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ARTES
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SCIENTIA
VERITAS
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
ER PLURIOUS
UNUM
TUEBOR
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BS
511
F748
1925
THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE

OTHER BOOKS BY DR. FOSDICK
THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY
THE MANHOOD OF THE MASTER
THE MEANING OF PRAYER
THE MEANING OF FAITH
THE MEANING OF SERVICE
CHRISTIANITY AND PROGRESS
TWELVE TESTS OF CHARACTER
THE MODERN USE
OF THE BIBLE
BY
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D.D.
MORRIS K. JESUP PROFESSOR OF PRACTICAL THEOLOGY
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
All rights reserved
1925
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1924,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1924. Reprinted
October, November, December, 1924; January, 1925.
To Two Members of the Younger Generation
ELINOR WHITNEY FOSDICK
DOROTHY FOSDICK
THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP
FOUNDATION
The Lyman Beecher Fund in the School of Religion,
Yale University, was established May 2, 1872, by a
gift of ten thousand dollars from Henry W. Sage, Esq.,
then of Brooklyn, New York, in memory of Lyman
Beecher, of the Class of 1797, Yale College, who died
January 10, 1863. In accordance with the wishes of
the donor, this gift was devoted by the Yale Corpora-
tion to the establishment of a Foundation "to be
designated as 'The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on
Preaching,' to be filled from time to time, upon the
appointment of the Corporation, by a minister of the
Gospel, of any evangelical denomination, who has
been markedly successful in the special work of the
Christian ministry." With the authorization of the
donor, the Corporation, in May, 1882, voted "that
henceforth the Lyman Beecher Lecturer shall be in-
vited to lecture on a branch of pastoral theology or
any other topic appropriate to the work of the Chris-
tian ministry." In December, 1893, the donor au-
thorized the Corporation "if at any time they should
deem it desirable to do so, to appoint a layman in-
stead of a minister to deliver the course of lectures on
the Lyman Beecher Foundation."
Religions
Wahr
2-23-26
12914
PREFACE
These lectures have just been delivered on the
Lyman Beecher Foundation at Yale University and
are now given to the publishers in the hope that,
although left in the style of spoken address, they may
prove useful beyond the original circle of auditors.
Nothing new or startling can be promised to the
reader who is well informed in the realm of modern
Biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, after ten years
of dealing with this subject in the classroom with
special reference to the practical problems of Christian
preachers and teachers, I hope that some service may
be rendered by the systematic statement which I
have endeavored to make.
Upon the basis of the approach to the Bible here set
forth I have done my preaching from the beginning of
my ministry, and for the last decade I have been try-
ing to set forth this approach in orderly fashion in
lectures at the Union Theological Seminary. To the
many students who have worked with me in the class-
room on this course of thought and whose encouraging
letters from the pastoral and missionary fields have
testified to its practical feasibility and have fur-
nished incentive for this publication, I am profoundly
grateful.
A word may be needed about the bibliographies,
printed one at the close of each lecture. These lists
of books are intended merely to be suggestive of read-
PREFACE
ing likely to aid the interested student in carrying
further the line of thought begun in the lectures.
Obviously, they are not exhaustive and could not
well have been made so.
It is useless to try adequately to express my sense
of indebtedness for help received in the preparation
of these lectures. My secretary, Miss Margaret
Renton, has given tireless and efficient service. Pres-
ident Arthur Cushman McGiffert and Professor Julius
A. Bewer, of the Union Theological Seminary Faculty,
have each read portions of the manuscript greatly to
my profit. Especially, I owe an unpayable debt to
my friend and colleague, Professor James Everett
Frame, who has read the entire manuscript and has
given me many valuable suggestions.
The position represented in this book will of course
be distasteful to those bound by a theory of literal
inerrancy in their approach to the Bible. I am hoping,
however, that many not so bound but anxious, it may
be, over the possible effects of modern scholarship,
may be led to see how consonant with a reverent
estimate of the Book and an inspiring use of it the
new views are.
New York, May 3, 1924
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
LECTURE
CONTENTS
I THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE...
II THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD.
III THE ANCIENT SOLUTION.
•
IV ABIDING EXPERIENCES IN CHANGING CATE-
GORIES...
V MIRACLE AND LAW....
VI PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION.
PAGE
I
33
65
•
97
IZI
169
208
VIII JESUS, THE SON OF GOD..
242
VII JESUS, THE MESSIAH.
THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
LECTURE I
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
I
Some of the most lively and perplexing problems
that trouble Christian thought to-day center in the
subject which we have chosen. Quite apart from the
lecturer's amazement and delight at finding a topic
with which but one of his forty-odd predecessors on
this Foundation has dealt at all, he may claim in-
terest in his theme because around it gather many of
our most serious questions and controversies.
1
To more ministers than one likes to think, the use
of the Bible is a difficult enigma. Some reveal this
by avoiding wide areas of the Scripture altogether.
All the king's horses and all the king's men could
hardly drag them into dealing with certain passages
that used to be the glory of our fathers' preaching.
Others make their embarrassment clear by their use.
of texts no longer treasuries of truth from which they
draw the substance of their message, but convenient
pegs on which they hang a collection of their own
thoughts. Others reveal their discomfort and con-
fusion when they try to discuss Biblical problems,
such as miracles. They are ill at ease in handling
1
¹ George Adam Smith: Modern Criticism and the Preaching or
the Old Testament.
I
2
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
these Scriptural categories, reminding one of a com-
ment which Longfellow once made on a preacher:
"I could not tell what he was driving at, except that
he seemed desirous not to offend the congregation."
And still other preachers cut the Gordian knot by
practically surrendering the Bible as the inspiration
of their thought and teaching, save as by courtesy
they use it in some oblique and cursory fashion to
point a moral, or adorn a tale.
Of course, such a summary does not include all
ministers, but one fears that it applies to a growing
percentage. Years ago, here at Yale, Dr. William
Newton Clarke made this comment on the preacher's
problem with the Book:
"I tell no secret-though perhaps many a man
has wished he could keep it a secret-when I say
that to the average minister to-day the Bible that
lies on his pulpit is more or less an unsolved prob-
lem. He is loyal to it, and not for his right hand
would he degrade it or do it wrong. He longs to
speak with authority on the basis of its teaching,
and feels that he ought to be able so to do. He
knows that the people need its message in full
power and clearness, and cannot bear to think
that it is losing influence with them. Yet he is
not entirely free to use it. Criticism has altered
the book for his use, but just how far he does not
know.” 1
Surely, it is worth while to attempt, from the
preacher's point of view, a constructive contribution
1 The Use of the Scriptures in Theology, 161.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 3
in this field. It would be worth while if only a few
ministers, laboring under the handicap of the preva-
lent confusion, were helped to handle the Bible with
new zest, freedom, honesty, and power.
Quite apart from the special needs of the preacher,
an intelligent understanding of the Bible is indis-
pensable to anybody in the Western world who wishes
to think wisely about religion. By no possibility can
any one of us be independent of the Bible's influ-
ence. Our intellectual heritage is full of its words and
phrases, ideas and formulas. Ignorance of it consti-
tutes a hopeless handicap in the endeavor to under-
stand any great Western literature, and as for our
English classics, take from them the contribution of
the Scriptures and the remainder would resemble a
town in Flanders after the big guns were through
with it.
No man in the Western world, therefore, can think
about religion as though the Bible did not exist. He
might as well try to think legally without reference
to the Common Law-a psychological impossibility.
Even though he never read a law-book, all the pre-
suppositions with which he starts, the problems with
which he deals, the mental grooves in which his
thought inevitably runs, are set in advance by the
inherited tradition. If a man wishes to think in-
dependently of the Common Law he must first thor-
oughly know the Law and then deliberately break
away from it.
Similarly, in our religious thinking we may agree
with the Bible or disagree with it, use its structural
ideas sympathetically or hostilely, or even be unaware
4
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
that we are using them at all, but in any case we are
under duress. One way or another we are thinking
with reference to the Biblical tradition. That is
inbred in our consciousness and we cannot get rid of
it. It will never do, therefore, for us to play ostrich
with reference to the problems which the modern use
of the Bible presents. We must see them straight or
we will see nothing else straight. In the last analysis
all the controversies that vex our modern churches
come back to this central matter: how are we using
the Bible? There is no hope of unsnarling our sadly
perplexed religious thinking until we achieve and
make popularly effective an intelligent employment
of the Scriptures.
When to this basic need which affects everybody's
religious thinking in the Western world are added the
special problems of the preacher, the necessity of a
well-instructed and fruitful use of the Bible becomes
overwhelming. For one thing, in most congregations
there are folk drilled in the older methods of employ-
ing Scripture. They are often the salt of the earth—
folk of consistent and effective Christian lives and of
reliable devotion to the kingdom. The man who
ministers to them must know the Bible. If he disa-
grees with their way of handling it he must not give
the impression of doing so ignorantly or flippantly,
without long reflection, sound reason, and conscien-
tious decision. They must feel that he is a thorough,
thoughtful, reverent student of the Book. If they are
sure of that they will give him large liberty. But if
they see that he is using texts for convention's sake
and not because he is concerned with the message of
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 5
the Bible or has any well-ordered and intelligent view
of it as a whole, they will rightly distrust his intellec-
tual integrity. He seems to be trifling, and he is.
Upon the other hand, multitudes of people, so far
from being well-stabilized traditionalists, are all at sea
in their religious thinking. If ever they were drilled
in older uses of the Bible they have rebelled against
them. Get back to the nub of their difficulty and you
find it in Biblical categories which they no longer be-
lieve-miracles, demons, fiat creation, apocalyptic
hopes, eternal hell, or ethical conceptions of Jehovah
in the Old Testament that shock the modern con-
science. Their inherited way of thinking about the
Bible has been to them indissoluble from their relig-
ion. An artificial adhesion, none the less strong be-
cause it is irrational, has been set up between their
deepest and most beautiful spiritual experiences on
the one side and their accustomed use of Scripture on
the other. When the one goes the other threatens
to collapse. In many cases it has collapsed.
The man who ministers to them must have an in-
telligible way of handling the Bible. He must have
gone through the searching criticism to which the last
few generations have subjected the Scriptures and be
able to understand and enter into the negations that
have resulted. Not blinking any of the facts, he must
have come out with a positive, reasonable, fruitful
attitude toward the Book. Only so can he be of
service in resolving the doubts of multitudes of folk
to-day. If they can see that the Bible is not lost but
is the more usable the better it is understood, that the
new knowledge has not despoiled it but has set its
6
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
spirit free for its largest usefulness, that its basic
experiences are separable from its temporary forms
of thought, and that in its fundamental principles of
life lie the best hopes of the world to-day, they are
set at liberty from a great fear that their faith is vain.
In the end, like many of us, they may see more in the
Scriptures now than ever they saw under the old
régime.
At any rate, whether we consider the preacher's
private thinking or public ministry, few things are so
important as that he should achieve an intelligent
and spiritually effective use of the Bible.
II
The results of the modern study of Scripture can be
grouped under two heads, and to one of these we now
turn our attention. For the first time in the history
of the church, we of this generation are able to arrange
the writings of the Bible in approximately chrono-
logical order. That statement, like other summaries
of human knowledge such as that the earth is round,
can be swiftly and simply made, but its involved
meanings reach far and deep. The total consequence
of all the work of the Higher Criticism is that at last
we are able to see the Bible a good deal as a geologist
sees the strata of the earth; we can tell when and in
what order the deposits were laid down whose ac-
cumulated results constitute our Scriptures. Was
there ever such an unfortunate label put upon an
entirely legitimate procedure as the name "Higher
Criticism"? Were one to search the dictionary for
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
7
two words suggestive of superciliousness, condescen-
sion, and destructiveness, one could hardly find any
to surpass these. Yet the Higher Criticism simply
asks about the books of the Bible: who wrote them,
when and why they were written, and to whom.
Every efficient Sunday School teacher, according to
his own ability, has always been a Higher Critic. This
process, however, armed with our modern instruments
of literary, historical, and archeological research,
pushed with unremitting zeal and tireless labor, after
following many false trails and landing in many cul-
de-sacs, has gotten a result, at least in its outlines,
well assured. We can arrange the documents of the
Bible in their approximately chronological order.
Endless minor uncertainties, difficulties, and un-
answered questions remain but, for all that, it is
possible now for Dr. Harlan Creelman to give us his
volume in which the strata of the Old Testament are
chronologically distinguished, and for Dr. Julius
Bewer to give us his continued story of Hebrew litera-
ture from its first emergence to its canonization.¹
From the purely scientific point of view this is an
absorbingly interesting matter, but even more from
the standpoint of practical results its importance is
difficult to exaggerate. It means that we can trace
the great ideas of Scripture in their development from
their simple and elementary forms, when they first
appear in the earliest writings, until they come to
their full maturity in the latest books. Indeed, the
* Harlan Creelman: An Introduction to the Old Testament Chron-
ologically Arranged; Julius A. Bewer: The Literature of the Old
Testament in its Historical Development.
8
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
general soundness of the critical results is tested by
this fact that as one moves up from the earlier writ-
ings toward the later he can observe the development
of any idea he chooses to select, such as God, man,
duty, sin, worship. Plainly we are dealing with ideas
that enlarge their scope, deepen their meaning, are
played upon by changing circumstance and maturing
thought, so that from its lowliest beginning in the
earliest writings of the Hebrews any religious or eth-
ical idea of the Bible can now be traced, traveling an
often uneven but ascending roadway to its climax in
the teaching of Jesus.
That this involves a new approach to the Bible is
plain. To be sure, our fathers were not blind to the
fact that the New Testament overtops, fulfils, and in
part supersedes the Old. They had the Sermon on
the Mount and the opening verses of the Epistle to
the Hebrews to assure them of that. But our fathers
never possessed such concrete and detailed illustration
of that idea as we have now. We shall have occasion
later to applaud the school of interpretation made
notable by Theodore of Mopsuestia and to appreciate
great exegetes like Calvin, but even such interpreters
never dreamed of arranging the documents of the
Bible in chronological order and then tracing through
them the development of those faiths and ethical ideals
that come to their flower in the New Testament.
Rather, they lacked both the historical apparatus that
could have made this possible and the idea of develop-
ment which interprets everything in terms of its early
origin and gradual growth. In consequence, the older
interpreters of the Bible consistently tended to read
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 9
the meanings of the New Testament back into the
Old, to level up the Old Testament toward the New,
until there was nothing in the New Testament which
could not by direct statement, by type, symbol, or
allegory, be found in the Old.
To us it would seem obvious that the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity arose after the church had be-
gun to meditate on the significance of Jesus. But our
fathers found the doctrine of the Trinity all through
the Old Testament. Luther found it in the opening
chapter of Genesis: "Let us make"; 1 he found it in
Psalm 67:
>
God, even our own God, will bless us.
God will bless us. 11 2
Calvin, a superb exegete, had to rebuke those ancient
fathers who, as he thought, had carried this process
much too far. They had based argument for the
Trinity upon the story that at the sacred oak of
Mamre Abraham had bowed once when greeting three
heavenly visitors and so had recognized one God in
three persons.
3
This leveling up of the Old Testament by reading
into it the message of the New is most familiar to us
through the deeply ingrained habit of finding definite
references to Jesus throughout the older record.
¹ Commentary on Genesis, Ch. I, verse 26a, in translation by J. N.
Lenker, Vol. I, 109.
2 Dictata super Psalterium 1513-1516 Glossa: Psalmus LXVI
(LXVII) lines 20-23, 40-41, in Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe,
Weimar, Vol. 3, 383.
3
³ John Calvin: Commentary on Genesis, Ch. XVIII, Sec. 2, last ¶,
in translation by John King, Vol. I, 470.
IO
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Luther said that Genesis contained more figures of
Christ and his kingdom than any other book in the
Bible.¹ The book of Proverbs would hardly suggest
itself to us as likely to yield rich doctrinal material,
but probably few passages in Scripture have been
more consistently used as proof of the divine nature
of Jesus than the eighth chapter of Proverbs. In a
word, the Bible has not been conceived as a record of
developing ideas and ideals, but as a repository of
truth in which from beginning to end could be found
everything that New Testament Christians believed.
From Genesis to Revelation it has been supposed to
speak with unanimous voice the theology of the early
church. In this respect Athanasius is typical of the
general method of ancient interpretation. "Athana-
sius saw no development of truth through the ages
of biblical history," says Gilbert, "and no differ-
ences of doctrinal type. All parts of the Bible were
equally good, in his judgment, as sources of proof-
texts." 2
If one supposes that the Reformation changed this
general view and use of Scripture, he can readily
disabuse himself by reading the commentaries and
books of apologetics. Indeed, one wishes that one
were not dealing with such typical-material when he
quotes from Pfeiffer, a Lutheran superintendent of the
sixteenth century. According to him Genesis "must
be received strictly"; "it contains all knowledge
¹ In Genesin Declamationes, closing ¶, in Weimar edition quoted
above, Vol. 24, 710.
2 George Holley Gilbert: Interpretation of the Bible; A Short His-
tory, 121.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE II
human and divine"; "twenty-eight articles of the
Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; it is "an
arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts of
atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Cal-
vinists, Socinians and Baptists"; it is "the source of
all sciences and arts, including law, medicine, phi-
losophy and rhetoric"; it is "the source and essence
of all histories and of all professions, trades and
works"; it is "an exhibition of virtues and vices" and
"the origin of all consolation.” 1
Fortunately for us, spiritual efficiency in the use of
the Bible is not entirely dependent upon correctness.
of exegesis. These older interpreters who used the
Book in ways now impossible for us did not on that
account fail to find there the sustenance and inspira-
tion which we may miss if we trust too much to our
keener instruments and too little to spiritual insight.
Just as men raised life-sustaining crops from the
earth's soil long before they analyzed the earth's
strata, so they got from Scripture the bread of life even
if the chronological arrangement of the documents
was yet undreamed. Nevertheless, it is of obvious.
importance that a new approach to the Bible has been
forced upon us. No longer can we think of the Book
as on a level, no longer read its maturer messages
back into its earlier sources. We know now that
every idea in the Bible started from primitive and
childlike origins and, with however many setbacks
and delays, grew in scope and height toward the
culmination in Christ's Gospel. We know now that
¹ Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with The-
ology in Christendom, Vol. II, 312,
I2
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
the Bible is the record of an amazing spiritual devel..
opment.¹
III
The first book of which I know that endeavored to
take this general idea and fill in its outline with definite
content by actually tracing through the Scripture the
development of significant ideas was written by Pro-
fessor Toy of Harvard, and was published thirty-
four years ago.2 Since then the material has grown
richer year by year. Probably the emergence of the
hope of resurrection among the Hebrews and its con-
summation in the New Testament has been more
fully traced than any other subject. But whether it
be the hope of life eternal or the idea of God, right-
eousness, sin, sacrifice, worship, the story of the
development of Scriptural concepts is at least partially
available. No preacher ought to go into his work
without the equipment and stimulus which this new
approach to the Bible gives.
Obviously this is no place for tracing in detail the
various roadways through Scripture which the great
faiths and ideals of the Gospel traveled from their
primitive origin to their consummation in the New
Testament. But we may well give clarity and content
1 The reader, of course, must never take the actual order of docu-
ments in our Bible as indicative of the chronological order in which
they originally were produced. The first chapter of Genesis, for
example, is very late. For information see Bibliography at the close
of this lecture.
2 Crawford Howell Toy: Judaism and Christianity; A Sketch of
the Progress of Thought from Old Testament to New Testament.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 13
to what we are saying by brief illustrations of this
fresh and rewarding approach to the Book. In the
field of ethics, for example, the development of moral
ideals within the Bible presents a fascinating story.
When one turns to the first conceptions as to the
nature of duty and its range, one is impressed with
certain clearly marked characteristics of early Hebrew
thought. For one thing, the range of duty was strictly
limited to special social groups. A man's obligations
to his family, his clan, his tribe, his nation—to the
social groups, that is, in which his membership was
recognized were set forth often on a high plane.
But obligation outside these boundaries was very
dim, if it was there at all.
This, of course, was associated with the geographical
limitation of Jehovah himself. As the early writings
of the Old Testament clearly reveal, Jehovah, at first
one among many gods, dwelt with his own special
people and exercised no jurisdiction beyond their
boundaries. So long, then, as religious imagination
conceived of God as limited in his interest and power
by the territory of his people, the sense of moral
obligation could have no wider range. Men who can-
not think of their God as caring for other peoples will
not themselves care for them. So long as Jehovah
and Chemosh were both real characters with settled
hostility a natural estate between them, the Hebrew
people of Jehovah could not be expected to recognize
ethical responsibilities to the Moabitish people of
Chemosh.
Here we have the explanation of those deeds in the
Old Testament which from our youth have shocked
14
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
us by their barbarity. The ruthless extermination
of the Amalekites-"both man and woman, infant
and suckling"-was due not to inhumanity as a
theory of moral action, but to the limitation of the
field within which humane action was a duty. Sam-
uel's oft-quoted words, "to obey is better than sacri-
fice," 2 were a high-minded man's indignant rebuke
because Saul had not killed Agag. Samuel was doubt-
less humane within the social group where such an
attitude was virtuous, but it never had occurred to
him that the realm of moral obligation took in Agag
and his people.
Here, too, is the explanation of the ethics of the
book of Deuteronomy. Its humane quality is ex-
traordinary. Few more beautiful passages can be
found than its injunctions to philanthropy. Its legal
applications of the spirit of mercy make it one of the
most remarkable of ancient books. All this goodwill,
however, was expended upon Israel and her prose-
lytes; the horizons never lifted to take in moral obliga-
tions to alien people.
Start now with this tribal morality and the road-
way leading up to the New Testament, where all
boundaries are down and God is calling all humanity
into his kingdom, is alike one of the most significant
that man ever traveled and one of the most rewarding
that man can study now. To see in the Bible new
world-contacts breaking down the old walls of isola-
tion, to watch prophets enlarging their thought of
God and thereby widening their sense of moral obliga-
tion, to feel the significance of great hours of vision,
11 Samuel 15:3.
2 I Samuel 15:22.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 15
"¹
as when Isaiah hears God say, "Blessed be Egypt my
people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel
mine inheritance," ¹ to rejoice in the widening inter-
nationalism of books of propaganda, like Jonah, until
at last, under the influence of Jesus, religion is uni-
versalized, human personality regardless of national
or racial lines is made the supreme treasure, men of
every tribe, tongue, people, and nation are welcomed
into one brotherhood, and a kingdom of God on earth
is promised to which men shall come from east, west,
north, and south-so to see the Bible is to enter
creatively into what God was really doing in that
amazing spiritual development whose record the
Bible is. Moreover, it gives the preacher a new grip
on the significance and necessity of his message. All
too clearly he sees how far back in the Old Testament
the world still is living, how much our morality be-
longs to the days of Saul and Samuel, how little we
have lifted it to the level of the Christian Gospel.
Consider another illustration of this approach to the
Bible. Prayer as intimate personal fellowship with
the unseen Friend is to us, however lamely we may
exercise our privilege, the very center of our inward
relationship with God. But the Bible at its beginning
had no such idea of man's relationship with God, and
the reasons are clear. For one thing, the idea of God
in the earliest writings of the Bible was such that few
would desire to have intimate fellowship with him.
Read Exodus 4:24-26, for example, and see that a
God who, out of pure caprice, at a wayside inn started
to kill a man on sight and was only estopped by the
1 Isaiah 19:25.
16
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
quick action of the man's wife in circumcizing her son,
was not a God with whom close communion would be
desirable. Or when on Sinai "thunders and light-
nings, and a thick cloud upon the mount" 1 were the
evidences of the divine Presence, one would not be
allured by such a thought of God to intimate fellow-
ship. Rather, the people stood afar off and said to
Moses, "Speak thou with us, and we will hear; but let
not God speak with us, lest we die." 2 For a long time
in the development of Old Testament religion, the
conception of God was lacking in those qualities
which would have led anybody to enter into his inner
chamber, and having shut his door, to pray to his
Father who is in secret.³
Moreover, even though one had wished so to pray,
it would have been impossible. God was not thought
of as a spiritual Presence everywhere available to the
devout and seeking soul. He was localized. He
dwelt on Sinai, or later in the Ark, or later in the
Canaanitish high places reconsecrated into shrines of
Jehovah. In those days in Israel, if a man wanted to
perform an act of worship he did not think of entering
into his inner chamber; he went up into his village's
high place and made an offering. "In every place
where I record my name," says Jehovah in Exodus,
"I will come unto thee." 4
Deeper yet in making impossible the New Testa-
ment idea of secret prayer was the limitation of
Jehovah's interest. He was not at the beginning
thought of as caring for individuals one by one. He
1 Exodus 19:16.
3 Cf. Matthew 6:6.
2 Exodus 20:19.
4 Exodus 20:24.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
17
was the God of the nation and he regarded individuals
only as they were incidentally affected by the national
fortunes. Not yet had the personality of the individ-
ual been shaken loose from its submergence in the
mass. Not yet was religion the relationship of the
soul with God; it was the relationship of the social
group with its heavenly chieftain.
1
Even in earthly justice the individual was treated
only as part of the group. When Achan secreted booty
from Jericho his whole family was put to death; ¹ be-
cause Saul slaughtered the Gibeonites his two sons
and five grandsons were handed over to be killed and
hung up in the mountain of Gibeah; 2 because Ahab
had allowed Naboth to be killed, Jehu killed Ahab's
son Joram.3 Everywhere in early Hebrew history, as
with all primitive peoples, the individual had no
standing save as an item in the corporate mass. When
Jehovah visits "the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children, upon the third and upon the fourth genera-
tion of them that hate" him,4 we are dealing not with
a premonition of modern ideas of heredity, but with
a very ancient idea of corporate responsibility in
which the separate rights of the individual had no
place. Of course, so prevalent a conception affected
religion; of course religion was not a personal, intimate
fellowship of the soul with God.
Start now with this beginning in the Old Testa-
ment-a God from whom one would wish to stand
far off in awe and fear, a God localized so that his
spiritual Presence is not available in secret prayer, a
¹ Joshua, Ch. 7.
3 II Kings 9:24-26.
2 II Samuel 21:1-9.
4 Exodus 20:5.
18
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
J
God who does not even care for individuals save as
they are temporarily members of the social group—
how lowly a beginning it was and how magnificent is
the development which leads us up and out into the
New Testament!
One who knows the Book can trace the major steps
of this amazing growth. He can feel the effect of the
Exile as it shattered the social group and threw in-
dividuals back on God. He can watch prophets like
Ezekiel in his eighteenth chapter stalwartly attacking
the old theology which submerged the individual in
the mass, or like Jeremiah breaking quite over old
restraints into deep personal piety and trust: "O
Jehovah, my strength, and my stronghold, and my
refuge in the day of affliction." He can see the hope
of resurrection emerging into confident faith, with all
the heightening of personal worth which it involved,
for death, as another said, is not a factory gate through
which men go in crowds, but a turnstile through which
they go one by one. At last, in some of the later
Psalms, one finds a view of God full of New Testa-
ment anticipations:
“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.
""
As for the New Testament itself, the old limitations
1 Jeremiah 16:19.
2 Psalm 139:7-IC.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 19
with which the process started are there quite done
away. God is severe in punishment upon impenitent
iniquity, but to those who seek him he is infinitely
good and gracious-who would not wish him for an
unseen Friend? He is universally available for every
willing soul, "a Spirit: and they that worship him
must worship in spirit and truth." 1 He cares for men
individually, loving us every one as though there were
but one of us to love. And prayer is not now sending
a delegate up Sinai to brave his thunders, but going
into the inner chamber, shutting the door, and speak-
ing to the Father who seeth in secret.
Did a dubious morning twilight ever break into a
more glorious noon?
IV
There are four ways in which to know the Bible.
The first is to be acquainted with its beauty spots,
and this, of course, is the way in which the great
majority of people know the Book. Some of the
choicest narratives in the Old Testament, notably
the matchless stories of Joseph, a few of the greatest
Psalms, preeminently the 23d, select samples of the
resonant eloquence of Isaiah, a few of the parables of
Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, some of Paul's.
supreme passages, especially the 13th chapter of First
Corinthians-such is the Bible which most people
know. Read Cromwell's letters and you get a fair
idea of the way our fathers knew the Scripture. They
knew it all. Its minor characters were as familiar as
1 John 4:24.
20
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
its stars, and to Cromwell's correspondents reference
to Phinehas was evidently as understandable as ref-
erence to Paul. But it is not so with us. As Dr.
Charles Sylvester Horne once put it: "To-day this
great territory of Scripture is like a modern continent;
extreme and unhealthy congestion at certain well-
known centers, and vast tracts of country uncul-
tivated and unknown." 1
The second way to know the Bible is to know its
individual books. Many a man has vainly struggled
to find interest and sense in some sections of the
Scripture, like a collection of prophetic sermons in
the Old Testament or an epistle in the New, and then,
discovering what the book really was about, what
kind of man wrote it, when he wrote it, why he wrote
it, to whom he wrote it, has seen the light break until
what was dull and opaque became luminous and clear.
