Some Christian Convictions Part 2

Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression. There are similar moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the supremely Loving--moments when "belief overmasters doubt, and we know that we know." At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with the living G.o.d.

Such moments, however, are not abiding; and in the reaction that follows them the mind will question whether it has not been the victim of illusion. John Bunyan owns: "Though G.o.d has visited my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet afterwards I have been in my spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once conceive what that G.o.d and that comfort was with which I had been refreshed." Many a Christian today knows the inspiration and calm and reinforcement of religion, only to find himself wondering whether these may not come from an idea in his own head, and not from a personal G.o.d.

May we not be in a subjective prison from whose walls words and prayers rebound without outer effect?

How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw from it? The Christian thought of G.o.d is after all no more than an hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life. May not our experiences be accounted for in some other way? We must distinguish between the adequacy of our thought of G.o.d and the fact that there is a G.o.d more or less like our thought of Him. Our experience can never guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents are--their characters, position, abilities, etc. But the child's experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living parents. Is it likely that, were G.o.d a mere fancy, a fancy which we should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be what it is? An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation. Religion is incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when we feel most sure that there is no G.o.d, something unsettles us, and gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination compa.s.s such results?

How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our experience?

One test is the satisfaction that it gives to _all_ elements in our complex personality. One part of us may be deceived, but that which contents the entire man is not likely to be unreal. Arthur Hallam declared that he liked Christianity because "it fits into all the folds of one's nature." Further, this satisfaction is not temporary but persistent. In childhood, in youth, in middle age, at the gates of death, in countless experiences, the G.o.d we infer from our spirit's reactions to Him meets and answers our changing needs. Matthew Arnold writes: "Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral experience of mankind; to hit it in the critical points; to hit it lastingly; and, when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it, then to come out stronger than ever." Unless we are to distrust ourselves altogether, that which appeals to our minds as reasonable, to our hearts as lovable, to our consciences as commanding, and to our souls as adorable, can hardly be "such stuff as dreams are made on."

Nor are we looking at ourselves alone. We are confirmed by the completer experiences of the generations who have preceded us. "They looked unto Him and were radiant." Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in each century, "lit with their loving and aflame with G.o.d," can scarcely have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations.

And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy.

Religion has written its witness into the world's history, and we can appeal to an eloquent past.

Look at the generations of old, and see: Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed?

Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken?

Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him?

And its witness comes from today as certainly, and more widely, than from any believing yesterday. Ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation, throughout the world, testify what the G.o.d and Father of Jesus Christ means to them. Are we all self-deceived?

Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as partially religious. For the final confirmation of our faith we look to the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith. His life and death, His character and influence, remain the world's most priceless possession. Was the faith which produced them, the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination? There is contained in that life more proof that G.o.d is, than in all other approach of G.o.d to man, or of man to G.o.d.

The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works in life. "He that willeth to do His will shall know." Coleridge bursts out indignantly: "'Evidences of Christianity'! I am weary of the word.

Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own evidence." Religion approaches men saying, "O taste and see that the Lord is good." He cannot be good unless He _is_. A fancied Deity, an invention however beautiful of men's brain, supposed to be a living Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse.

If our religion is a stained gla.s.s window we color to hide the void beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a G.o.d or not, let us smash the deceiving gla.s.s, and face the darkness or the daylight outside. "Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself.

Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of believers who have tried it and proved it. The G.o.d and Father of Jesus is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let G.o.d convince him. To commit one's self to G.o.d in Christ and be redeemed from most real sins--turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and find one's self empowered and enlightened;--is to discover that faith works, and works gloriously. A man's idea of G.o.d may be, and cannot but be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness of the Reality behind it.

Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those who prove wholeheartedly loyal.

For our final a.s.surance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together.

But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work tirelessly for the day when our G.o.d through Christ shall be all in all.

