs in an eminent degree, and which is, I fear, lamentably rare to-day — the careful study of religious problems by daymen at once open-minded and devout. In the best specimens of such study there is often, to my thinking, a quite peculiar value; a fresh and bracing air of thought all their

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own, a faculty for throwing wholesome light upon subjects tangled by the over-handling of experts. Experts, as Sir R. Anderson often pertinently reminds us, are by no means, as such, good judges.

“At the bar we sometimes find a man’s logic swamped. by his learning; and so it is in theology.” Thus wrote the late Lord Hatherley to me, in a private letter, thirty years ago, and went on to say that he wished for leisure to illustrate the poor reasoning power of some of the greatest German “tevatz. Lord Hatherley was one of our first masters of evidence. He was a life-long: student of the Holy Scriptures. And the modest Introduction to his Coxz¢:nuzty is a fine summing-up in favour of their properly supernatural character. That book was a noble lay contribution to the defence of faith. Another master of the practical application of legal science gives us another here.

And is there not a cause? The attitude towards Holy Scripture of a vast deal of cultured thought and responsible teaching at present offers assuredly a problem which it is idle to dismiss as if it were not portentous. By whatever process it has come to be, teachers and disciples far and wide now regard the Old Testament (to speak

Vill PREFACE

of it only for the instant) from an angle totally different (I use the words deliberately) from that taken by our Lord Jesus Christ, alike before and after His Resurrection from the dead. To Him, tempted, teaching, suffering, dying, risen, ‘‘z¢ zs written” was a formula of infinite import. The principle this expressed lay at the heart of His teaching. It is not too much to say that it belonged to the pulse, to the vital breath, of His message to others, and, what is mysteriously yet more, to His certainty about Himself. But in wide circles of our Christendom it is now openly or tacitly taken to be out of date, to be narrow, to be uncultured, to make much of “‘z¢ zs written;” as if an appeal to a definite supernatural bookrevelation were a thing discredited and to be given up.

If a severe necessity of irrefragable truth demands this, be it so. But let not the conclusion be reached, or rested in, light-heartedly, and smoothly decorated with the comfortable phraseology current in articles and reviews. The conclusion, if true, is portentous. It is a confession that on a matter central in His message our Master was much mistaken. He appears thus as not merely capable of nescience; that is a very different matter; the most cautious, the most

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worshipping, theology may hold that He consented, in His Humanity, to limitations of His conscious knowledge and to silence outside those bounds. But here He appears as ignorant with that sort of ignorance which profoundly impairs the whole value of a teacher — the ignorance of the man who does not know where his knowledge ends, and so makes confident affirmations, and draws confident inferences, where his basis as to facts is unsound.

Such a fallible Christ lies open to the suspicion of fallibility on other matters than the nature and integrity of the Old Testament; and reasonably. The theology which denies the Lord abnormal knowledge of facts of the past is only consistent when it extends its denial to the future, and takes cum grano the New Testament doctrine of His Return, which is a matter either of revelation, or of the vaguest and most impalpable forecast. Such extensions have undoubtedly come to be freely made within Christian circles; and not only in the ZLucyclopedia Brblica.

If these conclusions are demanded by irrefutable fact, let them be made, and accepted. But not (I repeat) light-heartedly, and as if we were the freer for them, and could talk glibly about them in the best modern style. Let us make them

PREFACE

with a groan, and take care to carve no more the unauthentic promise on the tombs of our beloved.

But first let us be absolutely sure that our detraction from the complete infallibility of the Lord Jesus Christ has infallible grounds. Let us take particular care to be sure that its basis is no priorvt theory of the genesis of Religion, which may even already be on its way to discredit in the court of knowledge and thought.

Wisely does Sir R. Anderson disclaim any neat theory of inspiration; as wisely does he emphasise the true, the profound, umanzty of the Bible. But all the more is he in the right when he analyses with the utmost rigour the flaws in the modern analysis of the Book, and calls reverent attention to the mysterious facts of its organic structure, and gives us both precept and example for an always deepening study of its hidden treasures.

The matter is one where, while the fairness of controversy must be guarded, as ever, its mere courtesies may not always be in place. For the question is of tremendous urgency. ‘We are contending for our all.”

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