I never think of Paul's letter to Philemon without
seeing Tychicus and Onesimus when first they carried
it across the Empire from Rome to Colossæ. Onesi-
mus must have clung to it as his only hope of esca-
ping the dire penalties of a runaway slave. One who
has traveled and trembled with that returning man
and seen him thrust Paul's letter fearfully into his mas-
ter's hand will not thereafter read it without a thrill.
But to read the books of the Bible without thus know-
ing their vivid settings is like listening to one half of a
telephone conversation.
A third way to know the Bible is to know its char-
acters. For the Bible is biography and he who would
understand its meaning must familiarly acquaint
1 The Romance of Preaching, 216–217.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
21
himself with the men and women who throng its
pages and illustrate its truth. As a lad I started to
read the Scripture through according to the familiar
schedule, three chapters each week-day and five on
Sunday, by which we were assured that in a single
year we could complete the reading of the Book.
I got safely through Numbers and Leviticus, even
Proverbs did not altogether quench my ardor, but I
stuck in the middle of Jeremiah and never got out.
I do not blame myself, for how can a boy read Jeremiah
in its present form and understand it? To-day,
however, there is no character in the Old Testament
who in my estimation towers so high as Jeremiah.
His was the richest experience of personal religion,
I think, known on earth before our Lord. Get Driver's
translation of his book, Skinner's monograph on him,
Prophecy and Religion," George Adam Smith's new
exposition, and, for homiletical suggestions, Cheyne's
"Jeremiah, His Life and Times" and Gillies' "Jere-
miah, the Man and His Message," and acquaint
yourself with this great prophet. A braver, gentler,
more exquisite, or more courageous soul has not often
walked the earth, and his spiritual pioneering in the
realm of personal religion made him a forerunner of
Jesus and one of the eminent benefactors of the
66
race.
If one is to know the Bible well he must so know its
characters. Its men and women must be real peo-
ple in his imagination and his affection. He must
come up to what the Bible says by way of the lives
through whom the Bible says it, until Amos the shep-
herd of Tekoa, or Hosea of the ruined home and broken
22
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
heart, Peter the vacillating changed to rock, or Paul
of the indwelling Christ and the unconquerable pas-
sion for the Cross, are his familiar friends.
But indispensable as are these three ways of know-
ing the Book-its beauty spots, its individual writings,
its revealing characters—all of them together are not
enough. Only as a man is able to trace up through the
whole Scripture the development of its structural
ideas does he really know the Bible.
To start with God conceived like a man who walks
in a garden in the cool of the day, or as one who comes
down from the sky to confuse men's speech lest they
should build their tower so high as to reach his home;
to know the road that leads out from that beginning
until in the New Testament God revealed in Christ is
the spiritual Presence in whom we live, and move, and
have our being, whose name is love, and whose temples
are human hearts; and to be able in any book or pas-
sage to locate oneself with reference to this progres-
sive revelation of the meaning of God-that is to
know the Bible.
To start with man whose only soul is his physical
breath and who, lacking alike separate rights here
and immortality hereafter, is identified with his body
and lost in his social group; to see the individual shaken
loose from the mass and lifted up into royal worthful-
ness, and within the individual the spiritual distin-
guished from the physical until in the New Testa-
ment man is spirit, inwardly renewed though the
outward man perish; to know the details of the journey
which men made from that starting point to that
conclusion, with all its rough acclivities, its devious
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 23
wanderings, its glorious vistas, its doubts and its
victory—that is to know the Bible.
To start with the demands of God on man in-
terpreted in terms of tribal custom, with ethics and
rubric jumbled together so that God equally hates
David's sin with Bathsheba and David's taking of
a census, or requires alike freedom from murder and
the refusal to seethe a kid in its mother's milk; to
see the prophetic task so magnificently performed by
which righteousness was made central in the character
of God and in his requirements of mankind, until in the
Gospel God's will, freed from clinging ceremonialism,
is completely moralized and men to please him must
be inwardly right in thought and outwardly merciful
in life; and at any point in this development to know
the men whose insight brought new light, and the
books and passages which represent the crucial hours
of choice that is to know the Bible.
To start with man's suffering as a curse from God,
with all trouble regarded as divine punishment, so
that wherever there was misery at all there was the
double misery of interpreting it as a sign of God's
disfavor; to see wiser, truer ideas of God surely but
hardly dislodging more ancient thoughts as the book
of Job argued against the old theology, or Isaiah's
53d chapter sounded a new note in the interpretation
of suffering; to see suffering gradually redeemed from
its old interpretation until, while some of it is still
punishment, more of it is welcomed as spiritual dis-
cipline, and a part of it is lifted up into the glory of
vicarious sacrifice; to see the process crowned in the
Cross of Christ, where suffering becomes voluntary
24
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
sacrifice as the means by which alone God can save
the world; and at any point in this whole development
to know the road by which the truth had traveled
hitherto and where it is going next-that is to know
the Bible.
From our youth up many of us have been familiar
with the phrase "progressive revelation." It is a
good phrase. But now the means are in our hands to
fill it with rich, substantial content. Not only can we
believe that the Bible does represent a progressive
revelation, but we can clearly and in detail watch it
progress. We can know where the Scripture's major
ideas started; we can trace the routes they took; we
can watch them in periods of rapid traveling and in
days when the going was difficult and slow. We can
enter into their defeats, their hair-breadth escapes,
and costly victories; and we can see the way the Gospel
of Jesus carried them up to a great height "not to
destroy, but to fulfil."
That is the new approach to the Bible.
V
Certain results follow from this approach which
ought to give relief to the thought, and power to the
work, of every preacher who uses it.
For one thing, we are saved by it from the old and
impossible attempt to harmonize the Bible with itself,
to make it speak with unanimous voice, to resolve its
conflicts and contradictions into a strained and artifi-
cial unity. How could one suppose that such internal
harmony ever could be achieved between writings so
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 25
vital and real, springing hot out of the life of the
generations that gave them being, and extending in
their composition over at least twelve hundred years?
Listen to Ecclesiastes:
"A living dog is better than a dead lion. For
the living know that they shall die: but the dead
know not anything, neither have they any more
a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
As well their love, as their hatred and their envy,
is perished long ago; neither have they any more
a portion for ever in anything that is done under
the sun"; "For that which befalleth the sons of
men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth
them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea,
they have all one breath; and man hath no pre-
eminence above the beasts: for all is vanity."1
And here is a passage from First Corinthians:
"For this corruptible must put on incorrup-
tion, and this mortal must put on immortality.
But when this corruptible shall have put on in-
corruption, and this mortal shall have put on
immortality, then shall come to pass the saying
that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy victory? O death, where
is thy sting?" 2
No ingenuity of exegesis ever can make those two
agree. The fact is that at the beginning Hebrew relig-
ion had no hope of immortality. Its future state in
1 Ecclesiastes 9:4-6 and 3:19.
2 I Corinthians 15:53-55.
26
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
1
Sheol was shadowy semi-existence concerning which
the dreariest words in the Hebrew vocabulary were
used. It was the land of "forgetfulness," of "si-
lence," 2 of "
"2 of "destruction;" and when one psalmist.
thought of it he said,
"Oh spare me, that I may recover strength,
Before I go hence, and be no more.
Then the hope of resurrection began to grow in Israel.
The story of its emergence, its struggle, its victory, is
one of the most thrilling in the Book. But there were
some who fought against this new faith with all their
might and scorn. The book of Ecclesiastes is their
voice. It is the Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám in the
Old Testament. Not for the world would I have the
book of Ecclesiastes taken out of the Bible; it supplies
an indispensable element in the record of a marvelous
development; but the endeavor to harmonize it with
the hope of immortality which glows in the 73d Psalm
and is brought to light in the whole of the New Testa-
ment is now a process as unnecessary as it is impos-
sible.
Again, read the ninth chapter of Esther, where the
writer rejoices in a vengeful massacre, or the closing
words of the 137th Psalm, which even Gounod's glori-
ous music cannot redeem from brutality:
"Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee
As thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
Against the rock.”
1 Psalm 88:12.
3 Job 26:6,
2 Psalm 94:17.
4 Psalm 39:13.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
27
The task of harmonizing such ethical conceptions
with the Sermon on the Mount surely is too much for
human wit or patience. The Old Testament exhibits.
many attitudes indulged in by men and ascribed to
God which represent early stages in a great develop-
ment, and it is alike intellectually ruinous and morally
debilitating to endeavor to harmonize those early
ideals with the revelations of the great prophets and
the Gospels. Rather, the method of Jesus is obvi-
ously applicable: "It was said to them of old time.
but I say unto you."
Moreover, the new approach to the Bible saves us
from the necessity of apologizing for immature stages
in the development of the Biblical revelation. From
the beginning of the church many things in the early
documents have been a stumbling-block to the faith-
ful. Indeed, before the church began, Philo of Alex-
andria with great candor faced difficulties that have
troubled modern minds. He was a passionate be-
liever in Judaism and gave his life to the task of
commending it to the acceptance of the Greek world.
But he says that it would be a sign of great simplicity
to think that the world was created in six days; ¹ that
the literal statement that woman was made out of a
man's rib is fabulous; 2 that to suppose Cain actually
built a city is "not only extraordinary, but contrary
to all reason;" 3 that to picture God literally planting
1
¹ Philo Judæus: Treatise on the Allegories of the Sacred Laws,
Book I, Sec. II, in translation by C. D. Yonge, Vol. I, 52.
2 Ibid., Book II, Sec. VII, 85.
3 Treatise on the Posterity of Cain, Sec. XIV, same volume as
above, 297.
28
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
a garden in Eden is "impiety" and "fabulous non-
sense." In general Philo would regard it as utterly
missing the Old Testament's real meaning to take any
of the anthropomorphic representations of God in the
Old Testament as representing literal fact.
Now, the older Hebrew and Christian interpreters,
lacking the modern historic point of view and scien-
tific apparatus, had one resource in their difficulties.
They allegorized away the things they did not like.
They read out the literal sense and read in the sense
they wished to find. They ascribed to ancient writers
a mystical knowledge of all later learning and made
the early stories of a childlike age the parables and
symbols of the Greek philosophy or of Christian
theology. Such a resource is no longer possible to us.
We know that the early writings of the Bible meant
what they said. But we do not need to apologize for
their crudities. They are early stages in a great devel-
opment. Their lack is the lack of immaturity, not of
perversion. They are as acorns to the oak, fountains
to the river, and as such they require no defending as
though they were impertinences in the revelation of
God. They are the infancy of a progressive unfolding
of the divine character and purpose, and they are to
be judged, as all things are to be judged, by what they
came to in the end. And what they came to in the
end was Christ and his Gospel.
VI
This leads us to our final statement about the con-
sequences of the new approach to the Bible. It re-
1 ¹ Treatise on the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, Book I, Sec. XIV, 63.
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE 29
stores to us the whole Book. It gives to us a com-
prehensive, inclusive view of the Scriptures and en-
ables us to see them, not piecemeal, but as a whole.
Those of us who accept the modern knowledge of the
Bible as assured and endeavor to put it to good use
are continually being accused of tearing the Book to
pieces, of cutting out this or that, and of leaving a mere
tattered patchwork of what was once a glorious unity.
The fact is precisely the opposite. The new approach
to the Bible once more integrates the Scriptures,
saves us from our piecemeal treatment of them, and
restores to us the whole book seen as a unified develop-
ment from early and simple beginnings to a great
conclusion.
One who has mastered the new approach is at
home in any part of the Bible and can use all of it.
He opens its pages at any point and knows where he is.
He knows the road by which the thought that he finds
there has traveled. He knows the contribution that
there is being made to the enlarging revelation. He
knows where next the road will turn and climb, and
he knows where it all comes out in the Gospel. Once
more, in a new way, he has regained what once our
fathers had and what recently the church has lost:
ability to see the Bible in its entirety and to use it as
a whole.
For no part of it is without its usefulness. People
to-day are living in all the stages of development
which its records represent. Its earliest, crudest sins
and shames, views of God, and ideals of man are all
among us. As one travels through the Book there is
no place on the road where one does not meet some
30
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
problems which modern folk are facing, some points
of view which they ought to get or ought to outgrow,
some faiths which they ought to achieve or ought to
improve upon. So long as a man knows the whole
road and judges every step of it by the spirit of Christ,
who is its climax, he can use it all.
This is the finest consequence of the new approach
to the Bible: it gives us the whole Book back again.
If some one protests that it spoils the idea of in-
spiration, I ask why. We used to think that God
created the world by fiat on the instant, and then,
learning that the world evolves, many were tempted
to cry out that God did not create it at all.
We now
know that changing one's idea of a process does not
in itself alter one's philosophy of origins. So we used
to think of inspiration as a procedure which produced
a book guaranteed in all its parts against error, and
containing from beginning to end a unanimous system
of truth. No well-instructed mind, I think, can hold
that now. Our idea of the nature of the process has
changed. What has actually happened is the produc-
tion of a Book which from lowly beginnings to great
conclusions records the development of truth about
God and his will, beyond all comparison the richest
in spiritual issue that the world has known. Per-
sonally, I think that the Spirit of God was behind
that process and in it. I do not believe that man ever
found God when God was not seeking to be found.
The under side of the process is man's discovery; the
upper side is God's revelation. Our ideas of the
method of inspiration have changed; verbal dictation,
inerrant manuscripts, uniformity of doctrine between
THE NEW APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
31
1000 B. C. and 70 A. D.-all such ideas have become
incredible in the face of the facts. But one who
earnestly believes in the divine Spirit will be led by
the new approach to the Bible to repeat with freshened
meaning and deepened content the opening words of
the Epistle to the Hebrews:
"God, having of old time spoken unto the
fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in
divers manners, hath at the end of these days
spoken unto us in his Son."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religion of Israel, E. Kautsch, in the Extra Volume of A Dic-
tionary of the Bible, edited by James Hastings. Scribner's.
Development of Doctrine in the Apocryphal Period, W. Fair-
weather, in the same volume.
The Religion of the Hebrews, John Punnett Peters. Ginn & Co.
The Moral Life of the Hebrews, J. M. Powis Smith. Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament, H. Wheeler Robin-
son. Scribner's.
God in the Old Testament, Robert Alexander Aytoun. Doran.
The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament, Arthur S.Peake.
Robert Bryant.
The Literature of the Old Testament in its Historical Develop-
ment, Julius A. Bewer. Columbia University Press.
An Introduction to the Old Testament Chronologically Ar-
ranged, Harlan Creelman. Macmillan.
The Origin and Permanent Value of the Old Testament, Charles
Foster Kent. Scribner's.
The New Testament in the Christian Church, Edward Caldwell
Moore. Macmillan.
The New Testament in the Twentieth Century, Maurice Jones.
Macmillan.
32
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
The Approach to the New Testament, James Moffatt. Doran.
The Story of the New Testament, Edgar Johnson Goodspeed.
University of Chicago Press.
The Historical Bible, Charles Foster Kent. Scribner's.
The Bible; its Origin, its Significance, and its Abiding Worth,
Arthur S. Peake. Hodder & Stoughton.
How the Bible Grew, Frank Grant Lewis. University of Chicago
Press.
The Christian Doctrine of Man, H. Wheeler Robinson. T. and
T. Clark.
The Use of the Scriptures in Theology, William Newton Clarke.
Scribner's.
•
LECTURE II
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
I
The results of the modern study of the Bible, as we
have said, can be grouped under two heads, and the
second of these, by far the more difficult to handle and
the more troublesome to modern minds, now claims
our thought. If we begin, not with the critical proc-
esses which have produced the result, but with the
practical consequence itself as it affects the minds of
multitudes of people, the matter can be simply put:
the Bible appears an ancient book difficult to read,
understand, believe, and follow in the modern world.
One wonders how many folk have felt misgivings
over the situation described by Dr. Robinson:
"A business man, harassed by the industrial
problems of modern democracy, drifts in to the
service of an English cathedral. The majesty of
his surroundings carries him back to the religion
and art of the thirteenth century. The Creeds
take him on a longer journey to the early cen-
turies of the Catholic Church. But the First
Lesson demands the longest pilgrimage of all,
for he must listen, perhaps, to the story of Jezebel,
of whose body was found no more than the skull,
and the feet, and the palms of the hands. It is
33
34
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
worth while to try and realise the strangeness of
the history which has incorporated such flotsam
and jetsam of Semitic story into the ritual of an
English cathedral in the twentieth century after
Christ. But many at the present day are con-
cerned less with the wonder than with the in-
congruity of it." 1
If this difficulty of naturalizing the Bible in the
modern world concerned only stories like those about
Jezebel, it might be comfortably arranged. The real
problem lies deeper. When one moves back to the
Scripture with a mind accustomed to work in modern
ways, he finds himself in a strange world. The people
who walk through its pages often do not speak his
language, nor use his intellectual viewpoints, nor ex-
plain occurrences by his categories. Knowing modern
astronomy he turns to the Bible to find the sun and
moon standing still or the shadow retreating on Ahaz'
dial. Knowing modern biology he hears that when
Elisha had been so long dead that only his bones were
left, another dead body, thrown into the cave where
he was buried, touched his skeleton and sprang to life
again, or that after our Lord's resurrection many of
the saints long deceased arose and appeared in Jeru-
salem. Knowing modern physics he turns to the
Bible and reads that light was created three days
before the sun and that an axe-head floated when
2
3
¹H. Wheeler Robinson: The Religious Ideas of the Old Testa-
ment, 212-213.
2 Joshua 10:12-13; II Kings 20:11.
3 II Kings 13:21; Matthew 27:52-53.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 35
Elisha threw a stick into the water.¹ Knowing mod-
ern medicine he finds in the Scripture many familiar
ailments, epilepsy, deafness, dumbness, blindness,
insanity, ascribed to the visitation of demons.² Know-
ing that the sky is blue because of the infinite number
of dust-particles that catch and break up the light, he
finds himself in the Bible living under a solid “firma-
ment” “strong as a molton mirror," or a "paved
work of sapphire stone" from which a fiery chariot can
come down to snatch a living man by literal levitation
from the flat earth to his heavenly reward.³
Here is the perplexity which more than any other
afflicts the minds of educated men. They honor the
Bible. They know that in it are the springs of the
noblest elements in our civilization. They stand uncov-
ered before Jesus Christ. But they are honestly both-
ered by many things in Scripture. They do not know
what to make of them. They find it hard to use one
set of mental presuppositions and categories in every
other realm of life and another set in religion. They
have to shift their mental gear too suddenly when
they turn from their ordinary intellectual processes
to the strange ways of thinking that the Bible con-
tains.
II
If this practical difficulty in using the old Book in
the new world so confuses many minds to-day it is
¹ Genesis 1:3-5, 16–19; II Kings 6:5–6.
2 Matthew 17:15,18; Mark 9:25; Matthew 9:32; 12:22; Luke
8:27, 35.
3 Genesis 1:6; Job 37:18; Exodus 24:10; Psalm 136:6; Isaiah 11:12;
II Kings 2:11.
36
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
important to understand the process that has caused
the problem. What has happened can be briefly put:
historical knowledge has given us a vivid understand-
ing of the old world from which the Scriptures came
until we see the Bible's original, native meanings in
terms of the time when it was written; and, on the
other side, the new world in which we live has become
very new, with ways of thinking that never were on
earth before; and these two worlds stand over against
each other alien at a multitude of points. What once
was said of Jehovah can in a different sense be said of
the Book-its thoughts are not our thoughts, neither
are its ways our ways. This is the second result of
our modern study of the Bible. It has made the
Scriptures appear in the light of an old Book in a new
world.
The ultimate cause of this problem is to be found in
the ambition of all Biblical scholarship to get at the
original meaning of Scripture, to discover in terms of
its historic significance just what any passage meant
to the folk who first wrote it and first read it. Surely,
this is not only an innocent ambition; it is an indis-
pensable goal for any interpreter of ancient literature
to seek. Nor is it new in the church's attitude toward
the Bible. Go back to the Syrian school of interpreta-
tion with Theodore of Mopsuestia for its scholar and
John Chrysostom for its preacher, a school that is
alike the glory and despair of the early church because
it rose so splendidly and then was so soon quenched
by ignorance, and you find an honest, earnest, and
energetic endeavor to get at the original historic sense
of Scripture. Those first great exegetes, in spite of the
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 37
prevalent allegorizing of their time, sought to know
what the Bible meant to say in terms of the time when
it was written. This, too, is the strength of Calvin's
work, which causes one modern admirer to call him
"the first scientific interpreter in the history of the
Christian Church."1 How could the Golden Rule of
exegesis be better put than in Calvin's dedicatory
letter to his Commentary on Romans: "This is in a
manner his [the interpreter's] whole charge: namely,
to show forth the mind of the writer whom he hath
taken upon himself to expound."
If, then, those older interpreters, with an eager
desire to get at the historic sense of the Bible, did not
fully achieve their end, it was not for lack of will but
for lack of means. Though they hungered and
thirsted for the original connotation of the Book, they
did not yet have the apparatus, historical, documen-
tary, linguistic, archeological, which could put them
in possession of the setting out of which the Bible
came, the ways men used to think, their social cus-
toms, intellectual categories, and prevalent beliefs.
What is new in our situation is the achievement of
new instruments. As never was true before in the
church's history, the scientific desire to get at the
historic sense of Scripture has scientific machinery
with which to work. Now we are able, as our fathers
were not, vitally to enter into the understanding of
older civilizations, their mental habits and social in-
stitutions, and in particular by many new avenues to
get at the world out of which the Bible came. We
can understand the original meaning of its words and
1 Kemper Fullerton: Prophecy and Authority, 133.
38
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
ways of thinking until, for those who know, that old
world lives again with picturesque vividness.
Consider the various disciplines that enter into
Biblical scholarship to-day and see how they all con-
tribute to one aim: to make luminous and clear the
historic meaning of the texts. First of all, knowledge
of the ancient languages has supplied an indispensable
instrument for the understanding of what the Bible
originally meant to say. In 1800 not a word of the
inscriptions of Egypt had been deciphered. In 1802
the Rosetta Stone began to surrender its secret. By
1832 decipherment of Egyptian inscriptions had been
put upon a secure basis. Since that time, as Driver
says, “the history, the art, the antiquities, the man-
ners and customs, the domestic life of an entire civili-
zation extending over some 4,000 years, have been
disinterred and made intelligible to the present genera-
tion." In 1849 not a word of all the Assyrian in-
scriptions had been translated except the names of
Nebuchadnezzar and his father. In 1851 Major Raw-
linson published, with grammatical notes, a trans-
lation of a tri-lingual inscription of Darius. Since
that time we have seen the rediscovery and recon-
struction of a great civilization of almost incalculable
antiquity which was once immensely influential on
Hebrew religion and which now is indispensable to
its full understanding. Even the linguistic relation-
ship of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Am-
haric, as dialects of one original language, was not
securely established before 1800, and since then stu-
dents of the Book have had put into their hands not
¹S. R. Driver: Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible, 4.
1
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 39
only an organized knowledge of Hebrew, but of all the
allied Semitic tongues and the different languages of
Egypt, to say nothing of a greatly improved knowl-
edge of the Hellenistic Greek in which the New Testa-
ment was written.¹
For another thing, the discovery and translation of
contemporary literatures have thrown a luminous light.
upon the historic meanings of the Scripture. To be
sure, the church has always known Josephus and
Philo, and certain apocalyptic books, notably Enoch,
have been used from the days of Origen and Jerome.
Yet, in a way no longer true, the Bible once stood out
sharply from antiquity, and the thought and life of
man that had lain around it remained in the shadow,
largely unregarded. Now the light spreads as current
books which sprang out of the same situations come
within our ken and, with others long known, are
subjected to careful scrutiny, and what in our knowl-
edge of Biblical times was incomplete is, by the new
information, often rounded out and fulfilled. So the
Jewish apocalypses have been brought to light in these
last few years, their importance has been vividly
realized, and the study of them has illumined the
development of apocalyptic hopes in Judaism. So
the work of Cumont, Reitzenstein, and others is
making clearer the meaning of those Hellenistic
mystery religions which surrounded and rivaled
Christianity and which affected some of the thought
and phraseology of the New Testament.
All this added knowledge of language and literature
has made textual criticism a powerful help in correct-
1 ¹ Ibid, 13-14.
40
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
ing obscure and perverted renderings and in getting
back as nearly as we can to the original autograph
copies of the Scriptures. How many people do not
know that the most ancient extant manuscript of the
Old Testament dates from the ninth century A. D. and
the most ancient extant Greek manuscript of the
New Testament from the fourth century; that the
versions are variant at so many points that one
could say of them what Jerome said of the Latin
translations of his day, that there are almost as many
forms of texts as there are copies? 1 The clearing up
of the texts, therefore, the selection of the more an-
cient or more sensible renderings, the correction of
obviously mistaken copying, have in all cases been
useful and in some cases, as with Jeremiah, have
rescued a book from obscurity.
To this same end of lighting up the original meaning
of the Bible, history makes an important contribution.
Nobly and rightly distinguished are those fathers of
history whose writings are still unexhausted quarries
of information, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and
Tacitus, yet Professor Shotwell is justified when he
exclaims, By what miracle has the long lost past been
at last recovered, in our own day, so that we are check-
ing up Herodotus by his own antiquity, correcting
the narrative of Livy or Tacitus by the very refuse
deposited beneath the streets upon which they
walked?" No longer the story of dynasties alone,
(
¹ St. Jerome: Preface to the Four Gospels (in Vulgate Version of
the New Testament), in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Sec-
ond Series., Vol. VI, 488.
• James T. Shotwell: An Introduction to the History of History, 2.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 41
but of peoples, their customs, laws, domestic habits,
mental categories, religious faiths, their folk-lore and
folk-ways, history, with its many modern auxiliaries,
has done for old civilizations whose influence lay
around and permeated the Bible what the spade has
done for Pompeii. Once more we can walk the ancient
streets, and, while life is gone, the memorials of its
presence are so clear that in imagination we can re-
construct the humanity that once toiled, dreamed,
thought, and suffered there.
Add to the list archeology and no long comment is
needed to make clear the incalculable service which
has been rendered by modern research to the under-
standing of the Bible. At innumerable points the
Scriptures have been corroborated, illumined, supple-
mented by the manifold results that have come from
the "romance of the spade." It was only in 1872 that
George Smith, working over some clay tablets from
the library of Asshurbanipal, found the first paral-
lels of the deluge story. The Daily Telegraph of
London offered him a thousand guineas to go to
Nineveh and describe his discoveries. He found more
of the deluge tablets and all the creation tablets. Nor
is the end yet. Every new discovery binds the Book
more closely to the life out of which it sprang and
reveals more clearly what its narratives, laws, rituals,
doctrines, and customs meant in terms of the gen-
erations when they arose.
Last but not least, comparative religion has made
an immense contribution to our understanding of the
original meanings of the Bible. Once the Hebrew
religion and its Christian fulfilment stood alone and
42
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
the religious life of the world outside was either
shrouded in obscurity or else was lumped in one
general condemnation as heathenism. Gone was the
noble catholicity of the early church's greater minds,
when on the basis of the doctrine of the Logos "which
lighteth every man," cosmopolitan Christians rec-
ognized all the world's wisdom and goodness as part
of the divine revelation. Gone was the breadth of
vision which had stirred Paul on Mars Hill and which
had made Clement of Alexandria say that philosophy
was given by God to the Greeks as "a schoolmaster
to bring the Hellenic mind . . . to Christ." The
older cosmopolitanism of the Græco-Roman world was
finally lost when the Empire fell, when the Turks shut
off the Orient from the Occident, and the shadows of
the medieval age closed in.
1
But the new world of broken boundaries and open
avenues has brought back to us interest in other
religions than our own, and with that interest, made
effective by the diligent study of the legends, cosmolo-
gies, rituals, doctrines of other people, new light has
come upon our sacred books. Supreme they may be,
but they are not, in their typical ways of conceiving
the world and describing events, isolated and alone.
Primitive cosmology, animal sacrifice, offering of
first fruits, circumcision, clean and unclean foods,
shrines on high places, priestly garments of linen,
sacred trees like the oak of Shechem, sacred chests
like the holy Ark, instruments for obtaining divine
oracles like the Urim or Thummim, ordeals to deter-
1 See, e. g., The Stromata, Book I, Ch. V, first ¶, in The Ante-
Nicene Fathers, Vol. II, 305.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 43
mine guilt or innocence,¹ angelic or demonic visita-
tions, and all manner of miracles, are familiar ele-
ments of man's religious life wherever its records
reveal the past or its present practises and beliefs
preserve unchanged an older heritage. Often, lec-
turing on some ancient idea or custom indicated in
our Bible, I hear from a missionary student a perfect
parallel out of the religious life of the people among
whom he works.