CHAPTER II

THE BIBLE

In terms of the definition of religion given in the last chapter, we may describe the Bible as the record of the progressive religious experience of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, a record selected by the experience of the Jewish and Christian Church, and approving itself to Christian experience today as the Self-revelation of the living G.o.d.

The Bible is a _literary_ record. It is not so much a book as a library, containing a great variety of literary forms--legends, laws, maxims, hymns, sermons, visions, biographies, letters, etc. Judged solely as literature its writings have never been equalled in their kind, much less surpa.s.sed. Goethe declared, "Let the world progress as much as it likes, let all branches of human research develop to their utmost, nothing will take the place of the Bible--that foundation of all culture and all education." Happily for the English-speaking world the translation into our tongue, standardized in the King James' Bible, is a universally acknowledged cla.s.sic; and scarcely a man of letters has failed to bear witness to its charm and power. While most translations lose something of the beauty and meaning of the original, there are some parts of the English Bible which, as literature and as religion, excel the Hebrew or Greek they attempt to render.

The Bible is a record of _religious experience_. It has but one central figure from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_--G.o.d. But G.o.d is primarily in the experience, only secondarily in the record. All thought succeeds in grasping but a fraction of consciousness; thought is well symbolized in Rodin's statue, where out of a huge block of rough stone a small finely chiselled head emerges. With all their skill we cannot credit the men of faith who are behind the Bible pages with making clear to themselves but a small part of G.o.d's Self-disclosure to them. And when they came to wreak thought upon expression, so clear and well-trained a mind as Paul's cannot adequately utter what he feels and thinks. His sentences strain and sometimes break; he ends with such expressions as "the love of Christ which pa.s.seth knowledge," and G.o.d's "unspeakable gift."

The divine revelation which is in the experience has been at times identified with the thought that interprets it, or even with the words which attempt to describe it. "Faith in the thing grows faith in the report"; and fantastic doctrines of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible have been held by numbers of earnest Christians. Certain recent scholars, acknowledging that no version of the Bible now existing is free from error, have put forward the theory that the original ma.n.u.scripts of these books, as they came from their authors' hands, were so completely controlled by G.o.d as to be without mistake. Since no man can ever hope to have access to these autographs, and would not be sure that he had them in his hands if he actually found them, this theory amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme:

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows, Where you, nor I, nor n.o.body knows.

We have not only to collate the ma.n.u.scripts we possess and try to reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the religious experience they attempt to express.

As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine a.s.sistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely a.s.serts that he has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the metaphor, now one portion of their communion with G.o.d is brought to view and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.

The Bible is the record of an _historic_ religious experience--that of Israel which led up to the consciousness of G.o.d in Jesus and His followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its G.o.d is the G.o.d of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a character of its own. Its record brings into the succeeding centuries, and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with G.o.d.

The Bible is a record of _progressive_ religious experience. As every poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem that G.o.d had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher inspirations. When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent. Its G.o.d grows from a tribal deity to the G.o.d of the whole world; from a localized divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their G.o.ds on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from "a man of war" and a tribal lawgiver into the G.o.d whose nature is love. "By experience," said Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering," and it took at least ten centuries to pa.s.s from the G.o.d of Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ.

Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by the more perfect consciousness of G.o.d. The Scriptures, like the land in which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines of human pa.s.sion and doubt and cruelty; and to view it as a level plain of religious equality is to make serious mistakes. _Ecclesiastes_ is by no means on the same level with _Isaiah_, nor _Proverbs_ with the _Sermon on the Mount_.

Doctrines and principles that are drawn from texts chosen at random from all parts of the Bible are sure to be unworthy statements of the highest fellowship with G.o.d.

Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to the progress; there was loss as well as gain. All mountain roads on their way to the summit go down as well as up; and their advance must be judged not from their elevation at any particular point, but from their successful approach towards their destination. The experiences of Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him. In form the Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends.

Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by its approximation to the faith and purpose of Jesus.

