The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible Part 10

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to manufacture cut of it any one uniform, system, of theology, as the fixed and final form of thought in which religion is to live._

Let me define these contrasting terms, so commonly confounded. Religion is man's perception of the Power in whom we live and move and have our being, and his emotion towards this power. Theology is man's conception of this Power, and his thought defined and formulated.

Religion is man's feeling after G.o.d; theology is man's grasp of G.o.d. The two are necessarily connected. They are different forms of one and the same force; the heat and the light which stream from G.o.d; but the heat and the light are not always equal. A worthy thought of G.o.d ought to sustain any worthy feeling towards Him. It generally does so. A heightened thought of G.o.d may often be found back of a rising flow of feeling after Him. More often the emotion precedes the conception; the vague, awed sense of G.o.d travails till a new thought is born among men. This has been the order of development in history. Men felt the Divine Power and Presence ages before they had learned so much of theology as to say--G.o.d. The feeling of G.o.d--religion--always keeps, in healthy natures, far ahead of theology--the thought about Him. The deepest religion finds no word for the mystery before which it bows. Its only thought may be that no thought is sufficient.

"In that high hour thought was not."

Theology, then, as man's thought about G.o.d, is necessarily conditioned by man's mind. It is under the general limitations of the human intellect, and the special limitations of thought in each race and age and individuality. It cannot escape these limitations, expand as they may. A flooding of the mind from on high may overflow these embankments but they still stand, shaping the flow of the fullest tides. The individuality of a great writer a.s.serts itself most strongly in his greatest works. His deepest inspiration brings out most plainly his mental form, just as the drawing of a full breath shows the real shape of a man. No possible theory of inspiration should lead us to look for the submergences of the d.y.k.es of thought cast up by race and age and individuality.

As a matter of fact, we find no uniformity in the theologies of the New Testament writers. Men have tried hard to make it appear that there was such a unity of thought. Never was more ingenious joiner-work done than in the "harmonies" of the New Testament writers. But facts are stubborn things, and in this case have resisted even the omnipotence of human ingenuity; as open minds have seen, despite the doctors.

St. Paul's Epistles reveal a theology by no means as precise and fixed as is popularly imagined, undergoing rapid changes, growing with his growth, always suffused from the soul with emotions which struggled against the prison bars of thought and speech. His intensely speculative mind had furnished a system of thought into which he built such ideas as these: The pre-existence of Christ, as, in some mystic, undefined way, the Head of Humanity; the sacrificial nature of His death; the justification of the sinner through faith; the life of Christ within the soul, as the Human Ideal; the speedy return of Christ in person to reign on earth (at least in the early part of his career); the resurrection of the pious dead; the translation of living believers; the final victory of goodness over evil; and the ending of the mediatorship of Christ, G.o.d then becoming all in all.

This was the form which the mystery of G.o.d's relationship to man took in the mind of this great genius, and around which the fiery pa.s.sion of his hunger after righteousness shaped itself.

In the Epistle of St. James, a.s.suming the traditional authorship, how much of this theology can you find? The incarnation is nowhere clearly stated.

The name of Christ occurs but twice. His atonement is scarcely mentioned.

The prophets are held up as examples of patience, under suffering without any reference to Christ. Paul's especial doctrine of justification by faith is explicitly denied. Of his fellowship with the Gentiles and his broad human sympathies, there is nothing whatever. All is intensely Jewish. If Paul's theology is orthodoxy, James is dreadfully unsound.[33]

"The fundamentals" are all lacking.

Both Paul and James differ very decidedly from the mystic soul who wrote the First Epistle of John; and all three differ again, quite as much, from the philosopher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. How little have either the Apocalypse or Jude in common with Paul! We can no more make a uniform theology out of the New Testament writers than we can out of Calvinism, Arminianism Catholicism, and Unitarianism.

These various theologies can be traced to the elements making up the individualities of the different writers. The idiosyncracies of Paul are clearly marked. He was a man of strong speculative mind, of mystic piety, of lofty enthusiasm for great ideals, a-hungered after righteousness. A Jew and yet a Roman citizen, his education developed the two-fold sympathies of an Israelite of the dispersion. At the feet of the liberal rabbi, Gamaliel, he learned the curious and mystical lore of the rabbins, while drinking in from his Master the spirit of freedom. Thrown from a child in constant contact with the Gentiles of his native city, Tarsus, race prejudices had been sapped unconsciously; while in youth or manhood the wisdom and beauty of the Greek genius had apparently been opened to him.

Paul's personality, fusing the materials of his education, and out of them building a body of thought around The Christ, explains his theology. He reproduces the conceptions of the rabbis, of the popular Jewish belief, of Gamaliel, of Tarsus, of Athens; transfigured on the heights of thought to which he climbed, in his intense musings over the problem of Jesus of Nazareth, while buried away in Arabia.