This, then, is the result which follows from all these
disciplines of modern scholarship converging on one
point: the world in which the Bible first was written
lives again in our thought. We can enter into its mind,
understand its problems, catch the native connota-
tion of its words. Historic imagination has well-
accredited data on which to work and can picture.
how men lived, thought, talked, and hoped in Scrip-
tural times. Perhaps what has been gained is as
nothing in comparison with the light that yet shall
come but, for all that, it is true that when we read the
Book to-day we read it with increasing clearness in
terms of its contemporary meanings. In a way never
true in Christian history before we stand face to face
with the historic sense of the Scriptures.
In the meantime, while this old world of the Bible
has been growing more vivid in our apprehension, the
new world in which we actually live has been growing
very new. Science has remade from top to bottom
our outlook on the physical universe; philosophy has
restated its problems, reformed its methods and,
when discussing old questions or new ones, uses pre-
See, e. g., Numbers 5:11-31.
1
44
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
4
suppositions and structural ideas of which the ancient
world never heard; the inductive method of scientific
investigation has revolutionized man's ways of dis-
covering and using truth; the idea of evolution in
biology has blossomed out into the idea of progress
in human life, a conception as far as possible removed
from the static view which controlled the ancient
world; ethical problems have so changed that polyg-
amy, chattel slavery, imperialistic government and
war are rightly recognized as sins to be hated and over-
come, although all of them are taken for granted in
large areas of the Bible without reproof, and in some
of the older documents are inculcated and encouraged;
democracy has arrived and has introduced ideas to
which older theories of the state were utter strangers;
the machine has remade our industry, and our whole
economic life, alike in its extent, its methods, and its
problems, is far removed from the economic back-
ground of the Bible. We live in a new world, we pic-
ture with increasing clearness the contemporary
meanings of an old world, and we feel the incompat-
ibility between them-that is the difficulty which
multitudes of modern folk are having with the Bible.
On the one side is the Semitic world-view with its
flat earth surrounded by the sea, and the solid firma-
ment a little way above; on the other our modern
universe of immeasurable distances. On the one side
is a world where God's providence is specially revealed
in miracle; on the other our world of law where God
is seen, not in the irregular, but in the regular. On
the one side we find a world thronged with demons
who cause sickness, drive men mad, inspire sin, and
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
45
enter into a universal conspiracy to overthrow God;
on the other a world where the fear of demons is a
superstition. On the one side are apocalyptic hopes
where expectations of God's triumph center in a
supernatural invasion of the world; on the other are
our social hopes that foresee a prolonged fight ahead,
with many a catastrophe, and many a long, hard pull.
In the Bible immortality is associated with the resur-
rection of the body; among us immortality is con-
ceived as escape from the body. There the person
of our Lord is interpreted in terms of the Jewish
Messiahship or of Alexandrian Platonism; here are
philosophical methods and structural ideas that have
no kinship with apocalypses or with Philo. There is
an ethic developed in a theocracy under autocratic
governments; here an ethic inevitably shaped by the
new democracy and the new economic order.
That is the problem which the modern man faces
with his Bible, and to say that it is serious is to speak
mildly.
III
We may make this problem more vivid by illustra-
ting it in the realm where the church met it first and
where we have had the longest time to adjust our
thought—the changed views of the physical universe.
If we could divest ourselves of the scientific informa-
tion into the possession of which we were born and
reared, and with quite unsophisticated minds could
look out on the physical world, we should see it a
good deal as men used to see it in the childhood of the
race. The world looks flat; travel far enough in any
46
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
direction and you come to water, which evidently
surrounds the earth; dig deep enough and you come
to water, which evidently underlies the earth. Look
up and you see a blue canopy or vault, which encloses
and covers the earth; across this vault's inner side
move lights to illumine the earth by day and night;
water falls from the sky in rain, so that on the other
side of the vault there must be a sea, and there must
be apertures in the firmament through which the rain
comes down. That is the world-view which is pre-
sented by things as they look. That world-view in-
evitably constituted the early cosmology of man.
One finds it as the background of all Semitic thought
about the universe, and it is indicated in every passage
of the Bible that indicates anything at all about the
physical world.
4
3
In the Scriptures the flat earth is founded on an
underlying sea; ¹ it is stationary; 2 the heavens are like
an upturned bowl or canopy above it; the circum-
ference of this vault rests on pillars; the sun, moon,
and stars move within this firmament of special pur-
pose to illumine man; 5 there is a sea above the sky,
"the waters which were above the heavens,"
"6 and
through the "windows of heaven" the rain comes
down;7 within the earth is Sheol, where dwell the
shadowy dead; this whole cosmic system is sus-
pended over vacancy; and it all was made in six
8
9
¹ Psalm 136:6, 24:1-2, Genesis 7:11. 2 Psalm 93:1, 104:5.
³ Job 37:18, Genesis 1:6-8, Isaiah 40:22, Psalm 104:2.
4 Job 26:11, Psalm 104:3.
6 Genesis 1:7, Psalm 148:4.
8 Isaiah 14:9-11.
5 Genesis 1:14–18.
7 Psalm 78:23, Genesis 7:11.
9 Job 26:7.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
47
days, each with a morning and an evening,¹ a short and
measurable time before. This is the world-view of
the Bible.
Moreover, it remained the world-view of the Chris-
tian church for a long time. Augustine, with un-
compromising strictness, stated the authority of
Scripture in matters such as this: "Scripture, which
proves the truth of its historical statements by the
accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false in-
formation."2 Those early fathers have been severely
handled because they thus clung to a world-view
which might have been outgrown long before it was,
had not their literalism barred the way. In this in-
sistence upon an old cosmology, however, they were
but children of their age. To be sure, Lactantius, a
Christian writer of the fourth century, ridiculed the
idea of people on the other side of the earth. He writes:
"Is there any one so senseless as to believe
that there are men whose footsteps are higher
than their heads? or that the things which with us
are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an
inverted direction? that the crops and trees grow
downwards? that the rains, and snow, and hail fall
upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder
that hanging gardens are mentioned among the
seven wonders of the world, when philosophers
make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and
mountains? . . .
. I am at a loss what to say re-
1 Genesis, Ch. I.
2 The City of God, Book XVI, Ch. 9, first ¶, in The Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II, 315.
48
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
specting those who, when they have once erred,
consistently persevere in their folly, and defend
one vain thing by another." 1
It will not do, however, to charge this against Chris-
tianity, for Plutarch, the brilliant pagan, held pre-
cisely the same scornful attitude about the antip-
odes, 2
It is true also that many of the church fathers
treated all scientific investigation with high disdain.
Basil of Cæsarea thought it a matter of no inter-
est to us whether the earth is "spherical or cylin-
drical, if it resemble a disc and is equally rounded in
all parts, or if it has the form of a winnowing basket
and is hollow in the middle." 3 Said St. Ambrose:
"To discuss the nature and position of the earth does
not help us in our hope of the life to come." 4 Said
Eusebius: "We have justly kept aloof from the un-
profitable and erroneous and vain labor of them all,
and do not busy ourselves at all about the said sub-
jects, for we do not see the utility of them, nor any
tendency to benefit and gain good for mankind.” 5
While, however, an extreme other-worldliness was
1 The Divine Institutes, Book III, Ch. XXIV, first and third ¶¶,
in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VII, 94, 95.
2 Lynn Thorndike: A History of Magic and Experimental Science,
during the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era, Vol. I, 219.
3 The Hexameron, Homily IX, 1, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, Second Series, Vol. VIII, 101.
4 St. Ambrose: Hexameron, Liber I, Cap. VI, ¶ 22, in Patrologiæ
Latinæ, ed. by J. P. Migne, Vol. XIV, Column 132.
5 Preparation for the Gospel, Book XV, Ch. LXI, in translation by
E. H. Gifford, Part II, 852c.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 49
1
in part responsible for this contempt of scientific
inquiry, there was another motive which introduces
a new element into our judgment of the case. All
investigation of cosmology in the early centuries was
inextricably tied up with astrology. The whole
ancient world into which Christianity went believed
that the stars controlled and forecast human events.
This astrological fatalism permeated the life of the
people through and through. Nor was it a mere
popular superstition; the foremost scientific minds
that the early centuries produced believed it. Pliny
expounded the predictive power of comets; ¹ Seneca
believed that the planets forecast the future and that
unusual celestial phenomena were to be looked upon as
prodigies and portents; 2 Ptolemy vigorously defended
astrology and sheltered it from defeat for many
centuries by the authority of his great name; even
Galen, the pioneer of scientific healing, devoted two
entire books to the presentation of astrological medi-
cine. This tremendously powerful influence affected
many minds in the church and one wonders whether
in our New Testament the beautiful story of the star
of Bethlehem is not associated with the desire to
connect so great an event as the birth of Jesus with
some unusual portent in the heavens. At any rate,
more than one Christian teacher, notably John
Chrysostom, worked hard to dissociate the story from
3
¹ Natural History, Book II, Ch. XXIII.
2 See, e. g., Physical Science (Quaestiones Naturales), Book VII,
Ch. XXVIII, in translation by John Clarke, 302–303.
3
³ Lynn Thorndike: A History of Magic and Experimental Science
during the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era, Vol. I, 110.
50
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
astrology, lest the Scripture itself should be made the
friend of superstition.¹
The Christians hated astrological fatalism, rightly
looking upon it as a deadly enemy of the Gospel, and
because astrology and astronomy had not yet been
differentiated, the early church was often hostile to
or negligent of scientific inquiry.
Whatever motives entered into the situation, how-
ever, and whatever mitigations of judgment may be
proposed, the story of the church's attitude toward
the enlargement of scientific knowledge is pathetic.
Gradually and painlessly, to be sure, the Ptolemaic
cosmology took the place of the flat earth. This new
astronomy rounded out the earth into a sphere but
still left it stationary. Different, therefore, as the
Ptolemaic system was from Biblical science, it could
without too great violence be accommodated to the
texts. But when the Copernican system was proposed
the storm broke. It was a war of texts against facts.
Even Luther called Copernicus a fool for suggest-
ing that the earth moved, and roundly capped his
argument by calling to witness the Scripture which
says that Joshua made the sun stand still and not the
earth.2
What has happened since is now common property.
We hold a world-view whose structural bases were not
laid down by Moses in the thirteenth century B. C.,
but by Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century
1 The Gospel of St. Matthew, Homily Six, Secs. I-IV, in The
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. X, 36–39.
2 Tischreden, Vol. I (in Kritische Gesammtausgabe, Weimar), Nr.
855, 3d ¶, 419.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
51
A. D. Upon these structural bases an entirely new
conception of the physical universe has been built up.
It may be that temporarily Newton's theory of
gravitation did "tend to infidelity" 1 as John Wesley
said, but, for all that, it has been accepted and with
its corollaries has revolutionized man's thought. It
may be that the evolutionary hypothesis is dangerous
to the religious faith of many folk who welcome it
to-day, as some conservatives think, but, for all that,
the more facts we know the better founded does the
hypothesis appear. We live in a new world. We have
not kept the forms of thought and categories of ex-
planation in astronomy, geology, biology, which the
Bible contains. We have definitely and irrevocably
gotten new ones diverse from and irreconcilable with
the outlooks on the universe which earlier ages in
general and the Bible in particular had. Whatever
we may think of it, this is a fait accompli.
Recently I received from a man in Massachusetts a
letter attributing most human ills to the Copernican
astronomy. Everything had gone wrong, he said,
since men began believing in a round and moving
earth. As for him, he was sure that alike Copernicus.
and Newton were wrong. The Scripture is against
them, he wrote, and the facts sustain the Scripture's
claim. He is the only thoroughgoing literalist with
whom I ever dealt. He really believes the Bible from
cover to cover. He has not deceived himself with any
of those devious schemes by which less ingenuous
minds read into the first chapter of Genesis concep-
tions of the universe that never were thought of before
¹ Edwin Tenney Brewster: The Understanding of Religion, 26.
52
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
the modern age. But there are not many of him left.
He seems like one born out of due time and alive after
his day.
Do not suppose that one, granting all this, picks up
the first chapter of Genesis with condescension. For
myself, I think it holy ground. If you wish to know
how great a thing was done there of which we are the
illimitable debtors, come up to the creation story in
Genesis from the so-called parallels that are found in
the creation tablets of Babylonia. Folk call them
parallels, but I do not see how they do it if they have
read them. They are full of the quarrels of gods, the
fear of primeval dragons, the war of Tiamat and the
hosts of chaos against Marduk and the gods of light.
They do, indeed, give us the same cosmology, but
Marduk builds it up by slitting Tiamat like a flat fish
and making the firmament of her upper half and the
earth of her lower. When one turns from this welter
of mythology to the first chapter of Genesis, with its
stately and glorious exordium, "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth," one feels as though
he had left miasmic marshes for a high mountain with
clean air to breathe and great horizons to look upon.
Here a victory was gained for pure religion for which
we never can be too thankful. In place of polytheism,
ethical monotheism; in place of mythology with ugly
dragons and disgraceful fights, one God transcendent,
who says “Let be," and it is; in place of political desire
to exalt Marduk, god of Babylon, a religious devotion
which makes the chapter read more like a psalm than
a cosmology; in place of man created that the gods
may have some one to offer sacrifices to them, man
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
53
meant to be and fitted to be the friend and son of God
—such are a few of the contrasts between the so-called
parallels of Babylonia and the magnificent first chapter
of the Book. The only way in which to feel the force
of this is to read the documents. See if you do not
come from the old Semitic heritage to the Biblical
account as Stade came from the so-called Eden story
of Babylonia to the Eden story of the Scripture, say-
ing that it was like passing from the slough of a village
cesspool to a clean mountain spring.¹
This is the fair and rational approach to a true
estimate of the account of creation in Genesis: we
must come up to it from contemporary thinking, not
go back to it from modern science.
Nevertheless, the problem still remains. The
science of the Bible is not our science. That fact
troubles multitudes of minds. They are bothered by
it and spiritually disturbed. And when one goes to
church and hears some sermons one cannot blame
them. Let a Christian layman put into his own urgent
words the difficulty which many feel when they try
to read the old Book in this new age:
1
"Six days in the week we live in an ordered
world. On the seventh, we open the church door
on a land of topsy-turvy, where axes float, dry
sticks change to serpents, cities are let down out
of the sky, angels stir the water of wells, bedeviled
swine run violently into the sea. We say prayers
for rain an hour after we have consulted a govern-
ment bulletin to see whether we shall need an
¹A. R. Gordon: The Early Traditions of Genesis, 56,
54
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
.
umbrella before we get home. We solemnly
repeat, . . . Maker of heaven and earth
"
descended into Hell . . . sitteth on the right
hand of God. . .' Yet all the while we know
perfectly well that heaven is not 'up' nor hell
down,' that this universe was never 'made' by
anybody in any such sense as the 'apostles' sup-
posed, nor has it any such topographical relations
as they assumed. Whoso has sat with his eye at
one end of a brass tube and a fragment of the
everlasting mystery at the other, knows that no
living being, from pond scum to mammal, ever
gets into this unintelligible world by virtue of any
process that in the least resembles anything that
the days of ignorance meant by 'conceptus'; while
as for 'carnis resurrectionem,' which, as a piece of
psychophysics, we inherit from the followers of
Zarathustra by way of the Pharisees and St.
Paul, most of us actually do hold the diametri-
cally opposite opinion-the Platonic doctrine of
the immortality of the soul." 1
What shall we preachers say to an educated lay-
man who talks to us like that?
IV
The basis of the answer, to whose completion the
following lectures will be devoted, is, after all, not
difficult to state. The most abiding elements in
human history are the fundamental experiences of
man's spirit. Everything else in man's life changes;
1 Edwin Tenney Brewster: The Understanding of Religion, 27-28.
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 55
outwardly his environments and inwardly his mental
categories alter; but at the heart of him is something
that changes but little if at all. This is not a matter
of pious desire; it is a matter of historic fact. "It is
more than doubtful," says Dr. Crump in his Logic of
History, "whether any varieties of human character
have disappeared during the ages of which we have
knowledge, or whether any new types of character
have come into existence. The motives that act on
men have altered but little.” 1
One must always distinguish, therefore, between
man's abiding experiences and their temporary ex-
pressions. We no longer put on sackcloth and ashes,
but that does not mean that any important change
has taken place in the griefs and miseries which sack-
cloth and ashes once expressed. We do not live in
tents under patriarchal rule; we live in modern apart-
ment houses with all the complicated appliances of
our scientific age; but if we are fortunate we under-
stand a story like that of Isaac and Rebekah as well
as though it were written yesterday- "And Isaac
brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took
Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her." 2
This contrast between the fundamental experiences
of man and their temporary expressions holds just as
good in the intellectual as it does in the practical
realm. Man's way of looking at the world, rationali-
zing his life, and explaining what happens to him, is
always changing. Man is forever getting a new mental
framework in which to arrange his experiences. But
the experiences themselves go on. This very much
1 C. G. Crump: The Logic of History, 49.
2 Genesis 24:67.
56
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
needs to be said. Fairly intoxicated with the newness
of this modern world, we are tempted to forget that
all the while there is a world of experience here, not
new at all but as old as the race: sin and its conse-
quence, hunger and thirst after righteousness, love,
hate and jealousy, heartbreak, grief and tragedy, joy,
hope, and the need of God. You will find them in
Homer and in Shakspere, in Job and in Goethe. Pick
up an old scientific book, like Pliny's Natural History,
and compare it with The Outline of Science, by
Thomson, and what a difference! But when you turn
to biography and read the story of men's lives, their
hopes and fears, temptations, motives, and desires,
loves, hates, griefs, struggles, defeats and victories,
it is all alike a thousand years before Christ or two
thousand years after. For there you have stepped
out of the shifting world into the deeps of the human
spirit where dwell the abiding experiences of men.
Since a preacher who is about his business is dealing
all the while with this inner world of man's spiritual
experience, he may be entirely aware of the contrasts
between the Biblical categories and his own and yet.
may go on year after year untroubled by it. Perhaps
he ought not to go untroubled, but it can be done.
On Sunday morning, as Ruskin said, he has "thirty
minutes to raise the dead in." He has lived through
another week of intimate dealing with the elemental
needs of human souls. When he mounts the pulpit
he is thinking of them and not of Copernicus versus
Genesis. With these ancient yet ever new needs of
man's spirit on his mind, he is not first of all impressed
by the changes of mental category which have taken
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 57
What
place between Biblical times and his own.
most impresses him is the amazing timelessness of the
Bible when it deals with the spiritual life of men.
As Dr. Moffatt says, "The alterations of civilization
leave the heart of vital religion untouched as nothing
else." 1
"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see
God”—what have time and change to do with that?
“Enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy
door, pray to thy Father who is in secret"; "God is
love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and
God abideth in him"-what have time and change to
do with that? "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and
anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you,
with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender-
hearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in
Christ forgave you"-what have time and change to
do with that? And supremely when one thinks of
Jesus, the quality of his spirit and the central emphases
of his teaching, I should suppose that no man would
care to be a Christian minister if he could not say
what George Matheson said, "Son of Man, whenever
I doubt of life, I think of Thee . . . Thou never
growest old to me. Last century is old, last year is
old, last season is an obsolete fashion; but Thou art
not obsolete. Thou art abreast of all the centuries,
nay, Thou goest before them like the star. I have
never come up with Thee, modern as I am.'
"2
No mere outgrowing of old world-views, therefore,
will ever make the Bible old to a man who is concerned
1 ¹ James Moffatt: The Approach to the New Testament, 174.
2 Searchings in the Silence, 20-21.
58
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
with the cure of souls. The only thing that ever
would make the Bible old to him would be to have
mankind's spiritual experiences and needs so change
that they were no longer mirrored in the Book and
met in the Gospel. And that day is a long sea-mile
away.
No one at this point need fear for a moment that
we shall fail in these lectures to wrestle as manfully
as we know how with the intellectual differences be-
tween the Scripture and ourselves. They are impor-
tant. They do present a serious problem. But,
surely, this more basic truth needs first to be em-
phasized. Underneath this new world of shifting
circumstance and changing category is a very old
world. On every hand we hear folk talking about the
newness of this modern world and the way that old
things have gone. We hear about new geology, new
biology, new astronomy, new theology, new world-
contacts, new economic problems, and the general
impression sinks in that the whole world is new and
that old things have disappeared. But one who thinks
more deeply, hearing such talk over much, becomes
rebellious and wishes to cry so that the whole genera-
tion can hear him: What is new, really new? To be
sure, countless external arrangements of human life
are new and, as well, almost all the mental frameworks
by which we apprehend and interpret experience; but
underneath, in the world where most of all we live,
what is new? Selfishness, lust, greed, and cruelty;
love, friendship, and self-sacrifice are these new?
Are sin, remorse, pardon, and reconciliation new?
Are the desires of men new for peace, for brotherhood,
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 59
for a kingdom of righteousness upon the earth, for
"a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heav-
ens"? The strength of the Bible has always been its
appeal to this deep and abiding realm of man's basic
experiences, for out of that realm the Bible came.
V
A man, therefore, can go on preaching the Bible
year after year and can pay little attention to chang-
ing thought-forms and outgrown categories. He can
do it by choosing his lessons from those wide areas of
Scripture where no outmoded ways of thinking trouble
him, or, in other areas, he can neglect those which he
knows are there. But this method of treating the
Bible, if exclusively used, is becoming increasingly
unsatisfactory and perilous. One of the most in-
telligent and conscientious ministers I ever knew
looked at me once in wistful surprise when I told him
of a large class which I taught every Sunday in the
church. "I rejoice in preaching," he said, "but I
should not dare to teach a class; they might ask me
questions." That is the trouble with the attitude
which we just have been describing if it is exclusive of
all others. The one who uses it is not facing, often he
does not know how to face, sometimes he is afraid to
face, the questions by which the more thoughtful
minds in his congregation are really troubled. He is
not taking into account some of the intellectual stum-
bling-blocks over which many young people are falling
when they read the Bible. He is not answering ques-
tions which, however secondary in importance to the
бо
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
profound needs of the moral and religious life, are
nevertheless real barriers against the free and glad
acceptance of the spiritual help which the Bible ought
to bring.
Moreover, not only is this too easy content with the
abiding spiritual messages of the Book increasingly
unsatisfactory for the preacher; it is increasingly
dangerous for the church. Is not this in part the ex-
planation of the appalling renaissance of obscurantism
which afflicts us to-day? Once there was a well stand-
ardized way of using Scripture. Practically everybody
recognized it. It was drilled into children alike in
home and school, and in the church it furnished the
unquestioned method of the preacher. This method
did not use merely the Bible's abiding experiences;
it used the Bible's scientific concepts and ways of
thinking from Genesis to Revelation.
Then came the new age with its disturbing influ-
ences. The old use of the Bible became impossible to
many preachers who, as much as ever was true of their
fathers, believed in Jesus Christ as the world's Savior
and wanted to proclaim his Gospel as the power of God
unto salvation. These preachers, therefore, having
lost an old method of using the Bible and not having
gotten a new one, let go Biblical conceptions that
seemed outgrown and quietly fell back on the un-
questioned messages of the Book-its central spiri-
tual hopes and timeless inspirations. This often pro-
duced great preaching; certainly its tendency has
been to produce more vitally helpful preaching than
much that the older dogmatism issued in. But it has
perilous lacks. It has not been teaching the people
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD 61
how to think in the realm of religion. It has been
practical, human, encouraging, vital, but it has been
intellectually loose-jointed and rickety. It has evaded
real questions. It has surrendered old intellectual
frameworks without getting new ones. It has let the
church drift before the breezes of inspirational preach-
ing upon the rocks of intellectual confusion.
We are paying for it now. On the one side we are
paying for it in multitudes of churches waiting to be
swamped by theological obscurantism, fanatical pre-
millennialists, anti-evolutionary propaganda, or any
other kind of reactionary movement in religious think-
ing against which no intellectual dikes ever have been
raised by thoroughgoing, consistent teaching as to
what our new knowledge really means to religion. On
the other side we are paying for it in the loss of our
more intelligent young people. Sure as most of them
are that the foundations of religion are secure, many
are alienated from the churches. When they read
the Bible or go to worship they feel their inherited
religious thinking, set forth in the Book and taken for
granted in the pulpit, so out of place in the modern
world that like the Jews in Babylon they cry, "How
shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land"?
Deeply as we rejoice, therefore, in the timelessness
of the Bible's central messages, and true as it is that
our preaching must mainly deal with the realm of
unchanging experience, where the deeps of the Book
call to the deeps of the human heart, it will not do to
leave the matter there. The old Book has moved out
into a new world. There are sharp contrasts between
some ways of thinking in the Bible and our own.
62
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
There is no use obscuring the fact. We would better
set it out in the clear light and deal with it. For if
we who are the disciples of the Lord do not do it in
the interests of his people and his cause, it will be
ruinously done for us by those who are his enemies.
Nor is there good reason why we should approach
this task with fearfulness or reluctance. We may well
approach it triumphantly. See what the church
already has done so wisely and so well in wide areas of
her life. When the new music came, when Palestrina,
Bach, Beethoven, Handel began using new instru-
ments and new methods, did the church say, "None
of that! Sackbuts and psalteries-they are the holy
instruments"? Upon the contrary, she captured the
new music, she claimed it for Christ, so that the
noblest harmony of the centuries has been set to the
high task of praising God.
When the new art came in, when out of old stiffness
and unreality painting began to move into lifelikeness
with expanding use of line and color, did the church
turn away and say, "None of that! We will go
back to the old outlines that Christians first drew
upon the walls of the catacombs"? Upon the con-
trary, the church captured the new painting. She
said to Cimabue, Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo:
"All that you know and the best that you can do for
the glory of Christ!" And the rememberable conse-
quence of that attitude is with us still in pictures be-
fore which generations of Christians have stood in awe.
When the new architecture came, when men began
dreaming their aspirations in Gothic stone, did the
church turn her back on that and say, "No, we will
THE OLD BOOK IN A NEW WORLD
63
return to worship as the apostles did, in an upper
room"? Upon the contrary, she captured Gothic
architecture, building with it cathedrals that, in Rus-
kin's words, are "vast illuminated missals bound with
alabaster instead of parchment."
See what the church has done so wisely and so
well in wide areas of her life where she has taken
things new and true and made them ministrant to re-
ligion. Why cannot we do that same thing gladly,
triumphantly in every realm of this new world? If
there are fresh things to learn concerning the physical
universe, let us have them, that we may find a deeper
meaning when we say, "The heavens declare the glory
of God." If there are new ways of approaching men's
minds, new methods of argument and apologetic, let
us have them and not fight like fools with bows and
arrows at Verdun, when the One we are fighting for
is so worthy of the best that we can do. If there are
new powers disclosed by science, let us have them
and put them at the disposal of the Lord of life to
make our service more efficient! All that we know at
the service of the Highest that we know that is the
ideal!
Surely, in a universe with a living God, the burden
of proof is not upon us who would urge that attitude.
The burden of proof is upon those who would en-
deavor to withhold us from it.
64
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Understanding of Religion, Edwin Tenney Brewster.
Houghton Mifflin.
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christen-
dom; Ch. III, Astronomy, Andrew D. White. Appletons.
The Old Testament in the Light of To-Day, William Frederic
Badè. Houghton Mifflin.
Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions, Morris Jastrow, Jr. Scrib-
ner's.
The Early Traditions of Genesis, A. R. Gordon. T. and T.
Clark.
Archæology and the Bible, George A. Barton.
Sunday-School Union.
American
Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible, S. R. Driver.
Oxford University Press for British Academy.
Sixty Years with the Bible, William Newton Clarke. Scribner's.
The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, Arthur Cushman Mc-
Giffert. Macmillan.
LECTURE III
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
I
Before we consider further the problem presented
by the old Book in a new world, we may well put
historic horizon around our thought by understand-
ing as clearly as we can the ancient solution of this
same problem. For the necessity of accommodating
venerable scriptures to new conditions has been faced
again and again by every religion that has had sacred
scriptures at all. Ours is not the first modern age.
Ours is not the first generation that has found itself
surrounded by new circumstances and using new
modes of thought. Therefore, ours is not the first
occasion in history when folk who venerated and
believed in a sacred book have been distressed and
puzzled because so many things in it seemed unfitted
to their modern world.
In this recurrent situation there has been one su-
preme resource: allegory. No other method of inter-
pretation, whether in our Hebrew-Christian tradition
or in the use of sacred scriptures by other peoples,
has been so wide-spread, so deep-seated, so indefat-
igable. That the roots of allegory are deep in the
problem which we are considering is clear. Homer's
poems, for example, became the sacred scriptures of
65
66
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
the Greeks. They were the source of religious in-
struction; their myths were embodied in venerable
customs of worship; they were glorified in art and
were the fountainhead of creative literature; and on
any question in heaven above or on the earth beneath
argument could be clinched by a text from Homer.