The Bible is a _selected_ record of religious experience. Old Testament historians often refer to other books which have not been preserved; and there were letters of St. Paul which were allowed to perish, and gospels, other than our four, which failed to gain a place in the Canon.

A discriminating instinct was at work, judging between writings and writings. We know little of the details of the process by which it compiled the Old Testament. The Jewish Church spoke of its Scriptures as "the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings"; and it is probable that in this order it made collections of those books which it found expressed and reproduced its faith. In the time of Jesus the Old Testament, as we know it, was practically complete, although there still lingered some discussion whether _Esther, Ecclesiastes_ and the _Song of Songs_ were sacred books. We should like to know far more than students have yet discovered of the reasons which Jewish scholars gave for admitting some and rejecting other writings; but, whatever their alleged reasons, the books underwent a struggle for recognition, and the fittest, according to the judgment of the corporate religious experience of the devout, survived.

The first Christians found the Jewish Bible in use as containing "the oracles of G.o.d"; and as it had been their Lord's Bible it became theirs.

No one of the first generation of Christians thought of adding other Scriptures. In that age the Coming of the Messiah and His Kingdom in power were daily expected, and there seemed no need of writing anything for succeeding times. Paul's letters were penned to meet current needs in the churches, and were naturally kept, reread and pa.s.sed from church to church. As the years went by and disciples were added who had never known the Lord in the days of His flesh, a demand arose for collections of His sayings. Then gospels were written, and the New Testament literature came into existence, although no one yet thought of these writings as Holy Scripture.

Three factors, however, combined to give these books an authoritative position. In the Church services _reading_ was a part of worship. What should be read? A letter of an apostle, a selection of Jesus' sayings, a memoir of His life, an account of the earliest days of the Church.

Certain books became favorites because they were most helpful in creating and stimulating Christian faith and life; and they won their own position of respect and authority.

Some books by reason of their _authorship_--Paul or Peter, for instance--or because they contained the life and teaching of Jesus, naturally held a place of reverence. This eventually led to the ascription to well-known names of books that were found helpful which had in fact been written by others. For example, the _Epistle to the Hebrews_ was ultimately credited to Paul, and the _Second Epistle of Peter_ to the Apostle Peter.

And, again, _controversies_ arose in which it was all important to agree what were the sources to which appeal should be made. The first collection of Christian writings, of which we know, consisting of ten letters of Paul and an abridged version of the _Gospel according to Luke_, was put forth by Marcion in the Second Century to defend his interpretation of Christianity--an interpretation which the majority of Christians did not accept. It was inevitable that a fuller collection of writings should be made to refute those whose faith appeared incomplete or incorrect.

In the last quarter of the Second Century we find established the conception of the Bible as consisting of two parts--the Old and the New Covenant. This meant that the Christian writings so acknowledged would be given at least the same authority as was then accorded to the Jewish Bible. Early in the Fourth Century the historian, Eusebius, tells us how the New Testament stood in his day. He divides the books into three cla.s.ses--those acknowledged, those disputed, and those rejected. In the second division he places the epistles of _James_ and _Jude_, the _Second Epistle of Peter_ and the _Second_ and _Third_ of _John_; in the first all our other books, but he says of the _Revelation of John_, that some think that it should be put in the third division; in the third he names a number of books which are of interest to us as showing what some churches regarded as worthy of a place in the New Testament, and used as they did our familiar gospels and epistles. By the end of that century, under the influence of Athanasius and the Church in Rome, the New Testament as it now stands became almost everywhere recognized.