The small amount of theology in the practical Epistle of James is quite as plainly Jewish, of the school of the Sages, with a touch of Essenism. The theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows throughout the influences of the philosophy of Alexandria. The theology of the introduction to the Gospel according to St. John is just as unquestionably this same Alexandrian philosophy, still further developed.

These variant schools of Christian theology, so plainly revealing the sources of their variations, deny the existence of any one uniform system of thought in the New Testament writers, and p.r.o.nounce the different systems transient and not final forms.

Whatever the Church may offer us, the New Testament offers us no fixed and final body of thought. In the Bible, Christian theology is still a soft vase, plastic to the touch of each worker upon it. Had Paul's fine hand played around it even another decade, how different the shape it might have taken.

With the incoming of a more rational, ethical, and spiritual age, we may surely expect a finer fashioning of the forms of thought blocked out in the New Testament, under the first, fresh inspiration of the age of Jesus; into whose larger patterns shall be taken up all the truths revealed through the various sciences of these rich later ages; while all shall still take on the shape of Him who is the image of the invisible G.o.d.

"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."

The true Biblical theology is--Christ himself. His thought of G.o.d, and not even Paul's thoughts about Christ, are to mould our thinking. The Supreme Son of Man must have had the truest thought of G.o.d. Two words formulate his theology as bodied not in a creed, but in a prayer--"Our Father." The earliest, simplest, deepest cry of the human after G.o.d, now by Him who lived its spirit perfectly, the trusting, loving, holy Child of the Father, made no longer a sigh, a dream, a vision, but a life. "The life was the light of men."

That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander wearily.

I cannot always make out the face of a Father on the stern, harsh Power in whom we live and move and have our being. Then I turn to my Divine Brother, who, of all the children of men, saw deepest into the mystery, and in his far-mirroring eyes I read the vision which satisfies me.

With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself:

"'Our Father:' yes, that's werry good."

V.

The Right Critical Use of the Bible.

"I am convinced that the Bible becomes even more beautiful the more one understands it; that is, the more one gets insight to see that every word, which we take generally and make special application of to our own wants, has had, in connection with certain circ.u.mstances, with certain relations of time and place, a particular, directly individual reference of its own."

Goethe: quoted by M. Arnold in "The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration."

V.

The Right Critical Use of the Bible.

"G.o.d, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the fathers, by the prophets."--Hebrews, i. 1.

The right use of the Bible grows out of the true view of the Bible.

The Old Testament is the literature of the people of religion, in whom ethical and spiritual religion grew, through all moods and tenses, toward perfection. The New Testament is the literature of the movement which grew out of Israel, the literature of the Universal Church bodying around the Son of Man, in whom religion came to perfect flower and fruit. The real Bible is the record of this real revelation coming through real ethical and spiritual inspirations; a revelation advancing with men's deepening inspirations toward the Light which rose in the Life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

G.o.d, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the fathers by the prophets, hath at the last of these days spoken unto us by a Son.

These speakings of the Divine Spirit in the souls of men, at many times and in many manners, were articulated, as best was possible, in the writings of many ages and of many forms. The Bible is the collection of these writings. They require a critical study, as _bona fide_ "letters,"

before we can know the degree of their inspiration, and their place in the progressive historic revelation; before we can thus deduce aright the thoughts about G.o.d out of which we are to construct our theology.

Concerning this right critical use of the Bible, I propose now to offer some practical suggestions. Next Sunday I purpose giving you a bird's-eye view of the general course of the historic revelation which led up to the Christ, the Word of G.o.d. After which I shall pa.s.s on to consider with you the pre-eminently right use of the Bible, in which our souls humbly hearken for its words proceeding from out the mouth of G.o.d, on which man liveth; and on them feeding, grow toward a perfect manhood in Christ Jesus.

I.

_Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as living "letters" to us._

The traditional form in which the Bible has been given to the people would seem to have been devised with a design of robbing its writings of every natural charm, as the best means of making men feel its supernatural power. The fresh sense of "letters" disappears in this conventional form.

These many books of many ages have been bound up together, with the most imperfect cla.s.sification either as to period or character. A verse-making machine has been driven through them all alike, chopping them up into short, arbitrary, artificial sentences, formally numbered in the body of the text. The larger divisions into chapters have been made in an equally mechanical manner. By this twofold system an admirable provision has been made for checking the flow of the writer's thought, and for effectually preventing any easy grasp of the natural movement of the book. Poetry has been printed as prose; thereby marring its rhythm, concealing its structure, and blinding the reader to the dramatic character of immortal works of genius. Through the whole ma.s.s of writings a system of chapter-headings has been introduced that ingeniously insinuates into the body of these sacred books, as seemingly an integral part thereof, a scheme of interpretation which possesses now no pepsine power for resolving their contents into spiritual nutriment, but rather positively hinders our a.s.similation of many of these books.

Probably the greatest obstacle to the use of the Bible is the senseless form in which custom persists in publishing it. I know few stronger evidences of the intrinsic power of these books than their continued influence, under conditions that would have remanded other books to the topmost shelves of the most unused alcoves in our libraries.