Then came a modern age. The crude anthropo-
morphism of Homer's theology shocked the developed
thought of a new generation. The scandalous amours
and quarrels of Homer's gods became intolerable to
maturer consciences. Moreover, new problems arose
on which men wanted light and of which Homer never
had thought or sung, yet on which sacred scripture
had to give light if it was to fulfil the functions of
sacred scripture at all. Under these circumstances
the dilemma was distressing. On the one side the
Greeks might have broken with the old poems al-
together, might have disowned them and torn the
Homeric heritage from their literature, art, worship,
and apologetic. Of course they did no such thing.
They chose the other horn of the dilemma. They
allegorized Homer. They said that he never meant
literally what he literally said; that all his stories had
a hidden sense; that one must find beneath their
superficial meaning the mystic significance which the
poet had in mind. The necessity which moved their
modern age thus to get rid of the historical sense of
their ancient scriptures and to put new sense in its
place was plainly stated by Heraclitus. He said of
Homer: "He was altogether impious if he was not
allegorizing.
"" 1
1 Homeric Problems, 1, lines 5-6.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
67
The Stoics systematized and carried to perfection
this method of using their literary heritage. They
found their whole modern system of thought in the
Iliad and Odyssey. The gods were not gods but
allegorical figures for the elements out of which the
cosmos was made. Zeus was ether, fire, law, reason,
fate, or providence, as any one might wish; Athena,
too, was ether; Hades was the heavy air that is in the
earth, and Hera was the air above. Rhea and Demeter
were earth itself, and Poseidon, water.¹ So the old
stories of the gods, that had sprung from their fore-
fathers' primitive life, became parables of the fully
developed philosophy of a modern age, until Cicero
could taunt Chrysippus, the Stoic, with endeavoring
"to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musæus,
Hesiod, and Homer . . . in order that the most
ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things,
might seem to have been Stoics.” 2
.
This method of accommodating an old bible to a
new age has been so prevalent wherever sacred scrip-
tures have existed, and in particular it has so con-
trolled the preaching of the Christian church through-
out the greater part of her history, that a clear under-
standing of it is indispensable as a background for
our present discussion.
II
The conditions out of which in the past allegorical
interpretation has invariably issued are not difficult
1 George Foot Moore: History of Religions, Vol. I, 520.
2 On the Nature of the Gods, Book I, Sec. XV.
68
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
to state. First, there must be a sacred literature
which by its antiquity has become venerable and by
long usage has been woven into the thoughts, affec-
tions, customs of the people. If added to this practical
authority a high doctrine of inspiration has developed,
like the Platonic conception of ancient poets possessed
by the divine afflatus and writing in a trance, then the
scriptures become so exalted that nothing in them can
be trivial, and so holy that to doubt them becomes
blasphemy. If the people possessing such a body of
sacred writings could always remain in the same
culture and circumstance as were theirs when the
scriptures were produced, the perfect harmony be-
tween their book and their life would not be dis-
turbed. But no people ever do remain so static.
Circumstances alter, new philosophies come in, new
ethical problems and ideals emerge, new religious
conceptions arise, and new cosmologies are proposed.
Sooner or later the people with their book find them-
selves in a modern age with elements in it with which
the book does not agree. Then they allegorize. They
go behind the natural historic sense of the pas-
sages which they object to or do not understand
and read into them the sense they wish to find
there.
This is being done all over the world to-day in every
religion with a sacred literature. You find it in India.
Out of the ancient Hindu faith have come reform
movements whose devotees have been affected by
modern ideas and customs. They are proposing some-
thing new but they still are passionately desirous to
be true to Hinduism and they so regard themselves.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
69
Such loyalty to the ancient faith, however, involves
loyalty to the ancient books. How shall they har-
monize their sacred writings with their own moder-
nity? Allegory is the panacea. Even stories like.
Krishna's amours with the cow-girls, which in fact
are primitive tales like Homer's from an age when
gods were freely credited with the passions of man-
kind, are allegorically interpreted to mean the yearn-
ing of the soul for union with God. This same process
is going on in Muhammadanism. The Koran has all
the sacredness with which long usage, passionate
fidelity, and a high doctrine of inspiration can endow
a book. No one could be a true Muhammadan who
did not venerate it. But the deeps of the human soul
are too powerful in their upheavals to postpone action
just because a book, however sacred, once was written
and still is ardently believed. New types of religious
life not contemplated in the Koran and far removed
from the experience and teachings of Muhammad do
appear in Muhammadanism. The Sufis, for example,
are mystics. They have passed to another religious
realm altogether from that occupied by Allah and his
message. No longer even believing in a personal
Creator, they are pantheists; no longer defining duty
as submission to divine law in hope of future reward,
they define it as surrender to divine love in a mystical
experience which is its own reward. But still they
believe in the Koran. They insist with ardent faith
that they alone understand it and are true to it. They
are doing with the Koran what the Greeks did with
Homer. They hold that it does not mean what it
literally says, that it has an inner, allegorical sense,
70
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
and many of them maintain that they alone are truly
interpreting what that sense is.
So clear are the conditions under which allegorical
interpretation arises and so repeated and unfailing is
its emergence wherever these conditions are fulfilled,
that the law of the procedure can be confidently
stated. It has been well put by Dr. J. Massie:
"When any literature has so deeply inwrought
itself into the hearts and lives of a people as to
have become a sacred and inseparable constitu-
ent of their nature, and when time has neverthe-
less so far changed the current of thought as to
make that literature apparently inconsistent with
the new idea, or inadequate to express it, then
the choice for the people lies between a ruinous
breach with what is, by this time, part and parcel
of themselves, and, on the other hand, forcing
the old language to be a vehicle for the new
thought." 1
When now we turn to the Hebrew-Christian tradi-
tion, we find no exception to this rule. The Jewish
rabbis allegorized their own Scriptures. How could
they avoid it? Some of the ritual and customary
laws incorporated in the code had sprung up out of
early conditions and could no longer be literally ful-
filled. Yet those laws stood in Scripture, where surely
the divine Spirit would allow nothing to be written
which was either inapplicable or unimportant. Even
1
J. Massie: article on Allegory, iii, in A Dictionary of the Bible,
ed. by James Hastings.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
71
Rabbi Ishmael, who tried his best to avoid allegory,
struck some passages where he was sure that an alle-
gorical interpretation must be given.¹ Moreover, the
rabbis faced the necessity of defending their developed
oral tradition from the sacred Scriptures. Some of
them said frankly that many of their new develop-
ments of thought and ritual were not obviously in the
Scripture and "hung only by a hair." This slender
support, necessary to sustain the rabbinical tradition,
was often found in the allegorical interpretation of
some ancient text.
Indeed, one whole book is in our canon of Scripture
to-day because allegory was employed to give it sacred-
ness. Rabbi Akiba, although he feared the allegori-
zing of the law, was the first teacher thus to allegorize
an entire book—the Song of Songs. This dramatic
poem is obviously a beautiful lyric of pure love, and,
save as human love at its best is itself religious, there
is no religion in the book at all. For many years the
Song was kept out of the Hebrew canon. Toward the
close of the first century A. D. the opposition against
it still was strong. But allegory won the day. The
Song was interpreted out of its original sense into
mystic meanings as a lyric on the love of Israel and
Jehovah, and Christians reallegorized it as a love-song
of Christ and his church. So it stands in our Bible
now and the headings of the King James Version still
bear witness to the allegorical accommodation of an
old book to a new age.
¹On this subject see Louis Ginzberg: article on Allegorical Interpre-
tation, in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. by Isidore Singer; and George
Holley Gilbert: Interpretation of the Bible; A Short History, 25.
72
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
When Judaism moved still further away from its
ancient setting into the Hellenistic world and in cities
like Alexandria grew to both intellectual and political
importance, the need of accommodation was even
greater. The Hellenized Jews, thoroughly impreg-
nated with Neoplatonic ideas were not on that account
less devoted to their sacred books. The conditions
for allegory, therefore, were perfectly fulfilled and a
florescent exhibition of it resulted. The whole Hellen-
istic philosophy was found in the Old Testament.
Nor has Judaism, moving from land to land and from
generation to generation, ever lacked those pursuers
of the mystic sense who in the old words have dis-
covered a new meaning. Here is an example of suc-
cessful allegory finding medieval mysticism in an
ancient Hebrew law. In Exodus 21:7-11 there is a
provision guarding the interests of daughters who
have been sold by their fathers into slavery. The law
provides that a daughter so sold, if she does not please
her master as a concubine, can be redeemed by her
father; she certainly shall not be resold to a foreign
people; and if she is not decently treated her free
return to her father shall be allowed. Obviously, the
social and ethical background which required such a
law is primitive. To the medieval Jew it was shame-
ful that such a commandment should stand in his
Torah. Allegory, however, solved the problem: the
father who sells the daughter into slavery is God;
the daughter is the human soul; her going into slavery
is the soul's birth into this material world; the object
of this bondage is that the soul at last shall be re-
deemed to its father; and this must be done lest the
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
73
soul be sold to a foreign people, that is, the evil angels.
The outline of medieval mysticism is thus discovered
in a primitive law.¹
From these repeated exhibitions of allegory, always
arising when an old book is introduced into a new
world, one turns to the New Testament and is amazed
that there is so little allegorizing there. The condi-
tions were perfect. The ancient Hebrew Scriptures
were received by the first Christians as their Bible;
the new revelation in Christ was regarded by them
as divine; in consequence they faced the apologetic
necessity of finding the new Gospel in the old Book.
The setting for allegory could not be better. And
allegory is there. Paul declared that the law pro-
hibiting the muzzling of oxen when they trod out the
corn meant that Christian ministers should receive
financial support; 2 he allegorized the rabbinical legend
of the rock that followed the Israelites through the
wilderness as meaning Christ;³ he definitely called
the story of the two sons of Abraham an allegory of
the old dispensation and the new: 4 and in such in-
terpretations he was doing for Christian purposes
what he doubtless had heard rabbis like Gamaliel do
in accommodating the old Bible to the understanding
and need of a later generation. What is surprising is
not these few mild examples of allegory in the New
Testament but the extraordinary fact that in a situa-
¹Louis Ginzberg: article on Allegorical Interpretation, ¶ on Gen-
eral Allegorization of the Law, in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. by
Isidore Singer.
2 Deuteronomy 25:4; I Corinthians 9:9-14.
3 I Corinthians 10:4.
4 Galatians 4:21-31.
74
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
tion which might have called out a tropical luxuriance
of allegorizing there is so little of it.
When, however, one turns from the New Testa-
ment's restraint to the church at large, the barriers
are down. Allegorizing appears everywhere. The
original motive for its use is lucidly displayed in
Origen. No modern ever recognized more clearly or
handled more frankly than he did the fact that the
Old Testament contains ideas, laws, customs, and
ideals which cannot stand the test of developed
thought and morals. The first chapters of Genesis,
taken literally, seem to him absurd:
"For who that has understanding will suppose
that the first, and second, and third day, and the
evening and the morning, existed without a sun,
and moon, and stars? and that the first day was,
as it were, also without a sky? And who is so
foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of
a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden,
towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life,
visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the
fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life?” ¹
The anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament shocked
him. With reference to the literal interpretation
of Moses' seeing God's "hinder parts" on Sinai,
he exclaims against "those old wives' fables . . . in-
vented by ignorant persons respecting the anterior and
posterior parts of God."2 Such ideas as God's having
¹ De Principiis, Book IV, Ch. I, 16, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers,
Vol. IV, 365.
Ibid., Book II, Ch. IV, 3 (277).
+
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
75
hands and feet, being angry and repenting, if taken
literally, he thought blasphemous. Some of the narra-
tives of the Old Testament seemed to him immoral.
There could be no profit in reading of the intercourse of
Lot with his daughters, the two wives of Abraham, the
two sisters married to Jacob, the two handmaids who
bore him children.¹ Many details carefully narrated
in the Old Testament such as the furnishing of the
tabernacle or the genealogies seemed to him trivial if
taken at their face value; 2 and some seemed impossi-
ble, such as the command not to eat vultures, which
no one would ever think of eating, or the command to
offer a "goat-stag" or unicorn,3 when no such animal
exists. Concerning the Mosaic legislation Origen not
only said that "many of the laws manifest the irra-
tionality, and others the impossibility, of their literal
observance,” but he thought some laws positively
barbarous, as, for example, the law which he under-
stood as a command to kill uncircumcized children.5
Surely, said Origen, the fault was the parents', not the
children's. And turning his attention to the New
Testament, Origen said that the Gospels taken liter-
ally contained discrepancies, contradictions, and im-
possibilities.6
Such were the difficulties of a great Christian
1 Ibid., Book IV, Ch. I, 9 (357).
2 Ibid. (357-358).
Origen's misunderstanding of a Septuagint word not found else-
where.
4 De Principiis, Book IV, Ch. I, 17 (366).
5 Genesis 17:14; Origen: De Principiis, Book IV, Ch. I, 17 (366).
6 Commentary on John, Book X, 2-3, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers,
Vol. IX, 382-383; Ibid., 4–6 (383-385); De Principiis, Book IV, Ch.
I. 18 (367).
76
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
scholar and apologist at the beginning of the third
century. And allegory was the solution. Unworthy
ideas of God, inapplicable laws, outgrown customs,
and patent contradictions were all read away by
means of the mystic sense. The letter was but the
body of a passage; the allegorical interpretation was
the soul. Indeed, Origen used the mystic sense to
defend the mystic sense. When on the first Palm
Sunday the ass and the ass's foal stood tied and the
Master sent two disciples to loose them and bring
them to him, Origen saw in the event a Biblical de-
fense of his whole method of exegesis. The ass was
the letter of the Old Testament, and the ass's foal was
the letter of the New Testament, and they both were
tied, but two apostles were sent to free them and
bring them to Jesus, and these two were the moral and
the mystic sense.¹ So by allegory Origen supported
allegory.
Indeed, when once you start this process there is
no end to it. In the Levitical law we read that the
meal offering may be baked in an oven, fried in a pan,
or toasted on a plate.2 Surely, said Origen, we cannot
imagine that God cares for such trifles. What the
passage really means is this: the meal offering is the
Scripture and, since an oven, a plate, and a pan are
mentioned, it is clear that the Scripture must have a
three-fold sense.3
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of
this method of interpretation upon the preaching of
¹ Commentary on John, Book X, 18, same volume as above, 396-398.
2 Leviticus 2:4-7.
3 Henry Preserved Smith: Essays in Biblical Interpretation, 53.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
77
the church. When once it had gotten under weigh
there were scarcely any limits to its use. The lifeless
page was helpless before the living man for he could
make it stand and deliver any sense he chose. To be
sure, the great allegorists like Clement or Origen would
indignantly have denied that allegory was guesswork.
They did their best to construct scientific canons to
govern it and to chasten its extravagance. They en-
deavored to create a methodology. When, however,
allegory once has been allowed, no canons can keep
an eager man from using it, however honestly, to
make the Scripture support what he thinks true.
Gfrörer has said the best that can be said of alle-
gorizing even in the hands of a master like Philo,
by applying to it Polonius' words, "Though this be
madness, yet there is method in 't.” 1
Moreover, allegory, while arising in the first place
from the serious need of accommodating an ancient
book to a new situation, appeals to other motives
also. For one thing, it makes great preaching. By
that fact the luxuriance of allegory can in large
measure be explained. Many a passage, dead as the
moon for homiletic purposes if taken literally, becomes
vital if one is allowed to allegorize it. Augustine
could find little provender for preaching in the garden
of Eden literally taken, but by allegory he opened
up an almost limitless possibility of sermons there.
He said that no one denied that Eden might signify
the life of the blessed; its four rivers the four virtues;
its trees all useful knowledge; its fruits the customs
1
¹ August Gfrörer: Philo und die alexandrinische Theosophie, Vol.
I, 113.
78
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
of the godly, and its tree of life wisdom herself; and
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the ex-
perience of a broken commandment. But in the
selfsame chapter he has another allegorical interpreta-
tion altogether. There Eden signifies the church; its
four rivers the four Gospels; its fruit trees the saints,
and the fruit their works; the tree of life Christ. And
Augustine adds this revealing comment: "These and
similar allegorical interpretations may be suitably put
upon Paradise [Eden] without giving offense to any
one, while yet we believe the strict truth of the history
confirmed by its circumstantial narrative of facts."1
Obviously, allegory here has gotten far away from
its serious motive of accommodating an old Book to
a new age and has become a homiletical device. In-
deed, Augustine frankly confesses what he is doing.
In a passage very interesting to a preacher he says:
"Why is it, I ask, that if any one says that
there are holy and just men whose life and con-
versation the Church of Christ uses as a means
of redeeming those who come to it from all kinds
of superstitions, and making them through their
imitation of good men members of its own body;
men who, as good and true servants of God, have
come to the baptismal font laying down the
burdens of the world, and who rising thence do,
through the implanting of the Holy Spirit, yield
the fruit of a two-fold love, a love, that is, of God
and their neighbor; how is it, I say, that if a
1 The City of God, Book XIII, Ch. XXI, in The Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II, 256.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
79
man says this, he does not please his hearer so
much as when he draws the same meaning from.
that passage in Canticles, where it is said of the
Church, when it is being praised under the figure
of a beautiful woman, 'Thy teeth are like a flock
of sheep that are shorn, which came up from the
washing, whereof every one bears twins, and
none is barren among them?' . . . And yet, I
do not know why, I feel greater pleasure in con-
templating holy men, when I view them as the
teeth of the Church, tearing men away from their
errors, and bringing them into the Church's body
with all their harshness softened down, just as if
they had been torn off and masticated by the
teeth. It is with the greatest pleasure, too, that
I recognize them under the figure of sheep that
have been shorn, laying down the burdens of the
world like fleeces, and coming up from the wash-
ing, i. e., from baptism, and all bearing twins, i. e.,
the twin commandments of love, and none of
them barren in that holy fruit." 1
Ah! Augustine! Even you found the allurements of
picturesque rhetoric too strong for a careful and re-
strained exegesis!
Let us guard ourselves against misunderstanding
here. No one should condescend to Augustine be-
cause he thus used methods no longer possible to us.
Fortunately, efficiency in preaching has never been
absolutely dependent on correct canons of exegesis.
¹ On Christian Doctrine, Book II; Ch. 6, in The Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II, 537.
80
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Indeed, I call you to witness that if we really believed
as Augustine did that the four rivers of Eden could
mean the four cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance,
fortitude, and justice, and if we could make our
audiences believe it too, as he could, we could preach
far more useful sermons on those four rivers than we
can now. Allegory is thoroughly vicious as a means
of getting at what the Bible originally meant to say,
but allegory, when honestly believed, is not neces-
sarily ineffective as a means of communicating im-
portant truth from one ardent mind to another. I
presume that when Augustine preached his tre-
mendous sermon to the Mauritanians against the
practise of the feud, he used allegory. I cannot
imagine him failing to use it. But how one wishes
that with all our modern knowledge we could preach
with like effect! Augustine writes:
"I strove, with all the vehemence of speech
that I could command to root out and drive from
their hearts and lives an evil so cruel and in-
veterate; it was not, however, when I heard their
applause, but when I saw their tears, that I
thought I had produced an effect. For the ap-
plause showed that they were instructed and
delighted, but the tears that they were subdued.
And when I saw their tears I was confident, even
before the event proved it, that this horrible and
barbarous custom . was overthrown; and
immediately that my sermon was finished I
called upon them with heart and voice to give
praise and thanks to God. And, lo, with the
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
81
blessing of Christ, it is now eight years or more
since anything of the sort was attempted here.” 1
In the face of such preaching only a small mind will
be tempted to any complacency because we have
outgrown allegory.
At any rate, the whole ancient and medieval church
used it constantly. Even when the light of the new
time began to dawn out of the shadows of the medieval
age, so bold, fearless and unconventional a preacher
as Wyclif never dreamed of surrendering allegory.
His treatment of the parable of the Good Samaritan
is famous. The man who went down from Jerusalem
to Jericho represents our first parents; the robbers
are the fiends of hell; the priest and Levite who went
by on the other side are the patriarchs, saints, and
prophets who failed to bring salvation; the Good
Samaritan is Jesus, pictured as of another nation
because of his heavenly origin; the wine which he
pours into the wounds is sharp words to prick men
from sin, and the oil is hope; the Samaritan setting the
man on his beast means Christ bearing man's sin in
his body; the inn is the church, and the help received
there sacraments and heavenly gifts; the following
day, when he left the inn, is after the resurrection; the
inn keeper is the clergy to whose care needy man is
committed; and the twopence given to him represent
Christ's Godhead and manhood to feed mankind to
the day of doom.2 The entire scheme of the old the-
¹ On Christian Doctrine, Book IV, Ch. 24, ¶ 53, in The Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II, 593–594.
2 Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold,
Vol. I, 31-33, Sermon XIII.
82
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
ology is found in the Master's story of a serviceable
deed. Yet not on that account will a wise man under-
estimate the extraordinary character and influence
of Wyclif, who, as an ancient woodcut pictures him,
struck from the flint the spark which John Huss
caught in his tinder, from which in turn Luther
lighted his flaming torch.
So, too, Savonarola was an inveterate allegorist.
His biographer tells us that he devoted a whole series
of sermons to the allegorical exposition of Noah's
ark. The saving of Noah's family was symbolical of
the ingathering of the righteous, and as for the ark
itself, its length was faith, its width charity, its height
hope. "He enlarged upon this strange allegory," we
are told, “during the whole of Lent, 1492, and giving
each day a different interpretation of the ten planks
of which the Ark was composed, again expounded the
virtues good Christians were bound to possess and
the duties they should fulfil." 1 A strange homiletical
method that would seem to most of us but, for all that,
what a preacher Savonarola must have been! How
futile it makes much of our thin piping seem when we
picture him at a sermon's close holding aloft the
crucifix and crying, "Florence, behold! this is the
Lord of the universe, and would fain be thine. Wilt
thou have him for thy king?" And all the people
cried with shouts and tears, "Long live Christ our
king!"
"2
¹ Pasquale Villari: Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, in
translation by Linda Villari, 186.
2 Ibid., 419.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
83
IV
If in the modern church this old method of interpre-
tation is largely discredited, although often surrepti-
tiously used even among intelligent Protestants, we
probably owe that fact more to John Calvin than to
any other man. "For the first time in a thousand
years," writes Gilbert, "he gave a conspicuous ex-
ample of non-allegorical exposition." 1 His attitude
toward the ancient method is indicated at the very
beginning of his treatment of Genesis. "We must
entirely reject the allegories of Origen, and of
others like him," we read, "which Satan, with the
deepest subtlety, has endeavored to introduce into the
Church, for the purpose of rendering the doctrine of
Scripture ambiguous and destitute of all certainty
and firmness." 2
Calvin, in a word, was a stern and exact literalist.
He hated the vague and insecure renderings of Scrip-
ture which allegory made possible. When he appealed
from the Pope to the Bible for his authority, he had
to know with steady certainty what the Bible meant
to say. He would have applied to allegory Jeremy
Taylor's figure of a coin held before a multiplying
glass; "For one piece of good money," he said, "you
shall have forty that are fantastical; and it is forty
to one if your finger hit upon the right." So Calvin
1 ¹ George Holley Gilbert: Interpretation of the Bible; A Short His-
tory, 209.
2 Commentary on Genesis, Vol. I, Ch. II, 8, in translation by John
King, 114.
3 Sermon, Via Intelligentiæ, in The Sermons of the Right Rev.
Jeremy Taylor, D. D., Robert Carter & Bros., publishers, 455.
84
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
believed that every passage in Scripture had but one
original and true sense, which allegory only travestied,
and that one sense he passionately desired to know.
At times his scorn of the prevalent allegorizing flamed
out in heat. "Frivolous, and obnoxious to ridicule
and calumny" he called one flagrant specimen that
aroused his ire.¹ And even when he dealt with the
famous promise of Genesis 3:15, "I will put enmity
between thee and the woman, and between thy seed
and her seed," he refused to follow closely the foot-
steps of Paul and make it primarily a prophecy of
Christ. He was too strict a literalist for that. To be
sure, the serpent represents Satan, so that the story
has universal application to man's moral trials, but
the story itself is rigidly literal. "I interpret this
simply to mean," he wrote, "that there should always
be the hostile strife between the human race and
serpents, which is now apparent; for, by a secret
feeling of nature, man abhors them.” 2
To-day Calvin's name suggests rigid and settled
orthodoxy. There were plenty of people in his own.
time, however, who did not so conceive him. Caroli
accused him of Arianism and called on him to sub-
scribe to the Athanasian Creed, which he roundly
refused to do, saying, "We swear in the faith of the
one God, not of Athanasius, whose creed no true
Church would ever have approved." Especially did
his renunciation of allegory disturb his contempo-
raries. Dr. F. W. Farrar has gathered such specimens
¹ Commentary on Genesis, Vol. I, Ch. XVIII, Sec. 2, (470).
2 Ibid., Ch. III, 15 (167).
3 Williston Walker: John Calvin, 197.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
85
of criticism as these: one of his fellow Protestants
accused him of wresting their weapons out of the hands
of Christian athletes; another said that he expounded
oracles about the Trinity or the Messiah like a Jew
or a Socinian; Hunnius, a Protestant, said that he had
corrupted Scripture in a detestable manner and that he
ought to have been burnt; and, not to be outdone, the
Roman Catholics called him a Muhammadan.1
So far as theory was concerned Luther, like Calvin,
rejected allegory. His language on the subject was
picturesquely characteristic of the man. "Origen's
allegories are not worth so much dirt," he wrote;
"Allegories are empty speculations, and as it were
the scum of Holy Scripture"; "Allegory is a sort of
beautiful harlot who proves herself spiritually seduc-
tive to idle men"; "To allegorize is to juggle with
Scripture"; "Allegory may degenerate into a mere
monkey-game"; "Allegories are awkward, absurd,
invented, obsolete, loose rags.
19 2
Indeed, the fundamental principle of Biblical ex-
egesis to which the Reformers gave their theoretical
consent and tried to give their practical allegiance was
that every passage in Scripture has but one meaning—
the original native connotation of the words-and in
the practise of that principle no one succeeded so well
as did John Calvin. The church never has been able
altogether to escape his influence and return peaceably
to the old use of allegory. Protestant preachers and
theologians have plentifully indulged in the vicious
practise, but the best of them have generally done it
1 Frederic W. Farrar: History of Interpretation, 346.
2 Ibid., 328.
86
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
with an inner sense of exegetical sin. Even Jonathan
Edwards, for example, fell from grace when he dealt
with the book of Esther. There is not a word of re-
ligion in it; yet religion must be there. Even the
name of God is not mentioned; yet how could the
book be in the Bible if God were not meant? So
Edwards stretched his familiar use of typology away
over into allegory. The banquet of Ahasuerus is the
Gospel feast; Vashti is the rejected church of the
Jews; Esther is the accepted church of Christ; Mor-
decai is the Gospel ministry; and Haman is Anti-
christ.¹
Nevertheless, in spite of all lapses, the exegetical
principle of the Reformation has never been com-
pletely lost. This principle implied scientific in-
vestigation. It demanded that we get back to the
original sense of the Book. The result was often
deadly literalism. The student wishes at times that
he could escape from it into the freedom of allegory
which did at least give scope to spiritual insight and
imagination. So far as profitable teaching is con-
cerned, the license of Origen's mystical sense is often
superior to the painful barrenness of passages sup-
posed to be verbally inspired and interpreted as sig-
nifying nothing but their first intention. This arid
literalism, however, provided the indispensable transi-
tion from allegory to modern methods of using the
Bible. The reformers did the church a momentous
service by their insistence on seeking for the Bible's
original meanings. Sometimes their principle was
¹ Notes on the Bible (46), in 1830 edition of President Edwards'
Works, Vol. 9, 328-331.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
87
stated with indubitable clarity. So Luther said con-
cerning the understanding of the Hebrew prophets:
"It is necessary if one will understand the prophecy,
to know what the situation was in the land, what
events were happening, what the people thought,
what the relationships were which they sustained to
their neighbors, friends, and foes, and especially what
their attitude was toward their God and toward his
prophets." 1 Could a better statement be made to-
day of what we mean by a historic approach to the
Scripture?
But the reformers little guessed to what ends the
principle they so believed would lead the church.
True to their principle in theory, they still in practise
were the children of their age, and, lacking instruments
of historic knowledge and investigation, they could use
eisegesis instead of exegesis on many a passage which
they thought they were literally interpreting. Calvin
drove allegory out the door, but its first cousin, typ-
ology, came in through the window. When Calvin
wished to prove the deity of Christ, he took fourteen
key-passages, eight from the Old Testament and six
from the New. Judges 13:2-25, Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6,
Jeremiah 23:6 are some of the proof-passages he chose.2
As for Luther, when he commented on Psalm 3:5,
"I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for Jehovah
sustaineth me,” he was entirely true to his method.
"Christ, by the words of his verse, signifies his death
1 Præfatio Doctoris Martini Lutheri in Esaia Lectionem, 2d ¶,
in Exegetica Opera Latina, Vol. 22, 4, Erlangen Edition.