The reason given for the acceptance or rejection of a book was its _apostolic authorship_. Only books that could claim to have been written by an apostle or an apostolic man were considered authoritative. We now know that not all the books could meet this requirement; but the Church's real reason was its own discriminating spiritual experience which approved some books and refused others. Canon Sanday sums up the selective process by saying: "In the fixing of the Canon, as in the fixing of doctrine, the decisive influence proceeded from the bishops and theologians of the period 325-450. But behind them was the practice of the greater churches; and behind that again was not only the lead of a few distinguished individuals, but the instinctive judgment of the main body of the faithful. It was really this instinct that told in the end more than any process of quasi-scientific criticism. And it was well that it should be so, because the methods of criticism are apt to be, and certainly would have been when the Canon was formed, both faulty and inadequate, whereas instinct brings into play the religious sense as a whole. Even this is not infallible; and it cannot be claimed that the Canon of the Christian Sacred Books is infallible. But experience has shown that the mistakes, so far as there have been mistakes, are unimportant; and in practice even these are rectified by the natural gravitation of the mind of man to that which it finds most nourishing and most elevating."

In their att.i.tude towards the Canon all Christians agree that the books deemed authoritative must record the historic revelation which culminated in Jesus and the founding of the Christian Church. A Roman Catholic may derive more religious stimulus from the _Spiritual Exercises_ of Ignatius Loyola than from the _Book of Lamentations_, and a Protestant from Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ than from the _Second Epistle of John_; but neither would think of inserting these books in the Canon. He who finds as much religious inspiration in some modern poet or essayist as in a book of the Bible, may be correctly reporting his own experience; but he is confusing the purpose of the Bible if he suggests the subst.i.tution of these later prophets for those of ancient Israel. The Bible is the spiritually selected record of a particular Self-disclosure of G.o.d in a national history which reached its religious goal in Jesus Christ.

Romanists and Protestants differ as to how many books const.i.tute the Canon, the former including the so-called _Apocrypha_--books in the Greek translation but not in the original Hebrew Bible. And they differ more fundamentally in the principle underlying the selection of the books. The Roman Catholic holds that it is the Church which officially has made the Bible, while the Protestant insists that the books possess spiritual qualities of their own which gave them their place in the authoritative volume, a place which the Church merely recognized.

Luther, in his celebrated dispute with Dr. Eck, a.s.serted: "The Church cannot give more authority or force to a book than it has in itself. A Council cannot make that be Scripture which in its own nature is not Scripture." The Council of Trent, answering the Reformers, in 1546, issued an official decree defining what is Scripture: "The holy, ec.u.menical and general Synod of Trent, legitimately convened in the Holy Ghost ...receives and venerates with an equal piety and reverence all the books as well of the Old as of the New Testament ...together with the traditions pertaining both to faith and to morals, as proceeding from the mouth of Christ, or dictated by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Church Catholic by continuous succession." Then follows a catalogue of the books, and an anathema on all who shall not receive them "as they are contained in the old vulgate Latin version."

Over against this the Protestant takes the position that the books of the Scripture came to be recognized as authoritative exactly as Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth have been accorded their place in English literature. It was the inherent merit of _Hamlet_ and _Paradise Lost_ and the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ that led to their acknowledgment. No official body has made Shakespeare a cla.s.sic; his works have won their own place. No company of men of letters officially organized keeps him in his eminent position; his plays keep themselves.

The books of the Bible have gained their positions because they could not be barred from them; they possess power to recanonize themselves.

Some are much less valuable than others, and it is, perhaps, a debatable question whether one or two of the apocryphal books--_First Maccabees_, or _Ecclesiasticus_, for instance--are not as spiritually useful as the _Song of Solomon_ or _Esther_; but of the chief books we may confidentially affirm that, if one of them were dug up for the first time today, it would gradually win a commanding place in Christian thought. And it is a similar social experience of the Church--Jewish and Christian--which has recognized their worth. The modernist Tyrrell has written: "It cannot be denied that in the life of that formless Church, which underlies the hierarchic organization, G.o.d's Spirit exercises a silent but sovereign criticism, that His resistlessly effectual judgment is made known, not in the precise language of definition and decree, but in the slow manifestation of practical results; in the survival of what has proved itself life-giving; in the decay and oblivion of all whose value was but relative and temporary."