2 Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, Ch. XIII, Secs.
IX-XI, in translation by John Allen, 124-128
88
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
"" 1
and burial," wrote Luther. ". . . For it is not to be
supposed that he would have spoken so importantly
concerning mere natural rest and sleep.' So he
lifted the Psalm out of its historic setting altogether
and regarded it as dictated throughout by Christ.
What has happened between the Reformation and
our day is clear. One searchlight after another has
been turned on the historic sense of Scripture. Once
men could read the Book asking, What does the Bible
say? and, not being encumbered by precise historic
information concerning the mental categories of
Biblical times, could read their own highly developed
theologies into almost any passage of the Old Testa-
ment they chose. Now, however, the question has
changed. We are not asking first, What does the
Bible say? but, What did the Bible say? In terms
of the generation in which it first was written, as
understood by those who first produced it and read it,
what did the Bible say? The consequence is that
we face the Biblical world made historically vivid
over against the modern world presently experienced,
and we cannot use the old method of accommodating
the one to the other.
That is the nub of our difficulty. We cannot hon-
estly allegorize. We face the old problem but we
cannot use the old solution.
We meet the same kind of difficulties that troubled
Origen, accentuated immeasurably by our knowledge
of the past and by the newness of our world, and yet
we cannot use Origen's way of overcoming it. We
have been brought up, whether we know it or not,
¹ Commentary on Psalm III, v. 5, 5th ¶.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
89
on Calvin's literalism. We have been taught that
in Eden the serpent literally spoke, that God made
woman literally out of man's rib, that into the ark
the animals literally went, that God literally promised
divine strength to Samson, however silly and brutal
he turned out to be, if he never shaved his head, that
all the details of the tabernacle were literally revealed
to Moses on the Mount, that God with his finger
literally wrote the ten commandments upon stone,
and that hiding Moses in the cleft he revealed to him
his back though not his face, that God literally com-
manded the massacres of whole populations, and
literally arranged the intricate rituals of bloody animal
sacrifice. Our allegorizing fathers did not have to
believe that. They could either throw the literal
sense away or else, neglecting it, read into the pas-
sage Platonic philosophy or Catholic theology. From
that we are estopped. We know now that Calvin's
principle was right. Those passages have but one
meaning, and that meaning is what they literally
say.
When one thinks not simply of narratives involving
gross anthropomorphisms or belated ethics, but of
passages involving mental categories which we no
longer use in ordinary life, like demonology, angelol-
ogy, Semitic cosmology, or miracles, the problem be-
comes even more difficult. At times the preacher
tries to abandon his modern world-view and go back
to ancient categories, but he cannot. At times he
tries by violence to harmonize the ancient and the
new, but they will not agree. He is facing Prot-
estantism's third attempt to accommodate the Scrip-
90
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
tures to the use of the church. First, Protestantism
tried to harmonize the Scriptures with the traditional
theology and failed. To imagine Jesus holding the
Nicene theology is an intolerable strain on any well-
instructed mind's credulity. Then, Protestantism
tried to harmonize the Scriptures with themselves,
since an infallible Book must be unanimous in all its
teaching. But these Scriptures came from too many
ages, out of too many diverse experiences, and bore
the imprint of too many varied influences to be a book
of unanimous dogma. Last of all, Protestantism tries
to harmonize the Scriptures with modern thought.
She labors to make the science of the Bible our science,
the psychology of the Bible our psychology; she en-
deavors to see in the apostles the favorite attitudes
and emphases of a twentieth-century clergyman, and
even divests our Lord of that special framework of
thought without which he could not have been under-
stood by his own generation and so never could have
been handed down to any other generation. But the
attempt is all in vain. The whole harmonizing proc-
ess is wrong in principle and impossible in practise.
At last the modern minister sees clearly the correct-
ness of Balfour's words: "The mental framework in
which we arrange the separate facts in the world of
men and things is a new framework." And because
we use new ways of thinking, they are diverse from
the corresponding ways of thought in which the Scrip-
tures state their truth.
This then, is the gist of our difficulty: we face here
a very old problem but we cannot use the old solution
any more.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
91
V
What we can do, however, is to find a new solution.
We ought to be encouraged to seek it because the
problem which we face was the Master's problem also
and he never resorted to allegory. He came with a
new revelation into a religious world where an ancient
Scripture was revered alike by his people and by him-
self. At every turn in his ministry he met the tower-
ing problem of Biblical interpretation. At last the
scribes and Pharisees crucified him, primarily because
they saw in his fresh and vital use of the Bible the
ruin of their legal system. The Master has rightly
been called "the first free spiritual expounder of the
Scriptures.'
""
Consider the way he used the sacred Book on which
his own spiritual life had been nourished and in whose
divine inspiration he ardently believed. First of all,
he distinguished himself from the rabbis by appealing
to the Book, not in favor of, but against the oral tra-
ditions of law and ritual which the scribes had built
up. Not for him the clever sophistries of exegesis,
the ingenious allegories by which the vast legal system
was defended as Scriptural. He knew that the legal
system in its minute applications was not in the Scrip-
ture and he said so. He discredited the oral law, said
that it was a plant which his father had not planted,
and that in time it would be rooted up.¹
In the second place, having thus appealed to the
Old Testament against the clever and sophistical in-
terpretations that had been fathered on it, he distin-
1 Matthew 15:1-9, 13.
92
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
guished in the Old Testament between significant and
negligible elements.
He rated ceremonial law low
and ethical law high. The Mosaic laws of clean and
unclean foods were plainly written in the Book, but
Jesus abolished them from the category of the ethical.¹
No laws in Scripture were more obvious and more ex-
acting than those relating to the sabbath, but from
Scripture insisting on observance of sabbath laws
Jesus appealed to Scripture insisting on the superior
rights of human need, and said that the sabbath was.
made for man, and not man for the sabbath.2 Did
not David break the letter of the law, he said, when
in need he ate the showbread from the altar to satisfy
his hunger? So always the Master put human need
above ritual requirement, quoting moral Scripture
against ceremonial Scripture to prove that God pre-
fers mercy to sacrifice.4
3
In the third place, having appealed from the oral
law to the written law, and within the written law
having appealed from ceremonial elements to ethical
principles, he went on to recognize that some ethical
principles in the written law had been outgrown. The
easy system of Mosaic divorce was not to be the law
of his disciples." Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand
for hand awakened only his brave and uncompromis-
ing protest. His whole Sermon on the Mount, start-
ing with its assurance that the old law is to be fulfilled
and not destroyed, is a definite endeavor to see that
6
1 Mark 7:15-23.
2 Mark 2:27.
3 Leviticus 24:9; I Samuel 21:1-6; Mark 2:25-26.
4 Hosea 6:6; Matthew 9:13, 12:7.
6 Exodus 21:23-25; Matthew 5:38-39.
5 Mark 10:2-12.
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
93
it is fulfilled, carried to completion, with its outgrown
elements superseded and its abiding ideals crowned
and consummated.
What the Master did, in a word, was to plunge deep
beneath the sophisticated exegesis of his time, the
timid literalisms which bound men by a text instead
of liberating them by a truth, and in the abiding ex-
periences and principles of the Old Testament find a
revelation of God that was fruitful and true.
Let it be clearly noted that this attitude of Jesus
involved the recognition of the fact that the Scrip-
tures did contain outgrown elements. No one could
have said that more explicitly than he did. He did
not try to conceal the situation by strained interpre-
tations and skilful allegories. The church had to wait
a long time for men who dared to follow in his steps.
Once in a while, in the heat of the Reformation, you
catch an accent of his freedom. So Luther, facing the
appeals of men like Karlstadt to the laws and morals
of the Old Testament, came back like thunder:
"This we will not stand. . . We will not
have Moses any longer as a law-giver, and God
will not have him either. Moses was the law-
giver of the Jewish people alone. . . . When
they say, Moses says so, it is written in Moses,
and so on, answer them: Moses has nothing to
do with us. . Moses is dead; his rule is obso-
lete since Christ came. . Say to them: Go
to the Jews with your Moses; I am no Jew; don't
bother me with Moses.'
•
"" 1
•
¹ Kemper Fullerton: Prophecy and Authority, 129.
94
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
This has Luther's brusque and bristling tone in it,
but, surely, one has only to read the Sermon on the
Mount to see that his basic position is much more like
Christ's than are all the allegories of the ancient
church or all the devious devices by which, in accom-
modating the Scripture to our own age, we try to har-
monize the irreconcilable.
Let us then frankly take our stand with the Master
on this basic matter! Of course there are outgrown
elements in Scripture. How could it be otherwise in
a changing world? We are crying for the moon when
we ask for a Scripture that does not speak to us in the
language and out of the moral and mental categories
of the generations when it appeared. Nor is this
really a serious problem save as our superficial think-
ing makes it one; it is to be taken for granted. What
does matter is that when we plunge deep beneath
such changed settings of thought and speech into the
experiences and convictions for which the Book essen-
tially stands, we find spiritual truths there which in
themselves are permanently valid. Indeed, one who
for long years has preached those truths with joy
cannot content himself with so cold a phrase as "per-
manently valid." He would rather say that in the
course of that religious history whose record is the
Bible, truths were wrought out without which no man
can really live; truths essential to man's health in
character, to man's hope in service, to man's triumph
in death; truths that for the sake of the life here and
the life hereafter must be preached and repreached
and preached again as long as the world stands. I
am not concerned now to explain this strange thing
THE ANCIENT SOLUTION
95
that men who shared so thoroughly the thought of
their time could make their truth permanently essen-
tial to the spiritual life of man. Our best explanations
do not go far; the residue of mystery is great. He who
long can ponder the fact and not perceive that God
was speaking there does not earnestly believe in God
at all. Not of the explanation, however, of the fact
I am thinking, and it is a fact immeasurably important
to the preacher.
Here, then, is the first essential of intelligent Bibli-
cal preaching in our day: a man must be able to rec-
ognize the abiding messages of the Book, and some-
times he must recognize them in a transient setting.
No man will ever do this well if he does not divest
himself of vanity and pride and clothe himself with
humility as with a garment. He must see that many
of our ways of thinking are very new; that they, too,
are transient, and that many of them will soon be as
outmoded as our forefathers' categories are. He must
see that just because our ways of thinking are new,
the garnered riches of the world's thought have been
stored up for us in other forms of thought than ours
and in other ways of speaking. If he sees this clearly
he will see also what a pitiably provincial life a man
must live whose appreciations are shut up to that
truth only which is expressed in modern terms. Such
a man is a prisoner in the thought-forms of the present
age. He cannot get out of that narrow world. He is
robbed of all the treasures of spiritual life which were
amassed before our modern age came in and there-
fore were of necessity stored in other mental recepta-
cles than ours.
96
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
A man of catholic culture should know how to be
at home in all ages, to appreciate wisdom and spiri-
tual quality in all forms of thought; he should drink
the water of life from Greek vases and Jewish water-
jars as well as from modern faucets, and whoever
lacks such culture robs himself of his racial inheri-
tance of experience and truth. This, I take it, is
one of the chief accusations against our fresh, young
intellectual life in religion and elsewhere. Many of
us who call ourselves liberal are not liberal; we are
narrow rather, with that most fatal bigotry of all: we
can understand nothing except contemporary thought.
Let us then turn to the testing of this matter. Let
us see what it means to find in Scripture abiding ex-
periences set in changing categories.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Interpretation of the Bible; A Short History, George Holley
Gilbert. Macmillan.
Prophecy and Authority, Kemper Fullerton. Macmillan.
Essays in Biblical Interpretation, Henry Preserved Smith.
Marshall Jones.
He Opened to us the Scriptures, Benjamin W. Bacon. Macmillan.
Allegorical Interpretation, Louis Ginzberg, in The Jewish
Encyclopedia, ed. by Isidore Singer. Funk and Wagnalls.
Allegory, J. Massie, in A Dictionary of the Bible, ed. by James
Hastings. Scribner's.
Allegory, Allegorical Interpretation, Johannes Geffcken, in the
Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ed. by James Has-
tings. Scribner's.
General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture, Ch.
XVIII, History of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture,
Charles Augustus Briggs. Scribner's.
History of Interpretation, F. W. Farrar. Dutton.
LECTURE IV
ABIDING EXPERIENCES AND CHANGING
CATEGORIES
I
We have been endeavoring to describe the problem
presented to the modern preacher by the contrasts
between Biblical thinking and our own. Our first
need as preachers is not that scholars should be easy
on us, obscuring the contrasts of which we have been
speaking. Our chief need is that scholars should
make us so familiar with the contrasts that we shall
take them for granted. These divergencies between
the Scripture and modern thinking should become so
thoroughly the commonplaces of our thought that in
our preaching they will not be paraded, exploited,
oracularly announced, but assumed. There doubtless
was a time when a brave, progressive, young preacher,
impressed by the fresh fact that the earth revolves
around the sun, must have been tempted to announce
it upon all occasions. He was self-conscious about the
great discovery. It was a brand-new fact and had
an irresistible fascination for the mind. If he preached
on "Love not the world, neither the things that are in
the world," he almost certainly would take advantage
of the text to allude to the fact that the world is not
stationary; it moves. But we have long ceased that,
not because we are ignorant of the fact or afraid of it,
97
98
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
but because we are so familiar with it that we take it
for granted.
So some preachers are impressed by the truth,
vividly presented to us with fresh and startling illus-
trations, that the Bible has ways of thinking that are
no longer ours. The cure of their obsession and be-
wilderment is not ignorance; it is familiarity.
With this conviction in mind let us consider certain
typical contrasts between Biblical thinking and our
own. For example, I believe in the persistence of
personality through death, but I do not believe in the
resurrection of the flesh. Many of our forefathers
could not conceive immortality apart from a resur-
rected body. The resurrection of the flesh was a
mental setting in which alone they supposed that
faith in life everlasting ever could be found, and they
believed in that setting, argued for it, and fought all
doubt about it with the vehemence of those who were
sure that if the setting went the jewel would be lost.
With what vividness popular Christianity used to
visualize judgment day and the resurrected bodies of
the dead rising from the sea, restored from dust and
ashes, or even reintegrated by the assembling of far-
scattered members, you know well. When one goes
back to early apologists like Justin Martyr, one finds
immortality inextricably associated with what the
Apostles' Creed calls "resurrectionem carnis." They
put it boldly and unequivocably: "We expect to
receive our bodies again after they are dead and laid
in the ground." 1
The basis for this physical phrasing of immortality
¹ Quoted by George Foot Moore: History of Religions, Vol. II, 162.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
99
is plainly laid in the Bible. In the first place, the
earliest conception of man's nature which meets us in
Scripture would logically necessitate a physical resur-
rection if there were to be any restored life after death
at all. For, at the beginning, what we would call the
physical and spiritual elements in man were not
distinguished, much less regarded as separable.¹ Man
was as yet an undifferentiated unity, so that the con-
tinuity of a man's spirit apart from his preserved or
restored flesh was an inconceivable idea. One of those
strands of development in the Bible most rewarding
to the student is the gradual differentiation between
the flesh and the spirit, until Paul at last can say that
flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.²
At the beginning, however, such an idea would have
been incredible. When Enoch was translated or
Elijah went to heaven in a chariot of fire, the whole
man went. Our rarefied conception of a soul had not
yet arisen.
In the second place, the earliest idea of the abode
of the dead necessitated the phrasing of immortality
in terms of resurrection. For the dead went to Sheol,
a definite place below the surface of the earth where,
ghosts of their real selves, they yet retained material
form. This empty and meaningless existence of Sheol,
however, was not immortality. Sheol was a barren
dread, not an eager hope. The hope which gradually
arose was of restoration to the earth, and that ex-
pectation inevitably took the form of resurrection.
¹ H. Wheeler Robinson: The Religious Ideas of the Old Testa-.
ment, 83.
2 I Corinthians 15:50.
100
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
from Sheol. We never should have used the word
resurrection in expressing hope of life eternal if such
had not been its history.
The development of Israel's expectation of a resur-
rected life makes a fascinating narrative. The eager
dream of a Messianic kingdom here on earth grew
vivid among the Jews; the question arose whether any
one should enjoy it save those who happened to be
alive when the consummation came; the sense of
justice demanded that at least the eminently right-
eous should be restored to share the victory;¹ and
finally the scene was completed by the expectation
that the eminently wicked would also be restored in
order that they might be adequately punished for
their sins. Only in the late book of Daniel do we find
in the Old Testament this fully developed way of
thinking: "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the
earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some
to shame and everlasting contempt.'
11 2
With such a view of man's nature and with such a
picture of the estate of the dead, bodily resurrection
would have been an inevitable phrasing of life after
death even if Zoroastrian influence had not come in.
As it was, during the Exile Zoroastrianism became
the mold into which the Hebrew expectations of life
beyond death were run. The result is familiar: an
intermediate state between death and judgment day,
then a general resurrection, a gathering of restored
body-souls before the throne of God, and the pro-
nouncement of final destinies.³
1 Isaiah 26:19.
2 Daniel 12:2.
³ See George Foot Moore: History of Religions, Vol. II, 55, 75.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
ΙΟΙ
This mental framework in the minds of New Testa-
ment folk is revealed in passage after passage. The
new and vivid hopes of life eternal which came with
Christ still clothed themselves in a familiar category.
In the book of Revelation the whole Zoroastrian-
Jewish paraphernalia was employed with picturesque
effect. To be sure, the new Christian meaning was
beginning to burst through its archaic phrasing. In
John's Gospel, addressed as it is to Hellenists, the
old apocalyptic is largely replaced by eternal life
which begins here; and Paul, while he kept the picture
of the general resurrection and the judgment day,
definitely altered the old tradition by insisting that
the resurrection body is not the old flesh restored, but
is as different from the old as new grain is from the
sown seed.¹ Never in the New Testament, however,
does the hope of life eternal altogether escape from
the influence of the inherited framework.
This, then, is the question which the modern church
must face: are we forever bound to the old category
as an expression of our living faith in immortality?
A great deal of water has flowed under the bridge
since the days when those first disciples thought of
life everlasting in Zoroastrian terms. Historically the
major agency in crowding out the older ways of think-
ing has been the Greek philosophy. Its basic premise
was the evil of the physical body and the desirability
of the soul's escape from its fleshly imprisonment to
the realm of eternal spirit. It did not want a bodily
resurrection; it wanted to escape from the body al-
together. When Origen, for example, expressed his
¹I Corinthians 15:35-38.
I02
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
faith in life everlasting, he frankly dematerialized it,
and thus became one of the first of that long succession
of Christians who, believing earnestly in immortality,
have not associated it with the resurrection of the
flesh.
Personally, I do not pretend to know the details of
the future life. I am sufficiently sense-bound so that
I do not easily imagine a completely disembodied
existence. I wonder just what we mean by the per-
sistence of personality if we do not include in our
thought some such idea as Paul's "not for that we
would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed
upon. "2 But I am likewise sure that the old Scriptural
framework with its background of a Hebrew Sheol
and a Zoroastrian judgment day is not in my mind.
To-day there are two parties in the churches. They
are in active controversy now, and every day their
consciousness of difference becomes more sharp and
clear. The crux of their conflict lies at this point:
one party thinks that the essence of Christianity is
its original mental frameworks; the other party is
convinced that the essence of Christianity is its abid-
ing experiences. To one party a mental category
once worked out and expressed in Scripture is final.
Men must never carry the living water in any other
receptacle than that; to do so is to forego the right to
call oneself a Christian. As a recent writer put it:
"The originators of the Christian movement . . . did
have an inalienable right to legislate for all genera-
¹ Origen Against Celsus, Book VI, Ch. XXIX, in The Ante-Nicene
Fathers, Vol. IV, 586.
2 II Corinthians 5:4.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
103
"" 1
tions that should choose to bear the name of 'Chris-
tian.' To the other party nothing in human history
seems so changeable as mental categories. They are
transient phrasings of permanent convictions and
experiences. They rise and fall and pass away. To
bind our minds to the perpetual use of ancient ma-
trices of thought just because they were employed in
setting forth the eternal principles of the New Testa-
ment seems intellectual suicide. What is permanent.
in Christianity is not mental frameworks but abiding
experiences that phrase and rephrase themselves in
successive generations' ways of thinking and that
grow in assured certainty and in richness of content.
The matter of immortality is simply one illustration
of the crucial difference between these two concep-
tions of Christianity. If the majority of Christians
in America would face the facts, they would have to
confess that they do not believe in some of the mental
frameworks in which Scriptural faith in immortality
first arose. Yet for all that they do believe in life
everlasting. The two things are separable. Many
of us for years have been preaching the Christian
hope of life eternal with certitude and joy. We have
been comforting the bereaved, solemnizing the frivo-
lous, rebuking the sinful, and undergirdling the strong,
by the message of life's abiding issues. We have
helped to make youth's struggle for character and
maturity's devotion to spiritual aims more worth
while, and to render the "patient continuance" of
old age more joyful by the gospel of everlasting life.
We believe it with assurance; we have seen its power.
1 ¹ J. Gresham Machen: Christianity and Liberalism, 20.
104
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
But we no more believe in some of the mental cat-
egories from which that gospel first emerged like a
fine flower out of a green cusp, than we believe that
the earth is flat.
II
Consider another illustration of this same principle.
I believe in the victory of righteousness upon this
earth, in the coming kingdom of God whereon Christ
looking shall see of the travail of his soul and be sat-
isfied, but I do not believe in the physical return of
Jesus. Multitudes of our fathers never thought of
separating the two. All history to them was a drama
whose dénouement was a literal return of Jesus in the
clouds of heaven.
Let us not forget the world-view which possessed
the mind of the church when this phrasing of expec-
tancy grew up. It was a world-view in which the lit-
eral second coming of our Lord was easily picturable.
Cosmas, for example, in the sixth century A. D., gave
a precise and detailed statement of the cosmology
which with only minor alterations had held the con-
sent of the church from its beginning. The earth, ac-
cording to Cosmas, is a parallelogram; it is flat; on
every side of it are seas; it is four hundred days'
journey long and two hundred broad; beyond the
seas are massive walls which enclose the whole struc-
ture and support the heavenly vault; above the vault
are the celestial dwellings.¹ In such an easily pictur-
able world the farewell of Jesus to the earth could be
¹ Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom, Vol. I, 93.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
105
imagined literally as a physical levitation until he was
received into heaven a definite distance above the
ground, and his return could be literally imagined as
a physical descent from the place where he had gone.
The marvel is not that such a picture of the Master's
going and return should arise in the setting of such a
world-view; the marvel is that after that world-view
has been so long outgrown, after we have known for
centuries that this earth is a globe whirling through
space with no ups nor downs any longer meaningful
in the old sense, so that if one man ascend from Mel-
bourne and another from London they go in opposite
directions, many folk should still retain the old picture
of our Lord's ascent and descent from the sky and
should regard that picture as a test of a standing or
falling church and an indispensable item in the evan
gelical faith.
The reason for the persistence of this special phras-
ing of Christian confidence in God's final victory lies
of course in the fact that this phrasing is to be found
in the Scriptures. The rise of it is not difficult to
trace. Given the passionate belief of the Hebrew
people that they were Jehovah's chosen race; given
the high hopes associated with the Davidic kingdom
and the stirring words of prophets predicting a glo-
rious future; given the catastrophes which one by one
fell upon the nation, crashing in upon its fortunes as
Persia succeeded Assyria, Greece succeeded Persia,
and Rome succeeded Greece; and, clearly, if the He-
brews were to cherish hope at all they would cherish
it in terms of divine intervention. In some writers,
although not in all, this expectation of supernatural
106
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
help took Messianic form. At first the Davidic king-
dom and dynasty were to be restored; then the per-
sonality of the Messiah assumed more definite and
more glorious importance, until finally the Day of the
Lord was to come when the Son of man should appear
upon the clouds of heaven. The full flower of this
hope is not found in the Old Testament. Only fore-
shadowings of it are there. The full development of
the Messianic expectation came between the Testa-
ments and is now laid bare to us in the apocalyptic
writings. They differed in innumerable details but
in their world-view and their philosophy of history
they were unanimous. They were utterly pessimistic
about the present; there was no good in it and no hope.
They were all concerned about a future which would
not be an outgrowth of the present but a catastrophic
upsetting of it, its final calcining and annihilation.
The Day of the Lord would come suddenly with a
Messianic invasion from heaven.
Such was the popular phrasing of hope in the en-
vironment where Christianity began, and the effects
of that phrasing, the outlines and implications of it,
are visible in passage after passage of the New Tes-
tament. It is present in some sayings attributed to
our Lord, and unless one accepts Matthew Arnold's
principle, "Jesus over the heads of all his reporters,”
at least some elements of it were in the background
of his thought. A few years ago Jesus was widely
interpreted by scholars as an apocalyptic thinker; to-
day the swing of scholarly opinion is rather the other
way and the Master's thought of the victorious future
is seen to be rooted in the prophets and psalmists and
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
107
not in the apocalyptists. Certainly, he never in-
dulged in fanciful pictures of the established kingdom,
as the Jewish apocalyptists did. He had no interest
in their carnal materializations of the coming era of
God's sovereignty over man; he made the kingdom
thoroughly moral, a life of filial fellowship with God
and fraternal relations between men. Moreover, he
emphasized inward preparation for the kingdom's
coming. His expectation of God's triumph was not
primarily an occasion for proud joy, but for humble
penitence. Purity, self-forgetting love, sincerity-
such are the attributes of life in the coming kingdom,
and a man should repent and seek inward cleansing and
renewal when he hears that the Day of God is coming.
More important still, the Master made no such gulf
between the present and the future ages as the Jewish
apocalyptists did. In his thought the kingdom of God
already was throwing foregleams of the new day into
the life of man. There was a spiritual sense in which
the kingdom was in the earth now-"The kingdom of
God is within you." 1 One could feel its power when
divine strength and goodness overcame evil-"If I
by the finger of God cast out demons, then is the king-
dom of God come upon you." 2 It was possible for a
man by the quality and spirit of his life to enter the
kingdom now—“Thou art not far from the kingdom
of God"; "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven"; "Suffer the little chil-
dren to come unto me . . for to such belongeth the
kingdom of God." The kingdom, therefore, was not
1 Luke 17:21.
•
3 Mark 12:34; Matthew 5:3; Mark 10:14.
2 Luke 11:20.
108
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
something merely to be awaited in the future, but to
be sought now in spirit like a pearl of great price or a
treasure hidden in a field.¹ In this spiritual approach
to the idea of God's coming sovereignty over life one
loses the apocalyptic way of thinking altogether, and
the kingdom, already here, like a grain of mustard
seed will grow into a great tree, or like a bit of leaven
will gradually transform the whole lump.2
Finally, the Master denationalized the kingdom.
It was to be no triumph of the Jews over their ene-
mies, but the rule of God over all mankind, and when
he lifted up the eyes of his faith he saw men coming
into the kingdom from east, west, north, and south.3
Thus the Master took a current category in which all
his people phrased their hope of God's victory on
earth, and transformed it. In his hands its fantastic
features were stripped away, its deep spiritual re-
quirements were exalted, its present meanings were
put to the front, and its narrow national boundaries
were broken down.
Nevertheless, the outline of the old thought-form
meets us constantly in the New Testament. John's
Gospel is one notable exception. That was a brave
attempt to reinterpret the Christian hope. It as-
serted Christ's second coming, but it spiritualized the
event. John was addressing his Gospel to Hellenistic
readers. They did not understand Jewish apocalyp-
tic; they did not like it; its dramatics, its catas-
trophic arrival of the day of judgment, its physical
resurrections were alien from Greek thought. Just
2 Luke 13:18-19; 13:20-21.
1 Matthew 13:45-46; 13:44.
3 Matthew 8:11, Luke 13:29.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
109
as John's Gospel, therefore, presented Christ, not
primarily in terms of Jewish Messiah, but of Greek
Logos, so it presented the Christian hope on earth,
not in terms of an apocalyptic kingdom, but of an
immediately possessed eternal life. Even upon the
lips of Jesus at the last supper is put the reiter-
ated teaching that his second coming is now, in the
hearts of his true disciples, and that he dwells in
them.¹
1
Elsewhere in the New Testament, however, the old
framework is the familiar setting of hope. The book
of Revelation is built upon it. When Paul lets his
imagination dwell on God's coming victory he draws
the familiar picture with which his Jewish training
had acquainted him long before he had known Jesus:
the sudden, physical coming of the Messiah upon the
clouds, the ascension of the living saints to meet him
in the air, the resurrection of the righteous dead, the
day of judgment, and the final destinies.
Once more, then, the church faces an issue: are we
bound to continue forever expressing in this ancient
category our living hope of God's victory on earth?
Even John reinterpreted the form of expectation that
he might preach God's coming sovereignty in terms
that his Hellenistic hearers could understand. Must
we then retrace our steps, give up what have seemed
to us the gains of centuries, go back to the ways of
thinking which developed among Jewish apocalyp-
tists between the Testaments, and become premille-
narians that we may be Christians?
¹ John 14:19-23. Cf. Ernest F. Scott: The Fourth Gospel, its Pur-
pose and Theology, Ch. X, The Return of Christ.
IIO
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Many of us for years have been preaching the vic-
tory of God's purpose on earth. We have not sur-
rendered to that superficial modernity which thinks
that man, blowing upon his hands, can tackle the
task of transforming human character and society
and can win against the dead-weight of a materialistic
universe. Our hope has been in God. We believe
that his purpose undergirdles human life, that his
providence directs it, that his victory lies ahead. The
proudest title that we can think of is found in Paul's
phrase, “God's fellow-workers."1 To be ourselves of
such a spirit that God can work his victory in and
through us; to persuade others to be transformed by
the renewing of their minds; to strive for the better
organization of society that the divine purpose may
be furthered, not hindered, by our economic and po-
litical life; and then to await the event in his way and
time--such have been our attitude and our preaching,
and they have seemed to us Christian.
Those first disciples were expressing in terms of
thought familiar to their generation this fundamental
hope which we are preaching still. A changed category
does not mean an abandoned conviction. At any
rate, an increasing number of Christian ministers will
go back to the New Testament as the fountainhead
of their faith in God and of their assurance that his
kingdom will come and his will be done on earth,
without its occurring to them to expect the physical
return of Jesus on the clouds of heaven.
1 I Corinthians 3:9.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
III
III
Consider still another illustration of this principle.
Belief in demons as the source and explanation of
life's manifold evils has been one of the most universal
and prevalent ways of thinking that Christendom has
ever known. Of course, it is no specialty of Chris-
tendom; it is one of the primitive ways of thinking
common to all mankind. In particular, the Græco-
Roman world was permeated with belief in demons.
There was little difference in this regard between the
many conflicting schools of thought; men everywhere
explained cosmic evil and the multitudinous mishaps
of daily life by demonology and, so far as the basic
outlines of this way of thinking are concerned, the
Stoic philosopher and the common peasant were alike.
When Christianity, therefore, went into the Græco-
Roman world, there was no dispute between Christian
and non-Christian as to the existence of demons.
Origen and Celsus, or any other debaters of the Gospel
versus paganism, started in their controversies with
the same premise: the reality, power, and malignity
of demons.¹ One of the chief sources of the Gospel's
influence in the early centuries lay in the fact that,
advancing triumphantly into a demon-ridden world,
it announced a power to cast the demons out and to
redeem men from their sway. The early Christians.
entered deliberately into a war on evil spirits, in whose
existence and machinations both pagan and Christian
unanimously believed. The result was two-fold:
¹ Cf. Origen Against Celsus, Book I, Ch. VI, and Book II,
Ch. LI, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, 398-399 and 451-452.
II2
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
first, a fine sense of victory on the part of multitudes
of folk who through faith in Christ cast off their fear
of devils; but, second, a new reality, a fresh vividness,
an expanded importance contributed to that demo-
niacal world by the very efforts that were made to
overcome it. What is treated so seriously becomes
increasingly serious, and Christianity did treat demons
with tremendous earnestness.
The evidence of this is inexhaustible. Not because
it is in the least unique, but to help our minds more
vividly to think in those early Christian terms, we
choose almost at random this typical passage from
Tertullian:
"We affirm indeed the existence of certain spiri-
tual essences; nor is their name unfamiliar. The
philosophers acknowledge there are demons;
Socrates himself waiting on a demon's will. Why
not? since it is said an evil spirit attached itself
specially to him even from his childhood-turn-
ing his mind no doubt from what was good. The
poets are all acquainted with demons too; even
the ignorant common people make frequent use
of them in cursing. In fact, they call upon Satan,
the demon-chief, in their execrations, as though
from some instinctive soul-knowledge of him.
Plato also admits the existence of angels. The
dealers in magic, no less, come forward as wit-
nesses to the existence of both kinds of spirits. We
are instructed, moreover, by our sacred books how
from certain angels, who fell of their own free-will,
there sprang a more wicked demon-brood, con-
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
II3
demned of God along with the authors of their
race, and that chief we have referred to. It will
for the present be enough, however, that some
account is given of their work. Their great busi-
ness is the ruin of mankind. So, from the very
first, spiritual wickedness sought our destruc-
tion. They inflict, accordingly, upon our bodies
diseases and other grievous calamities, while
by violent assaults they hurry the soul into sud-
den and extraordinary excesses. Their marvelous
subtleness and tenuity give them access to both
parts of our nature. . . . Invisible and intangible,
we are not cognizant of their action save by its
effects, as when some inexplicable, unseen poison
in the breeze blights the apples and the grain
while in the flower, or kills them in the bud, or
destroys them when they have reached maturity;
as though by the tainted atmosphere in some
unknown way spreading abroad its pestilential
exhalations. So, too, by an influence equally
obscure, demons and angels breathe into the soul,
and rouse up its corruptions with furious passions
and vile excesses; or with cruel lusts accompanied
by various errors, of which the worst is that by
which these deities are commended to the favor
of deceived and deluded human beings, that they
may get their proper food of flesh-fumes and
blood when that is offered up to idol-images. What
is daintier food to the spirit of evil, than turning
men's minds away from the true God by the
illusions of a false divination?" 1
1 Apology, Ch. XXII, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III, 36.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
This vivid reality of demons in the faith of the
church continued with unabated prevalence for cen-
turies. Demons were indeed regarded as superhuman,
but, for all that, they were supposed to be amenable to
much the same sort of influences as those which affect
us. Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome and one of the
four supreme doctors of the Western church, relates
that a nun ate some lettuce without making the sign
of the Cross and thereby swallowed a devil; when
commanded by a holy man to come forth, the devil
replied, "How am I to blame? I was sitting on the
lettuce, and this woman, not having made the sign of
the Cross, ate me along with it." 1 With such a view
of devils in the minds of the church's foremost doctors,
popular methods of exorcism can be easily imagined.
In the manuals one finds speeches that seek to cast
the devils out by flattery, directions for smudging
them out by burning asafetida and sulphur, tremen-
dous and disgusting curses fitted to weary the devils
and to make them leave; and sometimes the victims
were beaten to the point of death that the devils might
find them undesirable habitations. Go back to the
early church and you find Saint Jerome in his life
of Saint Hilarion giving a graphic account of how the
saint exorcised a demon from a possessed camel,2 and
come down to the Protestant church and you find
John Bunyan describing a scene which he himself
witnessed where they smudged a man to get the
1 Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom, Vol. II, 101.
¶ 23, Bruta animalia curata, in Patrologiæ Latina, ed. by J. P.
Migne, Vol. XXIII, 39.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
115
demon out of him, and almost smothered him in the
process.1
Everywhere in the life of the church up to the very
threshold of our own time demonology was ramp-
ant. Demons caused thunder-storms, and Romanists.
guarded against them by carrying little pieces of holy
wax stamped with a lamb,-the Agnus Dei,-and other
charms to ward off their power. Luther insisted that
the repetition of the first verses of John's Gospel
uttered with faith were of unfailing efficacy in stop-
ping the assaults of the most obstinate devils.2 The
very church bells were used not simply to sound far
and wide their call to worship, but to drive devils
from the thunder-clouds, and great cathedral bells in
Europe were anointed with holy oil, blessed with
sacred benedictions, and stamped with special mottoes,
that they might achieve this purpose.³
Consider the architecture of Christendom with its
embellishment of demons, the early drama in which
Satan and his hosts play so indispensable a part, the
painting where the devils are as real as men, the
literature where, as in Robert Burns, one sees reflected
prevalent primitive beliefs, and the universal sway of
demonology becomes impressive. Consider more
sinister facts-persecutions for witchcraft and the
long, unutterable horror of Christendom's treatment
of insanity—and the old belief becomes more than
1
¹ James Anthony Froude: Bunyan, 6.
2 Auslegung des ersten und zweiten Kapitels Johannis, in Werke,
Kritische Gesammtausgabe, Weimar, Vol. 46, 628.
3 Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom, Vol. I, 342–347.
116
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
impressive; it becomes terrific. Even John Wesley
held that many diseases were caused by demons, that
the gods of the heathen were actual existences and
were demons, that dreams are often caused by demons,
that most lunatics are demoniacs, that to give up
witchcraft would be to give up the Bible, and that
diabolic possession is too valuable a testimony to the
reality of the invisible world for Christians ever to
surrender it.¹ And if all this is considered popular
superstition rather than intellectual conviction, read
St. Thomas Aquinas' highly wrought doctrine of devils
and learn with him to discuss the nature of their sin,
their present estate and future prospects, their powers
and limitations, their number, and the conditions of
their knowledge.2
All this has gone from the minds of most of us.
Little by little the realms where demons used to oper-
ate have been invaded by scientific knowledge. In-
sanity, which once was universally ascribed to demons,
is now known to be the result of a disordered
brain. Epilepsy, once familiarly regarded as an evi-
dence of demoniacal possession, has been diagnosed
and described, and the nature of its attendant lesions
is at least partially understood. Dreams, melancholia,
hysteria, and other ills are dealt with in terms of
pathological psychology and are not treated as the
mischievous work of devils. Strange freaks of second
1 Cf. sermon, Of Evil Angels; A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers
Middleton; Preface to a True Relation of the Chief Things Which an
Evil Spirit did and said at Mascon, in Burgundy.
2 Summa Theologica Part I, Second Number, Treatise on the An-
gels; Third Number, Treatise on the Divine Government.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
117
sight, clairvoyance, telepathy are put in the realm of
psychic activity. Thunder-storms, formerly thought
of as the vivid and picturesque manifestations of
diabolic activity, are now classed under meteorology,
and Luther, whose conversion took place in a terrific
thunder-storm which frightened him because he
thought the devil was doing it,¹ would now be shocked
to learn that scientists are making thunder-storms of
their own. Moral temptation is generally looked
upon, not as inspiration from an outer world of de-
mons, but as the fruit of our own evil impulses. In a
word, the attack upon the vast and picturesque
demoniacal world in which our forefathers believed
has not been theoretical, but practical. Nobody in
our intellectual world stops to explain anything as the
result of its activity. Devils may exist, but their
functions are gone.
To be sure, demoniacal possession continues on
mission fields, but only where demons are believed in.
Wherever the modern doubt of demons comes in the
phenomena of demoniacal possession go out. The
result is that demonology has gradually faded. Some
still carry rabbits' feet, knock on wood, and cross
their fingers, but they do not really believe in demons
as their fathers did. As a matter of fact, if we did so
believe in them and acted accordingly, the public
authorities would at once take charge of us. We read
with antiquarian interest, not with understanding
sympathy, the early chapters of The Toilers of the
Sea, by Victor Hugo, where the old ideas are described
operating in full blast in the nineteenth century.
¹ Arthur C. McGiffert: Martin Luther; The Man and His Work, 17,
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Let us, however, frankly face the fact that when
we surrender demonology we surrender a Scriptural
category. Demonology is in the Bible. To be sure,
many of its exaggerations, its ludicrous applications,
its cruelties and grotesque enlargements are not there.
The Bible dignifies everything it touches. Neverthe-
less, belief in demons, their multitude, malignity,
activity, and power is unquestionably a Biblical
framework of thought.
There are few developments in Hebrew religion
much more easy to trace, at least in outline, than the
growth of this particular category. In the back-
ground is the universally prevalent belief in evil
spirits which the Hebrews shared with their Semitic
fellows. Azazel, a wilderness demon, even retained
his place in one of the temple rituals.¹ An important
addition was made to this original demoniacal world
when the divinities of other people, denied godhead
by the Hebrews, were not denied existence but were.
demoted to the rank of devils. As gods of the Sanskrit
classics became the dævas of Zoroastrianism, as the
gods of the old Arab tribes became the jinn of Muham-
madanism, as the gods of the Græco-Roman world
became the devils of the early Christians, and as the
Teuton deities were turned into demons by the medi-
eval church, so the Hebrews regarded foreign divini-
ties as demons. Later, the story of Genesis 6:2-4,
where heavenly beings married earthly women, was
elaborated until a previous rebellion of angels in
2
1 Leviticus 16:10; J. F. McCurdy, K. Kohler, and I. Husic: article
on Azazel in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. by Isidore Singer.
2 Psalm 106:37-38, Deuteronomy 32:17.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
119
1
heaven was posited and their unholy union with the
daughters of men was supposed to have issued in
demoniacal births. This became orthodox Christian
doctrine. Justin Martyr spoke of angels who trans-
gressed the divine appointment and by sinful inter-
course with women produced offspring who were
demons. 2
3
The mold into which Hebrew demonology at last.
was run and from which it took its final shape was
Zoroastrianism. When the Persian influence was com-
plete, the hitherto inchoate demonic world of the
Hebrews was a well-organized hierarchy of evil with
a chieftain, Satan, at its head. He never appeared
in the Old Testament until after Persian influence
had begun its work, and then he was spoken of in
only three connections. Long before Christianity
appeared, however, the Hebrew people had a highly
developed demonology. In practical life demons
surrounded them on every side. As we believe in the
almost omnipresent danger of destructive bacilli, so
they believed in the multitudinous hosts of evil spirits
which everywhere invaded their life and caused all
manner of misery and sin. Said one rabbi: “They
are more numerous than we and surround us as the
mounds of earth (thrown up by the plow) surround
the furrow." Said another rabbi: "Each of us has a
thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his
right."
Still another said: "Whoever wishes to be-
¹ Cf., e. g., The Book of Enoch, Sec. I, Chs. VI and XV.
2 The Second Apology of Justin for the Christians, Ch. 5, in The
Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. I, 190.
3 Job 1:6-12 and 2:1-7, Zechariah 3:1-2, I Chronicles 21:1.
120
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
come acquainted with them, let him take sifted ashes
and strew them around his bed and in the morning he
will see the footprints of a cock." If one believed
thus in demons, he could not live if he took them too
seriously, and one suspects that many people used
exorcising prayers or employed incantations and
amulets for guarding against demons with the same
cheerfulness with which we use paper cups and liquid
soap in our campaign of sterilization against the
microbes.
Nevertheless, it still remains true that this gigantic
host of evil spirits was supposed to be the source of all
things terrible. Insanity, individual wickedness, deaf-
ness, dumbness, blindness, epilepsy, power of evil
emperors, were all the work of demons; and the source
of that cosmic warfare against God of which the
earthly struggle was a counterpart was to be found in
the rebellion of Satan and his hosts against the Al-
mighty.
This method of explaining human sin and misery
is thoroughly characteristic of the New Testament.
Demons entered into the working ideas, habitual
explanations, and common terminology of all New
Testament folk. There is a notable absence of folk-
lore in the Book; there are no charms and incanta-
tions; Paul and John especially sublimate the whole
idea, but when the mind of the New Testament dealt
with physical ills like dumbness, deafness, blindness,
epilepsy, or with moral ills whether individual or
1
¹ I Tractat Berachoth, in Der Babylonische Talmud in Seinen Hag-
gadischen Bestandtheilen, ed. by Aug. Wünsche, 23, Erster Halb-
band, 12.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
I21
cosmic, that vast realm of experience was inevitably
phrased in terms of demonology.
Does that mean, then, that Christians must always
so phrase their experiences of human evil and their
convictions about it? To answer in the affirmative
is to shut the door of Christianity against intelligence,
for while an intelligent mind may well refuse to claim
omniscience by denying the theoretical possibility that
evil spirits exist, no intelligent mind can possibly go
back across the centuries and enter into demonology
as an habitual, inevitable, comprehensive category of
explanation for human sin and misery. What we
have in ancient demonology is a transient phrasing of
abiding experiences. Once men explained eclipses of
the sun by saying that a dragon swallowed it. We
know better now, but because we no longer believe
in that old explanation we have not thereby gotten
rid of the sun's eclipses. So we surrender the old
category of demonology as a means of scientific ex-
planation but, for all that, the age-long eclipse of
man's life in sin and misery is as much of a fact and as
terrible a fact as ever it was. Everything the devil
and his hosts ever meant is with us yet.
Having frankly recognized, therefore, the outgrown
nature of the category, we need not be troubled by it
when we read the Bible. What we should seek to
understand is the abiding experience. "Then was
Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted of the devil" 1-surely no one needs another
to tell him what that experience was. "Satan entered
into Judas who was called Iscariot, being of the num
1 Matthew 4:1.
122
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
.
1
ber of the twelve" is there any one of us who does
not know the peril of a privileged place such as Judas
had and from which he fell? "Get thee behind me,
Satan" 2—did none of us ever face temptation clothed
in the alluring voice of a friend and feel as Jesus felt
about Peter? "He [the devil] is a liar" 3-have any
of us so escaped the deceitfulness of sin that we cannot
preach on that? "Even Satan fashioneth himself
into an angel of light" 4-indeed he does and by it
he has fooled us all!
Nothing that the devils ever stood for has yet gone
out of human life. Personal temptation; various
aspects, allurements, and results of sin; disease, es-
pecially diseases with spiritual rather than physical
origination; and the ever present mystery of human
suffering and death-all this is with us still. For
years many of us have been trying to bring the Chris-
tian message to bear upon life's sin and evil. We
have found the Gospel that men need in the New
Testament. We return to the New Testament to
refind it when its meaning eludes us, to refresh it if
ever it grows dim. To cast the devils out of human
life is our commission, too, as it was that of the first
disciples, but it never occurs to us literally to hold in
our minds the ancient framework of demonology.
IV
An important part of the modern preacher's re-
sponsibility is thus to decode the abiding meanings
1 Luke 22:3.
³ John 8:44.
2 Matthew 16:23.
4 II Corinthians 11:14.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
123
1
of Scripture from outgrown phraseology. Some of the
Bible is written in a cipher which the mind of our
time finds it difficult if not impossible to read. We
have always recognized this in minor ways. When
the psalmist makes God say, "Upon Edom will I
cast my shoe," it requires a knowledge of ancient
Hebrew legal customs to grasp the meaning. Such
information has been the commonplace of our Sunday
School instruction, but the decoding demanded by
the facts which we are now considering is more serious.
The contrast here is not between transient customs
but between elemental forms of conception, a mani-
fest divergence between our habitual presuppositions
of thought and those used in Scripture. Yet all the
more because the letter of the Bible often grows
cryptic as our modern categories prevail must the
mind of the church be made familiar with its abiding
sense.
Consider angels. From the time Jehovah himself
walked in the garden in the cool of the day and famil-
iarly conversed with man, through the stages by which
his figure grew in dignity and transcendence until he
dealt with men by means of angels, the development
of angelology can be traced through the Old Testa-
ment. At first it was not easy to distinguish between
Jehovah and the angel of Jehovah 2 but soon the sep-
arate individuality of angelic beings became clear,
and finally, when Zoroastrianism had done its work,
the flexible and fluid Hebrew angelology had been
frozen into Persian form. During the Exile angelic
beings became increasingly important; they assumed
2 See, e. g., Genesis 16:7, 13; 31:11, 13.
1 Psalm 108:9.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
definite rank; they were arranged in a great hierarchy;
seven archangels were at their head and these chief-
tains were known familiarly by name.¹ Read Dan-
iel's tenth chapter and observe the definite and pic-
turesque conception of the angels, the literalness with
which their activities were imagined, the organization
of the nations under their jurisdiction after the man-
ner of Persian satrapies, and the mention of one arch-
angel's name.
When we turn to the New Testament, angels are
the common phrasing of God's ministry to man.
They form an innumerable host; they serve men by
causing useful dreams, by strengthening the spirit in
temptation, by opening prison doors, by giving peace
and power in time of stress.2 Not only do they sur-
round the heavenly throne and attend the divine
Majesty, but they appear corporeally on earth, glo-
rious in splendor.3
This is a phrasing of experience which we folk of
the twentieth century do not naturally use as an ex-
planation of our blessings either material or spiritual.
The typical modern mind does not habitually think
of angels as the cause of events in his life. Nobody
knows enough to assert that angels do not exist. That
statement, however, is of small importance in deal-
ing with our practical problem as interpreters of the
Bible. We may believe it entirely reasonable to sup-
1 K. Kohler: article on Angelology, sec. on A Heavenly Hierarchy,
in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. by Isidore Singer.
2 E. g., Luke 2:13, Matthew 26:53, Hebrews 12:22, Revelation 5:11;
Matthew 2:13; 4:11; Acts 5:19; Luke 22:43.
3 Matthew 16:27, 28:2-3, Acts 12:7.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
125
pose that the unseen world is populous, that multi-
tudes of beings exist, angelic in character and estate;
certainly we may refuse to claim omniscience by de-
nying it; but, for all that, we know well that we do not
think about angels in the Zoroastrian fashion. Ga-
briel has no real place in our explanation of events.
We cannot think with Jude of Michael and the devil
fighting over the possession of Moses' body.¹ We do
not practically ascribe helpful dreams or anything
else to the beneficent activity of individual angels.
Indeed, we must confess that as a category of scien-
tific explanation actually applied to daily life we are
not Biblical in our thinking about angels.
Here, then, is a way of thinking and speaking that
needs to be decoded for the use of well-instructed
folk. Surely it is not difficult to do it. Angels repre-
sent our fathers' profound and practical consciousness
of the reality, friendliness, and availability of the spir-
itual world. Pick up at random passages about angels
and consider their significance: "He said, Surely,
they are my people, children that will not deal falsely:
so he was their Savior. In all their affliction he was
afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them";
"The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them
that fear him, and delivereth them"; "He will give
his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy
ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest
thou dash thy foot against a stone"; "Even so, I say
unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels
of God over one sinner that repenteth"; "Think-
est thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he
1 ¹ Jude 9.
126
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
shall even now send me more than twelve legions of
angels?" 1
Looking at such passages from the standpoint of
literal fact with modern psychology as standard, we
get one kind of judgment; but, looking at them from
the standpoint of experience to see what vital truth
all this was about, we must perceive that our fathers
here were speaking of the essential principle of relig-
ion-the presence, providence, directing care, and
constant availability of that unseen friendship whose
source is in God. Moreover, as one sees how real,
vivid, and easily picturable angelology made this ex-
perience, one begins to suspect that we have lost
something with our lost angels.
Indeed, if any one has been tempted to look with
condescension on benighted minds that once believed
in them, he would better see how shallow that atti-
tude is. R. J. Campbell I suspect does not use the
category of angelology any more literally than most
of us, but listen to his wisdom when he deals with it:
"Often I pause and smile as I think what an
enormous contrast there is between such a char-
acter as, say, Louis IX-St. Louis of France-
and the average member of the Stock Exchange
at the present day, in general outlook upon life.
And yet which is the higher? The advantage
is not all on the side of the stockbroker. St. Louis
lived, or so he thought, in habitual intercourse
with invisible beings, saints and angels, and in a
world which was continually being acted upon
¹ Isaiah 63:8–9; Psalm 34:7; 91:11-12; Luke 15:10; Matthew 26:53.
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
127
from the unseen—in fact he believed that unseen
powers had far more to do with the shaping of
his life than had the people whom he saw around
him in the flesh. Was he wholly wrong? And
was he the worse or the smaller man for extending
his perspective beyond the horizon of things ma-
terial? I do not think so; and, notwithstanding
the evils wrought by unreasoning superstition in
the hands of an unscrupulous priesthood, I am
sure we shall have to recover that old-time con-
sciousness of the nearness and activity of the
invisible world." 1
For myself, I would far rather believe in angels
and so have the spiritual world real and near than be
as some modern men who live in a gross world of car-
nal things and never in their lives have felt upon their
souls anything that resembles the "brush of an an-
gel's wing." Angelology has rightly been preserved
in our poetic utterance. Some things cannot easily
be said without it. Read the poets and see how nat-
urally the sense of the Spirit's reality, nearness, and
availability pours itself out in terms of angels:
"Around our pillows golden ladders rise,
And up and down the skies,
With wingéd sandals shod,
The angels come and go, the Messengers of God.” 2
Not superstition only kept alive that ancient category
through so many centuries in so many souls great and
wise; it was rather their way of conceiving and expres-
1 The Ladder of Christ and Other Sermons, 212–213.
2 Richard Henry Stoddard: Hymn to the Beautiful.
128
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
sing their utter confidence in, assurance of, experience
with, the reality, nearness, friendship, and availability
of the spiritual world.
To be sure, it is notable that in the supreme souls
one overpasses this need of angels. The Master, for
example, so far as we know never spoke of his expe-
rience in terms of their ministry. Others might speak
of divine help mediated to him through divine mes-
sengers, but the angels of whom the Master himself
speaks are always in heaven; they never come into
his experience to intervene between his soul and his
immediate access to God. When he prays he goes
into the inner chamber and speaks to the Father in
secret. Most of us in this are seeking to follow
Christ. We find it more congenial to our ways of
thinking to pray as he prayed and to conceive of
God's immediate approach to our souls as he con-
ceived it. But the man who has difficulty in under-
standing what the saints and prophets meant by their
belief in angels must have a shallow and provincial
mind.
Indeed, something has happened in this realm
which is typical of our modern spiritual loss. Our
fathers enshrined their sense of the divine nearness
in angels who were close at hand; they carried the liv-
ing water of a real experience in old-fashioned water-
buckets. Then, their children, seeing how out of date.
the buckets were, threw them quite away, water and all,
and now we wistfully are missing the necessary thing
they spilled. We are not clear gainers by our shift of
thought away from angelic categories. We cannot
go back, to be sure; but in other and deeper ways we
ABIDING EXPERIENCES
129
must regain our fathers' sense of the reality and near-
ness of God; we must see for ourselves and help our
generation see
those angel faces smile,
Which we have loved long since, and lost awhile.
V
This, then, is the conclusion of the matter. It is im-
possible that a Book written two to three thousand
years ago should be used in the twentieth century
A. D. without having some of its forms of thought
and speech translated into modern categories. When,
therefore, a man says, I believe in the immortality of
the soul but not in the resurrection of the flesh, I be-
lieve in the victory of God on earth but not in the
physical return of Jesus, I believe in the reality of sin
and evil but not in the visitation of demons, I believe
in the nearness and friendship of the divine Spirit but
I do not think of that experience in terms of individual
angels, only superficial dogmatism can deny that that
man believes the Bible. It is precisely the thing at
which the Bible was driving that he does believe.
Life eternal, the coming of the kingdom, the conquest
of sin and evil, the indwelling and sustaining presence
of the Spirit-these are the gist of the matter once
set forth in ancient terms, but abidingly valid in our
terms too, and valid also in other terms than ours in
which our children's children may express them.
130
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, Stewart D. F. Salmond.
T. and T. Clark.
The Christian Hope, William Adams Brown. Scribner's.
A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel,
in Judaism, and in Christianity, R. H. Charles. A. and C.
Black.
The Kingdom and the Messiah, Ernest F. Scott. T. and T.
Clark.
Eschatology of the Gospels, Ernst von Dobschütz. Hodder
and Stoughton.
A Symposium on Eschatology, Members of the Society of Bib-
lical Literature and Exegesis. Yale University Press.
The Messianic Hope in the New Testament, Shailer Mathews.
University of Chicago Press.
Toward the Understanding of Jesus, Vladimir G. Simkhovitch.
Macmillan.
Demons and Spirits, H. L. Pass, George A. Barton, and others,
in the Enclyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ed. by James
Hastings. Scribner's.
Angelology, Ludwig Blau and Kaufmann Kohler, in The Jewish
Encyclopedia, ed. by Isidore Singer. Funk and Wagnalls.
Demonology, Kaufmann Kohler, in The Jewish Encyclopedia,
ed. by Isidore Singer. Funk and Wagnalls.
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Chris
tendom, Ch. XI, From "The Prince of the Power of the
Air" to Meteorology, Ch. XV, From "Demoniacal Posses-
sion" to Insanity, et passim, Andrew D. White. Appletons.
The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,
Ch. II, Excursus: The Conflict with Demons, Adolf Har-
nack. Putnam.
LECTURE V
MIRACLE AND LAW
I
We have saved for a special lecture that contrast
between Scriptural methods of thinking and our own
which more than any other perplexes modern minds.
Dr. James Moffatt of Scotland has said that when
students discuss the New Testament their questions.
generally turn upon two subjects, miracles and
money.¹ Any one who deals intimately with students
will recognize that in this regard the puzzled thinking
of young people in Great Britain and America is much
alike. They are anxious about the application of
New Testament ethic to modern economic conditions,
and in a world where natural law seems regnant they
are bewildered by religion's classic belief in miracles.
The failure of religious teachers to speak candidly
about this latter subject, their timidity in dealing
with so crucial a perplexity, is surprising and some-
times shocking. One example of the sort of thing we
have been doing is supplied in the English translation
of Sabatier's Philosophie de la Religion. In the orig-
inal French are straightforward, illuminating passages
on miracles, characterized by the lucidity of French
thinking in general and by the candor of Sabatier in
¹ Approach to the New Testament, 9.
1
131
132
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
particular, which in the English translation have been
deliberately omitted. Evidently our Anglo-Saxon
theological sensitiveness must be preserved from
shock, even at the cost of pious fraud.