In a sense each Protestant Christian is ent.i.tled to make up a Bible of his own out of the books which record the historical discoveries of G.o.d.

He is not bound by the opinions of others, however many and venerable; and unless a book commends itself to his own spiritual judgment, he is under no obligation to receive it as the word of G.o.d to him. As a matter of fact every Christian does make such a Bible of his own; the particular pa.s.sages which "grip" him and reproduce their experiences in him, they, and they alone, are his Bible. Luther was quickened into life by the epistles of Paul, but spoke slightingly of _James_; many socially active Christians in our day live in the prophets and the first three gospels, and almost ignore the rest of the Bible. But individual taste, while it has preferred authors and favorite works, does not think of denying to Milton, or Wordsworth, or Sh.e.l.ley, their place among English cla.s.sics; a social judgment has a.s.signed them that. A man who is not hopelessly conceited will regret his inability to appreciate a single one of the great authors, and will try to enlarge his sympathies.

The Christian will, with entire naturalness, be loyal to so much of the Bible as "finds him," and humbly hope and endeavor to be led into ampler ranges of spiritual life, that he may "apprehend with all saints" the breadth, length, depth and height of the historic Self-revelation of G.o.d.

The Bible is thus _a standard of religious experience_. If there is any question as to what man's life with G.o.d ought to be, it can be referred to the life recorded in these books. But men have often made the Bible much more; confusing experience with its interpretation in some particular epoch, they used the Bible as a treasury of proof texts for doctrines, or of laws for conduct, or of specific provisos for Church government and worship. They forgot that the writers of the early chapters of _Genesis_, in describing their faith in G.o.d's relationship to His world and to man and to history, had to express that faith in terms of the existing traditions concerning the creation, the fall, the deluge, the patriarchs. Their faith in G.o.d is one thing; the scientific and historic accuracy of the stories in which they utter it is quite another thing. They did not distinguish between Paul's life with G.o.d in Christ, and the philosophy he had learned in Gamaliel's cla.s.sroom, or picked up in the thought of the Roman world of his day. Paul's religious life is one thing, his theology in which he tries to explain and state it is another thing. They read the plans that were made for the organization of the first churches, and hastily concluded that these were intended to govern churches in all ages. The chief divisions of the Church claim for their form of government--papal, episcopal, presbyterian, congregational--a Biblical authority. The religious life of the early churches is one thing; their faith and hope and love ought to abide in the Church throughout all generations; the method of their organization may have been admirable for their circ.u.mstances, but there is no reason we should consider it binding upon us in the totally different circ.u.mstances of our day. Latterly social reformers have been attempting to show that the Bible teaches some form of economic theory, like socialism or communism. It lays down fundamental principles of brotherhood, of justice, of peaceableness, but the economic or political systems in which these shall be embodied, we must discover for ourselves in each age. It is the norm of our life with G.o.d; but it is not a standard fixing our scientific views, our theological opinions, our ecclesiastical polity, our economic or political theories. It shows forth the spirit we should manifest towards G.o.d and towards one another as individuals, and families, and nations; "and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

This brings us to the question of the _authority_ of the Bible. There are two views of its authority; one that it contains mysteries beyond our reason, which are revealed to us, and guaranteed to us as true, either by marvellous signs such as miracles and fulfilled prophecies, or by the infallible p.r.o.nouncement of the official Church; the other is that the Bible is the revelation of self-evidencing truth. The test of a revelation is simply that it reveals. The evidence of daylight lies in the fact that it enables us to see, and as we live in the light we are more and more a.s.sured that we really do see. Advocates of the former position say: "If anything is in the Bible, it must not be questioned; it must simply be accepted and obeyed." Advocates of the latter view say: "If it is in the Bible, it has been tried and found valuable by a great many people; question it as searchingly as you can, and try it for yourself, and see whether it proves itself true or not."