The time for such evasion and equivocation long
since has passed if it ever existed. Unless the church
is to content herself with a blind, unreasoning dog-
matism, which in the end will alienate intelligent
minds, she must face this crucial matter of miracles,
state the involved difficulties just as frankly as her
enemies can state them, and handle them with unim-
peachable frankness and devotion to the truth.
A familiar question to-day is the inquiry, Do you
believe in miracles? but too often in asking it the one
consideration is neglected on which an intelligent
answer must depend: the meaning of miracle. If we
use miracle in a general and popular sense to signify
marvelous events transcending known means of or-
dinary explanation, there have been in the history of
human thought at least four different connotations
to the idea of the miraculous-so different that a man
could believe one of them and yet disbelieve the others.
There are some mountains that can be climbed from
only one point of approach, and the discussion of the
miraculous is like them, for the road that leads us
over the defiles and past the chasms starts from one
point only a clear idea of miracle. The swiftest way
to reach that starting point is to make, however
briefly, a survey of the various meanings through
which, in the history of human thought, the idea of
the miraculous has passed.
That the conception of miracle is bound to have had
MIRACLE AND LAW
133
a history, to have passed from one significance to
another, should be clear. For the way in which a
man will understand and describe marvelous events
in his world-order will always depend on what he
thinks about the world-order as a whole. A savage.
in the heart of Africa to-day has one idea of miracle-
anything done, as he conceives, by superhuman
powers, demonic or divine-and his life is full of such
activities. A college man in America, however, has
another idea of miracle altogether: with him the con-
ception, if he harbors it at all, involves either the
suspension of natural laws or the extraordinary use of
law-abiding forces. Obviously, the African savage and
the modern college man hold very different ideas of
miracle, and the difference lies primarily in the world-
view which occupies the background of the mind.
Miracle, that is, is a relative term; its meaning changes
as the world-view changes, and in the development
of human thought it has changed radically at least
four times.
II
The earliest form of conceiving miracle which we
can discern in the dimness of antiquity was associated
with the animistic view of the world. According to
that conception, everything which was not the delib-
erate act of man was the act of spirits other than
man's. All nature's movements were looked upon as
the direct activity of extra-human wills. Winds and
waves, thunder and lightning, strange noises and
odors, the rising sun and the changing constellations,-
everything, from the phases of the moon to so inti-
134
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
mate an occurrence as the conception of a child, whose
natural causation was not understood, was looked
upon as due to the direct agency of spirits. In such a
world-view, notable for the absence of the slightest
idea of regularity, with whimsical individual wills as
the explanation of everything, a miracle would be any
occurrence which men did not deliberately cause. Of
course, with such a world-view, life would be mostly
miracle. Breathing, for example, would be regarded
as man's act, but sneezing is so unaccountable, sudden,
and irresistible, that it was universally regarded as
specially inspired by a spirit—a miracle, that is—and
to this day many civilized people cross their fingers
or utter some cabalistic incantation when they sneeze.
This, then, was the earliest idea of miracle. Any
event which was not obviously man's own action was
regarded as the action of some extra-human will and
so belonged to the miraculous realm.
The way out from this earliest view to its successor
lay through the development of a long experience of
dependable regularity in the world. The Bible some-
times gives lyric expression to confidence in the stand-
ardized activities of nature. In Genesis 8:22 we read,
"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest,
and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day
and night shall not cease," and in Psalm 148 the
psalmist sings of the heavens,
((
He hath also established them for ever and ever:
He hath made a decree which none shall transgress.
The old whimsical world of animism, filled with the
1 Marginal translation for verse 6.
MIRACLE AND LAW
135
unpredictable activity of spirits, had been at least in
part supplanted by the trusted regularities of nature.
Never in the Bible, however, do we deal with any
such idea as is represented in our phrase "natural
law." In all the Old Testament there is not even a
word that can be translated "nature" and in the New
Testament the word so rendered means not the cosmic
order, but the specific constitution of some particular
thing as, for example, an olive tree, wild by nature.¹
Few things could make us feel more vividly the dif-
ference between Biblical categories and our own than
the simple fact that the very word "nature," without
which we could not do our ordinary thinking, and the
idea of natural law, without which our view of the
world would be unimaginable, are not once to be
found.
What had happened to differentiate the Scripture
from the preceding form of thought was the growth
of a large body of experience as to many reliable
regularities in man's dealing with the world. In much
the same way a child starts in infancy with no idea of
habitual and dependable processes in nature. You
can startle an infant, but you cannot surprise him. He
has no idea of what is usual against which you can
project the experience of the unusual. "Extraor-
dinary" has no meaning to him because he has not
achieved any conception of what is ordinary. Throw
a ball into the air and if it stays suspended the infant
will not be surprised. But when childhood has come
on and a body of experience has been built up as to
what usually happens, a ball which stayed in the air
1 Romans 11:24.
136
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
would be amazing. The extraordinary nature of the
event would stand out against the background of
ordinary experience. Nevertheless, the child, how-
ever able to distinguish usual and unusual, and to be
surprised at the marvelous, would not yet know the
law of specific gravity nor even suppose that such a
law exists.
This experience of habitual regularity in the world
without any accompanying idea of involved laws.
which could be discovered and stated was the back-
ground of the Biblical idea of miracle. What we
would call gravitation, for example, was a constant
experience; men had come to depend on it, but no
one had ever thought of it as a law-abiding force or
had supposed that it could be stated in a mathematical
formula. To the writers of the Book, God was the
ultimate actor in all good events. His providence
undergirdled and penetrated all life. Some events he
did in a usual way, others in an unusual. A miracle
was simply an extraordinary event which surpassed
or transcended the ordinary course of God's procedure.
God was free to do anything he wished to do in any
way he wished to do it. For the most part he had
standardized his activities; one could depend on an
established and familiar regularity. But he might at
any moment choose an abnormal instead of the normal
way of acting. An axe-head might usually sink in
water but there was no reason why God should not
make it float if he wished to do an extraordinary
thing. It was surprising when he did it, but it pre-
sented no intellectual problem whatever. No laws
were broken because no laws were known. No He-
MIRACLE AND LAW
137
brew had ever dreamed of such a thing as a mathe-
matical formula of specific gravity in accordance with
which an axe-head in water ought invariably to sink.
Wherever one turns in the Bible he finds this simple
idea of miracle as an extraordinary activity of God
standing out from his ordinary habit of procedure.
There are three Hebrew words and three Greek words
in the Bible that connote miracle and they are variously
translated wonders, wonderful things, strange things,
glorious things, works, mighty works, signs.¹ Without
the slightest idea of laws to be suspended or broken,
the writers of the Bible described the unusual activi-
ties of God and indiscriminately treated as miracle such
things as the Red Sea held back by a wind and God's
restoration of sinners to his favor,2 resurrection from
the dead and God's sending rain upon the soil,³ a fish
swallowing a man and the exaltation to safety of those
who mourn, walking on the sea, commanding a tem-
pest to cease, and the healing of some distracted mind.
4
Indeed, so easy and unembarrassed by any intellec-
tual difficulty was this idea of usual and unusual events,
that not God alone and his representatives, but Satan
and his satellites were supposed to work miracles con-
tinually. To the contemporary thought of Biblical
times miracles did not necessarily argue divine power.
The Pharisees thought that even the Master in his
mighty works might be acting for Beelzebub,5 and
1 MDID, NSD, NIN, dúvaµis, tepas, onμetov. See Maurice A. Canney:
article on Wonders, in the Encyclopædia Biblica, ed. by Cheyne and
Black.
2 Psalm 107:17-21.
4 Job 5:9, 11.
3 Job 5:9-10.
5 Matthew 12:24.
138
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
in passage after passage the marvelous invasion of
the ordinary course of things by the extraordinary
activity of evil powers was taken for granted.
This, then, was the second conception of miracle:
unusual events which stand out with surprising effect
from the background of usual procedure.
The next change in the understanding of miracle
was precipitated when the Hebrew-Christian tradi-
tion moved out into the world of Greek thought. For
the first time in its history that tradition faced in
Greek philosophy an impressive concept of cosmic
order. The solemn words of Prometheus,
Necessity doth front the universe
With an invincible gesture,"
are a summary of one aspect and that not the least
significant of Greek thought. In Hebrew thought
necessity never confronted anything. In Jeremiah's
figure, God could make and unmake and remake his
earthly vessels, whether men or nations, as a potter
does his pots.¹ Everything was free, anything could
happen, and hope had wings. But in Greek thought
the Fates were in control and even the father of the
gods was vassal to their irresistible decrees. Not by
the path of inductive science but, none the less surely,
by the flight of speculative philosophy, the Greek
mind came to a lofty, majestic, and sometimes terrific
idea of an all-comprehensive and dominant cosmic
order.
Soon or late it was inevitable that this masterful
idea should raise an intellectual problem with refer-
1
¹ Jeremiah 18:1-8.
MIRACLE AND LAW
139
ence to miracles. To be sure, the conception was too
ponderous to be well assimilated in popular thought
and, even if it had been assimilated, there always
have been ways of making predestination in general
lie down in peace with miracles in particular. Yet,
for all that, the simple Biblical idea of God's usual and
unusual ways of acting could not long go unques-
tioned in a world where belief in a vast cosmic
system had once taken possession of man's imagina-
tion.
The conflict came to the surface in Augustine. So
far as our records go, he was the first man in our He-
brew-Christian tradition who ever felt the need of
presenting an intellectual defense of the miraculous.
As you read him you can feel in the background of
his mind the influence of the cosmic order of the
Greeks. "We say that all portents are contrary to
nature," he wrote, "but they are not so. For how is
that contrary to nature which happens by the will of
God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly
the nature of each created thing?" That is to say,
there is an all-inclusive cosmic order in which from
God's point of view there are no breaks nor interven-
tions, and what seems miracle to us is simply the
fulfilment of deeper powers and purposes than we
yet have fathomed.
If the church had followed Augustine's lead, how
different the course of subsequent thought would have
been! As a matter of fact, however, the church went
off on another road. It, too, accepted into its think-
1 The City of God, Book XXI, Ch. 8, in The Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II, 459.
140
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
ing much of the Greek contribution, which heightened
greatly the idea of a cosmic order, but instead of mak-
ing that cosmic order include everything, even mir-
acles, as natural in God's eyes, the medieval church
used the cosmic system to set off miracles in sharp
contrast, to make them more exceptional than they
had ever been before. For the first time, miracles
were regarded as an intervention in a regular world-
order. There was a cosmic system-so thought the
church-but God was more powerful than that sys-
tem, vast and impressive though it was. He tran-
scended it, broke through its regularities, disrupted
its habitual procedures. Miracle to the Biblical
writers meant God's working in an extraordinary
way, whereas he usually worked in an ordinary way;
miracle in the middle ages was understood to mean the
sovereign power of God intervening in the estab-
lished methods of a cosmic order. Miracle thus was
heightened and given a specific uniqueness that never
had been there before.
The next stage in the development of the under-
standing of miracle we need not at length elaborate,
for we ourselves are in the midst of it. Modern sci-
ence came upon the scene. It took the Greek philo-
sophic concept of a cosmic order and brought it down
from heaven to earth. Regularity in nature was no
longer left as a vague impression made by the general
order of the universe; nature's habitual procedures
were now dealt with one by one and set in mathemat-
ical formulas as irrevocable laws. The result is that
the modern mind finds itself in a cosmic system which
is regular with a vengeance. Many of its established
MIRACLE AND LAW
14I
procedures can be put into mathematics and tested
by repeated experiment. From chemistry to psy-
chology we are living every day more confidently
upon the basic idea that this is thoroughly and unin-
terruptedly a law-abiding universe.
What happened to the idea of miracle when this
onrush of inductive science overtook it is clear. Mir-
acle had been defined as God's intervention in a cos-
mic order. It was redefined as God's intervention in
mathematically stated law. When a word is headed
strongly in one direction it is hard to stop its momen-
tum, and miracle, having come to mean God's irrup-
tion into established order, kept on meaning that even
when established order was defined with the partic-
ularity of Newton's formula of gravitation. The con-
sequence has been disastrous. Many have concluded
with brusque finality that miracles do not happen.
And if we were compelled to accept the idea of mir-
acle on which the church stranded in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, most of us, however unwil-
lingly, would have to accept that dictum.
If, then, we use the word miracle to mean marvelous
events transcending known means of ordinary ex-
planation, the idea has had four major formulations
in human history. It started by meaning all activities
in the world which man did not deliberately cause;
it went on to mean unusual events which rose above
the level of the ordinary; it then fell under the sway
of a philosophic idea of cosmic order and began to
mean intervention in an established system; and at
last it faced modern science and was redefined to
mean the rupture or suspension of demonstrable laws.
142
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
III
With this historic background in our thought we
turn to picture the resultant state of mind in many of
our well-instructed auditors when on Sunday we read
a passage in the Bible involving miracle. Let us put
the matter without the mitigations and reverent
asides that our ministerial instincts would suggest,
but with the brusqueness and unsparing candor that
often find expression in private on the lips of an im-
patient modern man. However much he may adore
Christ, believe in the basic principles of Christianity,
and support the church, what is this typical twentieth-
century man feeling to-day about stories of miracles?
For one thing, he feels that miracles are a priori
improbable. Something radically transforming hap-
pened to the minds of men when Newton first set
down in a demonstrable formula the law of gravita-
tion. That formula eliminated chance and irregularity
from a wide area of human experience. Lawlessness
and whimsicality were banished from the relationships
where that formula applied, and a regular procedure
was established which could be stated in figures and
verified by anybody who intelligently experimented
with the phenomenon at any time and under any
circumstances. Realm after realm has thus been
redeemed from irregularity. Once the fact that we
see the flash before we hear the roar was given the
very childlike explanation that "sight is nobler than
hearing." With such an explanation it is conceivable
that some day for special purposes the arrangement
might be reversed and hearing dignified above sight.
MIRACLE AND LAW
143
But when light-waves and air-waves have been dif-
ferentiated and their habits studied and formulated,
no such changeableness is any more imaginable. We
feel sure that men always and invariably have found
sight swifter than hearing, and that they always will.
This sort of thing has deeply transformed men's
thinking. They are convinced that this is a thor-
oughly law-abiding world.
When, therefore, our modern friend faces in the
Bible a story which seems to involve a ruptured law
of nature, his first and very strong impression is that
the story is antecedently improbable.
For another thing, our modern friend feels that
stories of miracles are historically unreliable. Indeed,
the farther he goes in the study of the documentary
evidence, the more he is likely to feel that way. In
estimating the life of Francis Xavier, for example,
we have many personal letters of his own and, as well,
accounts written by his fellow missionaries who ac-
companied him upon his travels. In addition to these
first-hand documents we have the early lives of
Xavier and then later lives written centuries after his
death. The growth of miracle-stories up through
these successive documentary strata is amazing. In
all Xavier's letters and the accounts of his companions
not a miracle is mentioned, but the biographies of
Xavier are full of them. St. Francis himself tells us
of the struggle he had in learning the simplest elements
of the Japanese tongue; but in the later lives he spoke
Japanese so fluently, never having studied it, that
his hearers thought he was a Japanese himself, and,
moreover, other nationalities present heard him
144
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
miraculously in their own tongues. When one re-
calls that the ample, first-hand documents contained
not a single miracle, it certainly is astonishing to find
that when St. Francis was canonized Cardinal Monte
described ten great miracles wrought by the saint,
including making sea-water fresh, raising the dead,
levitation, transfiguration, causing an earthquake and
burying a town under cinders, and even having a crab
restore a crucifix which had been lost at sea.¹
To one who is familiar with the successive docu-
ments involved in the development of miracle-stories,
this kind of thing is a commonplace. One stands in
wonder now in Canterbury Cathedral on the bare
stone floor where innumerable throngs once came on
pilgrimage to see and experience miracles at the tomb
of St. Thomas à Becket. The early stories of the
dead saint's power describe easily explicable healings,
but in the end there is no limit to the credulous ac-
ceptance of marvels. Canterbury water was turned
to milk, leprosy was cured, amputated members were
restored, a baby eight months old sang the Kyrie
Eleison, a starling seized by a kite invoked St. Thomas
and was saved, a cow dead and flayed, whose skin had
been sent to the tanners, was restored unharmed to
the owners, and a boy dead seven days was brought
back to life.2
Wherever we possess successive renditions of mir-
acle-workers' lives we find this tendency to give
1 See Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom, Vol. II, 5–23.
2 See Edwin A. Abbott: St. Thomas of Canterbury, His Death and
Miracles
MIRACLE AND LAW
145
entirely explicable events a miraculous twist, to
heighten the effect of marvels by astonishing addi-
tions, and to invent miracles of which the earlier
records bear no trace. Muhammad distinctly dis-
claimed all possession of miraculous powers and when
pressed for a "sign" pointed to the weight and truth
of his words as the only evidence of his prophethood.
His followers, however, soon told a different story.
He was credited with having made the sun stand still,
with having obtained water from a flinty rock, with
having fed thousands by the multiplication of a little
food.¹
The endless repetition of this sort of thing in docu-
ments involving miracles has seriously limited the
credulity of modern minds when they face stories of
the marvelous in ancient literature. Nor is it sur-
prising that men should turn to the Bible, wondering
if the same process is at work there. We have, for
example, three sets of documents about the early
church: the epistles, the "we-sections" of Acts,—a
diary in the first person written by some companion of
Paul, and the rest of Acts. In all of the epistles no
miracles are recorded-only references to them as
among the gifts of the Spirit; 4 in the "we-sections"
of Acts we have explicable events such as revealing
visions, a healing of fever, the recovery of Eutychus
3
1 George Foot Moore: History of Religions, Vol. II, 476.
2 On the following point see J. M. Thompson: Miracles in the New
Testament.
³ Acts 16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18, Chs. 27-29:16.
4 I Corinthians 12:8-11, 28-29, Galatians 3:5, Hebrews 2:4, Romans
15:19.
146
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
1
stunned by his fall from a window, and the escape of
Paul from the poison of the viper's bite. When,
however, one steps back from these two sets of first-
hand documents into the other material of Acts, he
faces such marvels as these: a man lame forty years
is instantaneously healed; Peter, as he passes down a
street full of sick folk, heals "every one"; Philip is
miraculously caught up from the Jerusalem-Gaza
Road and is set down miles away at Azotus; Peter
raises a dead woman to life, and is released from
prison, the iron gate opening of its own accord.2 It
looks on the face of it as though the farther we get
away from the first-hand documents the more mar-
velous the stories become.
When one turns to the Gospels, if one considers
Mark the earliest, as the consensus of scholarly opin-
ion does, with Matthew and Luke each using Mark
and other material of their own, and with John com-
ing last of all, the same heightening process appears,
It appears in spite of the fact that Mark could not
have been written before 65 A. D. Mark traditionally
is not a first-hand document; it is full of miracles, a
few of which are omitted by Matthew and Luke; and
there must have been comparatively little time be-
tween its composition and the writing of the later Gos-
pels. The chance of discovering development in the
successive narrations of the same miracles does not
seem promising. Nevertheless, comparing Mark and
Matthew, we find that in the earlier Gospel there are
no birth-stories while in Matthew Jesus is virgin-born
1 Acts 16:10; 28:8; 20:9-12; 28:3-6.
2 Acts 3:1-8, 4:22; 5:15–16; 8:26–40; 9:39–41; 12:10.
MIRACLE AND LAW
147
"2
and the star of Bethlehem miraculously leads the
Magi to the manger; that in Mark only Jesus walked
on the water, while in Matthew Peter tried it too;¹
that in Mark a fig tree denounced in the evening was
wilted the next morning, while in the later record the
fig tree was cursed in the morning and "immediately
withered away;" 2 that Mark recorded no other
marvels at the crucifixion than the rending of the
temple veil, but that Matthew added the resurrection
of "many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep,
who "entered into the holy city and appeared unto
many"; that at Gadara, according to Mark, Jesus
healed one demoniac while according to Matthew he
healed two; that at Jericho in Mark's Gospel he
gave sight to one blind man, in Matthew's Gospel to
two.5
3
6
4
""
When we compare Mark and Luke we get the same
impression of heightened effect and added detail. In
Luke, though not in Mark, are the stories of the
virgin birth and of the angelic apparition to the
shepherds. In Mark, where "one of them that stood
by drew his sword, and smote the servant of the high
priest, and struck off his ear," no miracle is recorded.
In Luke, however, the ear is restored-the only
example in Scripture of the restoration of an ampu-
tated member. Luke is especially rich in dramatic
1 Mark 6:45–51, Matthew 14:22-33.
2 Mark 11:12-14, 20-21, Matthew 21:18-19.
3 Mark 15:38, Matthew 27: 51–54.
4 Mark 5:1-20, Matthew 8:28-34.
5 Mark 10:46-52, Matthew 20:29-34.
6 Luke 1:26-35; 2:9-14.
7 Mark 14:47, Luke 22:51.
148
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
additions to the narrative. Although not so specified
in Mark, in Luke we learn that Jairus' daughter was
an only daughter and the demoniac boy was an only
boy.¹ Where in Mark Jesus "healed many," in Luke
"he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed
them"; 2 and whereas in Mark the story of the de-
scending dove at Jesus' baptism is easily interpreted
as a symbolical description of a spiritual experience,
Luke makes the event indubitably physical-"in a
bodily form, as a dove." 3
When we turn from the Synoptic Gospels taken as
a group to compare them with the later Gospel of
John, once more we face a heightening of the miracu-
lous element. In particular, among miracles that the
Synoptists do not mention we find some of the most
astonishing wonder-works attributed to Jesus: turn-
ing water into wine, curing a man born blind, raising
Lazarus from the dead after he had been four days.
entombed.4
Consider such facts as this, increasingly well known
to thoughtful minds, and surely it is evident that we
would better come to serious grips with the problem
that is here presented.
In the Old Testament as well as in the New appears
this same tendency to heighten marvels as one retreats
from first-hand documents. All the records of the
prophets whose writings we have are notable for the
absence of miracle. Even the book of Jeremiah, which
contains not only his sermons but his life compiled by
¹ Luke 8:41-42, Mark 5:22-23; Luke 9:38, Mark 9:17.
2 Mark 1:34, Luke 4:40.
4 John 2:1-11; 9:1-7; 11:1-44.
3 Mark 1:10, Luke 3:22.
MIRACLE AND LAW
149
his nephew Baruch, has not a miracle in it. In Amos,
Hosea, Ezekiel, where biographical elements are
present, no miracle is to be found, and in Isaiah only
the retreating shadow on Ahaz' dial. But when from
the records of those prophets whose first-hand docu-
ments we possess we step back to Elijah and Elisha,
the first great figures of the prophetic line, who left no
first-hand documents at all, we are in another realm.
With Elijah's name are associated such miracles as
these: the unfailing cruse of oil, the resuscitation of the
widow's son, the feeding by the ravens, the heaven-
lighted sacrifice on Carmel, the dividing of the Jordan
when smitten with the prophet's cloak, the slaying
of two troops of soldiers by fire from heaven, the
ascension in a fiery chariot.¹ Around Elisha's name
cluster such marvels as these: the dividing of the
Jordan, the embassy of bears to eat up mocking chil-
dren, the raising of the Shunammite's son, the increase
of the widow's oil, feeding a hundred men with twenty
loaves, curing Naaman's leprosy, making an axe-head
swim, smiting a whole Syrian army blind, and the
raising of a dead man to life by the efficacy of the
prophet's bones.2 Surely, it does look as though the
farther we get from first-hand documents the more
marvelous the stories are.
Indeed, one of the most interesting illustrations of
this fact in Scripture still remains. If ever miracle-
stories might a priori have been expected, one might
¹I Kings 17:8-16; 17:17–24; 17:6; 18:38; II Kings 2:7-8; 1:9-12;
2:II.
2 II Kings 2:13-14; 2:23-24; 4:18-37; 4:1-7; 4:42-44; 5:1-14;
6:5-7; 6:18; 13:21.
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look to find them associated with the establishment
of David's kingdom. That was the beginning of
Israel's greatness; it was regarded as the act of God;
around it the dearest memories of the nation centered:
but not a miracle is told in connection with David's
life.¹ The narratives are plainly first-hand documents
written by a contemporary who was intimately con-
versant with events. When, however, one steps back
from these records of the foundation of David's king-
dom to the ages of the judges and the desert-wander-
ings, miracle at once begins: the sun stands still,
Jericho's walls magically fall, the Jordan parts and
waits with piled-up waters while the people cross,
water flows from rock, and plagues in swift succession
come and go in Egypt as Moses and Aaron with up-
lifted wand command.2
Our modern friend who looks upon miracle-narra-
tives as historically unreliable may be to us exceed-
ingly bothersome. We may wish he were not here and
we may cry to be free from his harassing questions
and his embarrassing facts, but when we ourselves
face the documentary evidence we must admit that in
general the nearer we get to first-hand sources the
fewer and simpler are the miracles, and that the
farther we get away into tradition and report the
more complex, elaborate, and inexplicable they be-
come. That is the second item in the attitude of the
modern mind.
There is a third item, however, which, so far as
¹ Cf. II Samuel, Chs. 1-7, 9-20, and I Kings, Chs. 1-2.
2 Joshua 10:12-14; 6:20; 3:15-17; Numbers 20:11, Exodus, Chs.
7-10.
MIRACLE AND LAW
151
prevalence and popularity are concerned, is probably
more influential still: the conviction that miracles
are practically undesirable. The modern man does
not regard the ages of miracles with any wistful desire
to have them back again. He knows that once every-
body, saint and sinner alike, believed in miracles, took
them for granted, relied on them in business, politics,
and jurisprudence, regarded them not as matters of
pious belief in past events but as contemporary factors
in daily life. He knows that no kind of miracle is
related in Scripture the counterpart of which cannot
be found and found repeatedly in the records of other
religions. What is still more important, miracles of the
most extraordinary sort, healings, exorcisms, resur-
rections from the dead, and physical prodigies of
every kind were the familiar events of the most intel-
ligent European Christianity up to the gateway of the
eighteenth century. "All this," writes Lecky about
the church's miracles, "was going on habitually in
every part of Europe without exciting the smallest
astonishment or scepticism."1 Scores of saints have
to their credit on the official records miracles like
raising the dead, speaking with tongues, miraculous
appearance and disappearance, instantaneous transfer
from one spot to another, and all manner of healing,
even to the restoration of amputated limbs. When
our forefathers discussed miracle they were not, like
us, playing the limelight of attention upon a small
area of history nearly two thousand years ago; they
were discussing a contemporary expression of God's
¹ W. E. H. Lecky: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
of Rationalism in Europe, Vol. I, 158.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
providence and power in which they believed and on
which they practically relied as much as ever the New
Testament disciples did.
The typical modern man does not regret that that
old world of thought has gone and that the new world
has come in. He is not unaware of the history of the
change that has passed over man's mind since the
Reformation. First, doubt fell on the contemporary
ecclesiastical miracles, and Protestants even developed
a theory which, not denying their occurrence, ascribed
them to the devil. Then doubt fell on the miracles of
the patristic age and the frontier of the miraculous
was pushed back to apostolic times.¹ In consequence
of this elimination of the church's miracles from intel-
ligent credence, the miracles of the Bible became the
only ones in which Christians any more believed, and
they were thereby lifted into an absolute uniqueness
which they had not before possessed. Increasingly
they became a mainstay of apologetics. The divinity
of the Christian revelation was vouched for by the
miracles which uniquely attended it. Indeed, at this
point an idea of miracle was brought to the front, so
important that much of the eighteenth century's
discussion of religion centered about it and is unintel
ligible without it. Miracles, as Tillotson taught, were
not simply marvelous events, however astonishing
1 ¹ Cf., for example, Conyers Middleton: A Free Inquiry Into The
Miraculous Powers, Which are supposed to have subsisted in the
Christian Church, From the Earliest Ages through several successive
Centuries. By which it is shewn, That we have no sufficient Reason
to believe, upon the Authority of the Primitive Fathers, That any
such Powers were continued to the Church after the Days of the
Apostles. 1748.
MIRACLE AND LAW
153
and inexplicable; they were signs wrought with an
apologetic aim for the purpose of bearing testimony
to a person or a doctrine.¹ Transubstantiation, said
Tillotson, inasmuch as it is never visible to the
senses, would not be a miracle, even if it were a
fact. Then, under the assaults of men like Hume,
this apologetic use of the miraculous began to give
way. Doubt fell at last upon the Biblical miracles
themselves and, instead of proving the truth of Chris-
tianity by miracles, men began arguing for miracles
because Christianity was true. Believing in the
divine nature of the Christian revelation because of
its spiritual quality, folk were urged to regard as
reasonable the miracles which adorned it like spangles
on a royal robe.
One inevitable issue followed from this process of
thought: miracles ceased being a contemporary matter.
To discuss them became more and more an argument
for a post-mortem case. The only miracles to be con-
sidered had happened very long ago. The theologians
were hard put to it to explain why they should have
ceased happening. Some who still believed in the
patristic miracles said that God withdrew miraculous
powers when Constantine became a Christian be-
cause they were not needed any more, and some Cath-
olics set the date of the Inquisition's establishment
as the time when God stopped miracles because the
"secular arm" could take their place. Various and
often skilful were the explanations, for men found the
fact which they were trying to explain hard to handle.
John Tillotson: sermon, The Miracles wrought in Confirmation
of Christianity, in Tillotson's Works, Vol. III,
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
If miracles had happened in the Bible and had not
happened since, then God had changed his way of
running the world. At some definite date he had
changed gear from one method to another. Such was
the dangerous position in which the church was cor-
nered in the eighteenth century when the idea of mir-
acles as the rupture of demonstrable law led to a dis-
belief in all miracles except those recorded in the
Bible.
This constitutes almost the nub of our modern diffi-
culty. We are desperately trying to believe in events
two thousand years ago the like of which we no longer
expect in our experience nor regard as reasonable in
our world. We are trying to project our minds back
over a date when God changed his method of running
the world into a previous age when things were done
that no longer have any part in our reliance or our ex-
pectation. The result is deadly unreality in our thought
of miracle. As Mr. A. G. Hogg put it, miracle is "the
most depressing and lifeless of topics," when it is "ap-
proached as a question concerning events of an unre-
peatable past."¹
This is the more so because the modern man does
not want the age of miracle repeated. He glories in
the achievements and possibilities of the age of law,
and prevalent religious thought has taught him to
put miracle and law in contrast. In practical living
he does not miss miracle at all. He knows that we
are doing by means of law what the most successful
miracle-workers in history never dreamed.
Miracle is sporadic; it helps some one occasionally:
¹Redemption from This World, 3.
MIRACLE AND LAW
155
law is reliable and a law-abiding force is the most de-
pendable servant that the race ever had. Miracle is
aristocratic; it helps a few favored individuals: law is
democratic; when once it has been put to work it
serves all men who will avail themselves of its gifts.
A few special blind folk in the New Testament re-
covered their sight through miracle, but innumerable
multitudes of folk are saved from blindness and cured
of blindness by modern scientific medicine. Miracle
is curative; it comes in as a deus ex machina when the
damage has been done: law is preventive. A miracle
in Elijah's hands may save one widow from famine,
but irrigation plus scientific agriculture can in time
forestall famines altogether. Far more than strictly
intellectual difficulties, this practical love of a law-
abiding world, this distaste for the whimsicalities and
the irregularities of the age of miracle makes the nar-
ratives of miracle unreal to the modern man. It
might be easier for him to believe in miracles if he
really wanted to.
Such is the state of mind in an increasing number
of our auditors on Sunday. To them miracles are
antecedently improbable, stories of them seem in gen-
eral unreliable, reliance on them seems practically
undesirable, and so in the end the whole matter be-
comes pretty much unbelievable.
IV
Personally, I do not think that this sweeping nega-
tion adequately deals with the problem of miracle,
but, surely, there is no escape from the problem by the
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
denial of such facts as we have been considering. The
way out lies in another direction altogether. It lies in
the endeavor to discover what, if any, was the vital
spiritual experience that our forefathers were trying
to express by their category of miracle.
If miracles are to have any vitality whatever in the
faith of men to-day, they must be a contemporary and
not simply a historic matter. Jesus never called on
his followers as a test of discipleship to believe in nar-
ratives of other people's marvelous deeds, but he did
insistently call on them to manifest in their own
lives superhuman power, so that they might not have
to scale down their expectations and achievements to
the level of ordinary life. He did not expect them so
much to believe in miracles as to work them. The
church to-day, in wide areas of her teaching, is de-
manding something else altogether. She is making
it a test of discipleship that men should give credence
to miraculous events sixty generations old while gen-
erally she takes it for granted that nothing even re-
motely similar to them can be expected now. She has
pushed miracle to a remote antiquity. She has largely
surrendered to the futile position which Bishop Spratt
expounded. Said the Bishop:
"God never yet left himself without a witness
in the world; and it is observable that He has
commonly chosen the dark and ignorant ages
wherein to work miracles, but seldom or never
the times when natural knowledge prevailed; for
He knew there was not so much need to make
use of extraordinary signs when men were diligent
MIRACLE AND LAW
157
in the works of His hands and attentive to the
impressions of His footsteps in His creatures." 1
This endeavor to believe in miracles and to make
faith in them significant, when all the time we are
thinking of miracles as indissolubly associated with
ancient ignorance and as vanishing when intelligence
arrives, is not Christian faith at all. Religiously it
is the essential denial of the superhumanly empowered
life which Jesus demanded and demands still of his
disciples, and intellectually it leads to hopeless con-
fusion. Straining to believe miracles nearly two
thousand years old if miracle means nothing to us
now is vanity. Unless the miracle-idea has some
contemporary significance, Biblical miracles will more
and more become unreal ghosts lost in antiquity and,
gradually becoming dimmer, will disappear in utter
incredulity.
What, then, was the abiding conviction which our
forefathers at their best were expressing when they
thought and talked in terms of miracles? They were
believing in the providence of God and in his imme-
diate presence and activity in his world. They were
saying that life so divinely ordered never can be
ironed flat, reduced to the rigid limitations of the or-
dinary, but that always expectation must include
events of "luminous surprise."2 They were saying
that in actual experience life like a vast and varied
1 ¹ W. E. H. Lecky: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
of Rationalism in Europe, Vol. I, 161.
2 William Adams Brown: Dudleian Lecture on The Permanent
Significance of Miracle for Religion, in The Harvard Theological
Review, Vol. VIII, 305 (July, 1915).
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
continent has lowlands and lofty peaks; that to the
eye of spiritual insight life is full of events, not ordi-
nary but special, not tame but exciting, not familiar
but marvelous. They were saying that superhuman
power is here, available for use, and that when men
are open to its inrush and control it is not easy to set
limits to the results that may ensue. Granting all the
associated aberrations and credulities of the miracle-
idea, it was nevertheless our forefathers' way of say-
ing that they believed in the living God, whose ways
of working are not bound within the narrow limits of
man's little knowledge.
Unless it is willing to be denatured, religion cannot
get on without this exciting aspect of its thought, this
real and expectant faith in God, this consciousness
of superhuman power, this experience of luminous
events. The crucial question for modern Christianity
to face is not first the credibility of this or that narra-
tive nearly two thousand years old, but the possibility
of retaining in our modern scientific thought such a
vital and vivid expectancy of divine action as our
fathers often phrased in terms of miracles.
Personally, I think that it can be done, and while
an adequate presentation of the case would involve
the statement of one's whole philosophy, I venture to
put a modern Christian view of the world into three
brief propositions.
First, the concept "law" does not exhaust reality.
This does not mean that everything is not law-abiding.
I presume it is, although it was a modern scientist and
not a preacher who said, "The Uniformity of Nature
which the legalists hold over us as a sacrosanct prin-
MIRACLE AND LAW
159
1
ciple is a big assumption. For who shall define its
tenure in a world of æonic flux?" What one does
want to say is that the popular idea of natural law as
a receptacle into which can be poured the entire uni-
verse with none of it spilled over is a false idea. State
all the laws we know about a man and then guess at
all we can imagine, and we have not yet gotten the
whole man. We have merely gotten everything ex-
cept the man. For law may express life; it never can
explain it. The more one deals at first hand with
really great scientists the more one sees how much less
they themselves think they know than popular opin-
ion credits to them. Said Professor J. H. Poynting
at the British Association in 1900:
"We must confess that physical laws have
greatly fallen off in dignity. No long time ago
they were quite commonly described as the
Fixed Laws of Nature, and were supposed suffi-
cient in themselves to govern the universe. Now
we can only assign to them the humble rank of
mere descriptions, often erroneous, of similar-
ities which we believe we have observed. . . .
A law of nature explains nothing, it has no govern-
ing power, it is but a descriptive formula which
the careless have sometimes personified." 2
Surely, such descriptive formulas do not shut out
vital belief in a provident and active God. To mod-
ern Christian thought what we call laws are our par-
tial plottings of the ways in which creative Spirit acts.
1 J. Arthur Thomson: The System of Animate Nature, Vol. I, 24.
2 Ibid., 9.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Our second proposition is that law is not a means
of imprisonment to personality, but of release. To
immature thought the first vision of the reign of law
is overwhelmingly oppressive. Imagination builds
a prison-house whose stones are material things and
whose bars are rigorous laws. This is a strangely mis-
taken impression, however, for the plain fact is that
the more we know about nature's laws the more free
we are to act. We learn a new law and we can do a
new thing. Why can we tunnel our rivers and bridge
our gulfs, ride on the wings of the wind, speak in New
York and be heard in San Francisco, if not because of
the liberated creativeness which we have gained
through the knowledge of natural law? Personal
initiative and control are not hampered by law; law-
abiding forces are the supreme medium for their freest
expression.
So Boutroux, approaching the problem from the
standpoint of philosophy, stated the truth about nat-
ural law's effect on man:
"Modern science showed him physical law
everywhere, and he imagined he saw his freedom
being engulfed in universal determinism. A cor-
rect idea, however, of the natural laws, restores
him to true self-possession, and at the same time
assures him that his freedom may be efficacious
and control phenomena. . . . The mechanical
laws of nature, . . . instead of being a necessity,
set us free; they enable us to supplement,
by active science, that state of contemplation in
which the ancients were plunged."
"" 1
1 Emile Boutroux: Natural Law in Science and Philosophy, 218.
MIRACLE AND LAW
161
If, therefore, we were to consider God in the most
anthropomorphic way, we should have to credit him
with freedom to create and control at least as much
as we can. And when we enlarge our thought of God,
see him as the ideal-realizing Capacity in the universe
or the creative Spirit at the heart of it, what we call
laws may be standardizations of his activity but cer-
tainly not limitations of it.
Our third proposition is that existence is not a
closed system into which nothing new can come. The
rigid, mechanical interpretation of all life, which looks
on it as a predetermined affair with past, present and
future potential in the primeval star-dust and auto-
matically unfolding, is not a necessary implication of
modern science. Personally, I do not think it a per-
manently tenable implication of modern science.
Read J. Arthur Thomson's System of Animate Na-
ture, and see! Certainly, the swing of prophetic
modern thought is away from a mechanistic toward a
vital conception of the universe. Whatever may be
the philosophic terms in which we choose to put it,
this seems to be a live cosmos, endlessly creative, con-
stantly introducing factors not mechanically predict-
able from what went before, full of unexpected issues
and unforeseeable events.
Such, then, in briefest outline, is a modern Christian
outlook on the world. When one gathers up its total
meaning it assures us that God is the immanent life
of the universe, whose familiar ways of acting are
partially plotted in what we call laws and who by
them and others unknown to us is working out his
eternal purposes.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
If, now, this be the truth about our world, I can see
that miracle may have a modern meaning. None of
the previous meanings which the word has had are
adequate for our purposes. Certainly, I do not be-
lieve that all actions not our own are the work of
spirits; I am sure that the simple category of usual
and unusual divine activities does not cover the case;
I cannot think of a miracle as intervention in a phil-
osophically conceived cosmic system; and I do not
believe that miracles are the suspension or rupture of
universal laws. Once more miracle must be redefined.
It has passed through four previous meanings; it
should easily endure decoding into a fifth. At any
rate, if miracle is to have any meaning at all to mod-
ern minds I venture it will have to be reinterpreted
from its old phrasings into some such terms as this:
a miracle is God's use of his own law-abiding powers
to work out in ways surprising to us his will for our
lives and for the world. Unless the whole Christian
Gospel is false, miracles in that sense are happening
all the time. If I had not experienced them and seen
them I should not be a Christian at all.
V
With such an idea let us turn back to the Bible and
consider the credibility of the miracle-narratives there.
Let us not talk about believing them as though his-
torical questions could be or ought to be settled by
any leap of faith. Credence of ancient miracles in
the Bible or out of it is not properly a matter of faith;
it is a matter of evidence. Antecedently I am pre-
MIRACLE AND LAW
16.3
1
pared to acknowledge that anything is possible.
There is no telling in advance what God may do or
may not do when he sets out to use his law-abiding
power to consummate his purposes. Even Huxley,
agnostic that he was, said: "Whoso clearly appre-
ciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can
have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on ac-
count of its marvelousness." Surely, a Christian
who believes in God and who thinks of God as work-
ing in and through human life will not close the doors
of his mind against the acceptance of evidence just
because it is evidence for something marvelous. Nev-
ertheless, we do not accept Biblical narratives of the
miraculous as an act of faith. We do it, if we do it
at all, because we are historically convinced. Ap-
proaching the Bible so, there are some narratives of
miracles there which I do not believe. To suppose
that a man in order to be a loyal and devout disciple
of our Lord in the twentieth century A. D. must
think that God in the ninth century B. C. mirac-
ulously sent bears to eat up unruly children or made
an axe-head swim seems to me dangerously ridicu-
lous. Folk who insist on that kind of literal inerrancy
in ancient documents are not Fundamentalists at all;
they are incidentalists. Joshua making the sun
stand still may be poetry and the story of Jonah and
the great fish may be parable; the miraculous aspects.
of the plagues in Egypt and the magic fall of Jericho's
walls may be legendary heightenings of historical
events; the amazing tales of Elijah and Elisha may
1 In a letter to Charles Kingsley quoted in Life and Letters of
Thomas Henry Huxley, by His Son, Vol. I, 234.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
be largely folk-lore; and, in the New Testament, find-
ing a coin in a fish's mouth to pay the temple tax, or
walking on water, or blasting a tree with a curse,
may be just such stories as always have been asso-
ciated with an era of outstanding personalities and
creative spiritual power. Certainly, I find some
of the miracle-narratives of Scripture historically
incredible.
Others puzzle me. I am not sure about them.
What does the story of the miraculous draft of fishes
mean? Is it, as some think, a sermon on the failure
of evangelism when carried on without Christ and the
success of it when Christ directs, so that the nets of
the church are full to breaking when the fishers of
men cast in at his command? Our Occidental minds
probably miss many symbolic literary devices in an
Oriental book and this may be one of them. Or what
shall we say about the physical aspects of the resur-
rection of Christ? We believe that he is not dead but
is risen; that we have a living Lord. And yet we
may not know what to make of narratives about his
eating fish after his resurrection, passing through
closed doors, and offering his hands and feet to the
inquiring touch of Thomas. Is it the Hebrew necessity
of associating continued life with a physical resur-
rection that made these stories, or is Frederic W. H.
Myers on the truer track when, speaking from the
standpoint of a psychic investigator, he says: “I
predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all
reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the
Resurrection of Christ, whereas, in default of the new
evidence, no reasonable men, a century hence, would
MIRACLE AND LAW
165
1
have believed it." There is no use in pretending
that we know more than we do, and about many an
ancient miracle-narrative a man may well suspend
judgment awaiting light.
There are, however, many miracles narrated in the
Scripture which I cannot help believing. To be sure,
they often are told in language that the representa-
tive of a New York newspaper would not have used
if he had been covering the case. They are often
robed with the marvelous drapery which ages when
miracles were part and parcel of men's common
thought habitually employed in their imagination of
events, but, for all that, the abiding experience in-
volved in them is clear and it is as true and as possible
for our day as for theirs.
For this is the principle on which alone can Biblical
miracles have a vital part in our faith. Wherever a
narrative in Scripture describes an experience in terms
of miracle so that we recognize that the same kind of
experience is open to us or would be open if we were
receptive of God's incoming power, that narrative is
fundamentally credible and useful.
At once, when this approach is made, wide areas of
Biblical miracle rise, not only into credence, but,
what is more important, into challenge, calling us in
our generation to explore the possibilities of divine
resource released in marvelous ways through faithful
men. It is not simply true that from the leadership
of Moses to our Lord's healing of the sick I see not.
the slightest reason to doubt many recorded miracles;
it is more significantly true that this same kind of
¹ Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, 351.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
,
miracle ought to be among the signs of religion's
reality to-day. Providential guidance of men and
nations, as in Israel's release from Egypt, divine calls
and commissions, as when God spoke to Samuel in
the temple, conversions like Paul's on the Damascus
road, and endowments of the church with power as on
Pentecost, answered prayers where men let in the
waiting Spirit and came off more than conquerors,
healings where men proved that Spirit is mightier
than flesh-all through the Scripture such activity
of divine power is presented in terms of miracle.
Such experiences, however, are among the inevitable
fruits of vital religion in any generation, and the Bible
in such narratives does not so much call on us to stretch
back our minds and believe in ancient events as to gird
up our souls and reduplicate them in our own time.
It is this aspect of miracle that alone seems to me
exciting and worth while. God guides men and na-
tions as much now as he ever did; he empowers men,
commissions them, opens to them possibilities of
abundant life, and has at his disposal and ours re-
sources of which we have hardly touched the shallows.
He is as ready now as ever to use his law-abiding
powers to work out in ways surprising to us his will
for us and for the world. Belief in miracles, therefore,
is not first of all an historical matter; it is a contem-
porary challenge. To learn anew the power of prayer,
to release through our lives a superhuman Spirit into
human affairs, to do things which cannot be done,
until men find it easy to believe in God because of the
evident marvels of his presence in us and through us-
this is what it really means to believe in miracle.
!
MIRACLE AND LAW
167
Faith in the miraculous is not primarily mental cre-
dence of past events; it is spiritual adventure into the
release and use of divine power in our own day.
To you, therefore, who are going out to preach, I
say, Make men believe in miracle. But do it by lead-
ing them into the experience of God's power in their
own lives now. Teach them so to find conversion,
direction, commission in their fellowship with God,
so to explore the possibilities of prayer, so to believe
in God's providence for a willing nation and an
obedient world, that they will find their minds at
home when in other terms than theirs the Bible
presents them with the same experiences. Never let
the mechanistic philosophy imprison your mind. Keep
the doors of hope and expectancy open. Above all,
believe in the living God until you see him, in ways
surprising in your eyes, working out his will for you
and for the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
La Notion Biblique du Miracle, E. Menegoz, in Séance de
Rentrée des Cours . . . 5 Novembre, 1894.
Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion d'apres la Psycho-
logie et l'histoire, Ch. III, Du Miracle et de l'Inspiration,
Auguste Sabatier. Librairie Fischbacher.
The Permanent Significance of Miracle for Religion, (Dud-
leian Lecture for 1915 at Harvard University), William
Adams Brown. The Harvard Theological Review, Vol.
VIII (July, 1915).
Miracles and the New Psychology, E. Romilly Micklem. Ox-
ford University Press.
Miracles in the New Testament, J. M. Thompson. Edward
Arnold.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
The Christian Hope, Ch. VII, The Effects of the Resurrec-
tion upon the Christian Hope, William Adams Brown.
Scribner's.
The Resurrection in the New Testament, Clayton R. Bowen.
Putnam.
The Virgin Birth, Frederic Palmer. Macmillan.
The Virgin Birth of Christ, Paul Lobstein; trans. by Victor
Leuliette. Putnam.
A Critical Examination of the Evidences for the Doctrine of
the Virgin Birth, Thomas James Thorburn. Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge.
The Virgin Birth of Christ, James Orr. Scribner's.
The Virgin Birth of Jesus, G. H. Box. Isaac Pitman.
LECTURE VI
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
I
We have been endeavoring to deal candidly with
the contrasts in mental category between Biblical
times and our own. In every case we have found that
the category which at first seemed outgrown was in
fact the transient phrasing of a permanent experience.
We have seen that the true way to understand the
Bible's vital message is to go through the ephemeral
category into the repeatable experience. This lesson
is one which not only theological reactionaries but,
perhaps even more, liberals need to learn. Out of an
early training in which literalism was in control, many
a mind, accepting new ways of thinking, has come to
the conclusion that older mental frameworks are un-
true. The revolt from credulous acceptance of ancient
categories in their youth throws them into impatient
rejection of them in their maturity. To them angelol-
ogy, demonology, apocalyptic, and miracle simply
are not so and that is the end of it. As a matter of
fact, for all their assurance of increased knowledge,
they are in danger of missing more truth than they
gain. For they have not traveled the whole road until
they have gone on to see that the thought-forms which
they reject were old ways of framing experiences and
convictions which are true and always will be. Not
169
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
till a man has taken for granted the changed frame-
works and is rejoicing in the abiding truth has he
finished his course.
If the essential value of the Bible thus lies in its
abiding and reproducible experiences, even when one
has to get at them through altered categories, how
much more when there are no outmoded frameworks
to be displaced at all! Wide areas of Scripture deal
with abiding experiences set in timeless and universal
terms. The elemental needs of man's spirit for peace,
stability, comfort, and divine saviorhood; the mean-
ing of temptation, sin, remorse, penitence, pardon,
and reconciliation with God; the basic virtues of
honesty, sincerity, courage, charity, magnanimity,
love; the great hopes of a kingdom of righteousness
here on earth and of life hereafter-these are the
fundamental matters in Scripture, and in Scripture
they always were gotten at by way of actual experi-
ence and they cannot now in any other way be under-
stood.
In this lies one of the distinct characteristics of the
Bible. All its attitudes and its whole course of thought
were arrived at experimentally, not theoretically; they
were the result, not of philosophic speculation, but of
practical living reacting on thought. The idea of
God in characteristic Greek or Indian philosophy was
under the sway of an impressive speculative theory—
God was the Absolute; he was Pure Being. Every-
where in the best thinking of India and Greece one
finds that speculative concept in control. When,
however, one turns to the Bible, he finds himself in
another realm. The Hebrews were not philosophers;
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
I7I
their thinking was practical, imaginative, dramatic.
Abstract theory never dominated their minds about
anything, and in particular never laid the rails on
which the idea of God must willy-nilly run to its
logical conclusion. Rather, in the Bible, the idea of
God developed as a man walks, following the grade
as it comes, up hill and down dale, going across lots
when that seems shorter, and encountering alike the
unexpected beauties and the unforeseen obstacles
of a pedestrian journey close to mother earth. In
consequence, the idea of God in the Bible may be less
consistent certainly it is less abstract and theoreti-
cally determined in its development-but it is im-
measurably closer to human life. It never loses con-
tact with that. The writers of the Book did not call
God by abstract names. The Absolute, Pure Being-
no such words and no such ideas are in the Bible.
Father, Mother, Husband, Friend, such are his
names in Scripture. The writers rose to think of him
as Hosea did out of the experiences of his own do-
mestic tragedy, or as Jesus did out of his filial fellow-
ship. Every thought of God in the Bible came warmly
out of actual experience; every stage in its develop-
ment was associated with practical factors in the
people's life that called it forth.
This experimental quality of the Bible at first may
give it a feeling of homeliness and childlikeness in
comparison with the lofty and majestic speculations
of Plato, but it has helped immeasurably to give the
Scriptures their abiding appeal. Plato has been very
influential, but largely by indirection; few now read
bim and fewer still profit by him as a guide when they
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
do. The Bible, however, never wears out; it never
loses its appeal; it claims a wider audience with every
century; the plain man who knows life at first hand
often understands it better than the philosopher; and
all of us get more vital help from it than from all the
philosophers we ever read. One reason is this: philos-
ophers make mental frameworks determinative; they
erect abstract theoretical concepts as essentials of
truth, when, as a matter of fact, nothing is so ephem-
eral as these forms of our thinking. All philosophies,
therefore, are bound in time to be outgrown. Some
super-Darwin, some ober-Einstein will arrive and be
the death of them. But life is not outgrown. In its
basic needs and fundamental experiences life is the
most constant thing we know. And the Bible builds
on that. In the Bible mental frameworks are secon-
dary; the creative force is always experience, and one
may challenge the inquirer to point out many pas-
sages in Scripture where the pulse of the living expe-
rience is not still beating strong.
History furnishes many examples of this ephemeral
nature of mental frameworks. Milton's Paradise
Lost illustrates it. Milton set himself to write a poem
that would last forever. He deliberately chose a theme
which should be timeless and universal. He was sure
that in his setting of the fall of man with its cosmolog-
ical background and its contemporary theological
categories he had lighted on a mental receptacle so
essentially permanent that into it he could pour his
truth, confident that it never would be lost. What
actually has happened we all know. The one thing
that Milton thought permanent has turned out to be
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
173
ephemeral. His system of mental categories has
utterly collapsed. Nobody reads Paradise Lost for
its setting, where, as Sidney Lanier sings,
"Immortals smite immortals mortalwise
And fill all heaven with folly."
We read it, if we read it at all, partly because of its
nobility of cadence and style, and partly because its
characters, especially Satan, depict so much abiding
human experience. For it is only experience that
lasts; the mental phrasings of it are temporal.
If, therefore, cosmology, demonology, angelology,
apocalyptic, and old forms of the miracle-idea had
been speculatively controlling elements in Scripture,
then the Book would be doomed to lose its hold on
modern minds. But because they are the incidents,
not the essentials, the stream's flotsam and jetsam,
not the stream's banks, and because the basic and
creative factors in Scripture are always the living
experiences of the human soul in its deepest needs,
direst struggles, noblest aspirations, and finest hopes,
the heart of man turns tirelessly back to the Book.
So rich, fruitful, and indispensable are these norma-
tive experiences with God and man which the Bible
thus sets forth, that the main business of the Christian
preacher can be defined as the endeavor to reproduce
them in the lives of men to-day. Preaching is primarily
the endeavor not to get men to accept a formula, but
to get them to reproduce a life.
The ultimate purpose, therefore, of all our discus-
sion of changing categories is to get the matter out
of the way. Changing categories are important only
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
because we make them important by being perplexed
about them. When once we have looked squarely
at them, been honest about them, taken them for
granted, then we are free to launch out on the Bible
like those who go down to the sea in ships, and do
business in great waters.
II
Nevertheless, there are perils associated with this
modern use of the Scripture and fairness demands a
frank facing of them. For one thing, spiritual values
often are discerned by a naive and childlike faith
when they are invisible to a critical and analytic mind.
It is a pity that these two attitudes, appreciation and
criticism, both of which are indispensable to fully
rounded personality, should be set over against each
other. In actual experience, however, they often are
not confederate, as they should be, but hostile, and
many a man to whose open and unquestioning soul
the Scriptures came in youth with their authoritative
and appealing message, has paid for his later critical
intelligence about the Book by surrendering the far-
too-precious coin of spiritual insight and appreciation.
Keat's complaint that the rainbow never could be so
beautiful again, now that science had analyzed it, has
had its replica in the disillusioned attitude of many
souls toward the Bible, modernly interpreted. Nor is
the reason difficult to see. No man easily keeps his
mind analytic and reverent at the same time. The
botanist and the poet do not often co-exist in the same
person. The botanist and the poet have very different
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
175
business with the flowers. The first must pull them
apart, dissect them, and describe their component
elements, while the second wants to see them whole
and appreciate them.
"And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils,"
is a poet's attitude, rather than a botanist's.
Our modern mind in its scientific attitude toward
the Bible, as toward everything else, is largely botan-
ical. We want to see the facts stripped bare and
subjected to merciless analysis. We positively fear
poetry, sentiment, emotion, "as a tight-rope walker
fears the wind," because they are unbalancing. Nor
can any one who knows the incalculable contributions
to knowledge made by this habit of mind fail to respect
it. Even toward flowers we need Luther Burbank's
attitude as well as Wordsworth's; he will make better
flowers for other Wordsworths to sing about, just
because of his clear-cut, hard-headed analysis of facts.
Nevertheless, it is a pity that folk who have only one
life to live should get from life only what critical
dissection gives and not at all the values which come
from appreciation and reverence.
In Yosemite Valley the waterfalls tumble from the
lofty cliffs in such diaphanous and delicate tracery of
spray and mist that one might imagine angels weav-
ing on those watery looms the garments they will wear
before the throne of God. Ask a chemist, however,
what a waterfall is and as a chemist he will answer
H₂O. That is the truth; moreover, it is important
truth; but, surely it is not all the truth. Something
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
is there for those to see who have more than analytic
eyes; something is there visible only to insight, appre-
ciation, reverence.
Not only with reference to the Bible, but in wide
ranges of human interest, the modern age needs to
learn this lesson. In particular, students of religion,
no longer withheld by false taboos from fearless in-
vestigation of sacred things, are analyzing everything
that ever has made religion rich and fruitful. They
analyze prayer. They decompose it into its psycho-
logical processes. They pick it to pieces and study
its works as a boy might take his father's watch apart
and strew upon the table wheels, ratchets, pivots, and
jewels, saying, That is the watch. Moreover, that
process applied to prayer is useful. We are learning
more about prayer as a law-abiding, reliable, psycho-
logical activity than we ever knew before. But when
one's attitude toward prayer stops with analysis one
has lost out of praying all that ever made it worth
analyzing. Paul had never heard of modern psychol-
ogy, but when in the midst of his conflict he cried,
"Strengthened with power through his Spirit in the
inward man," 1 he knew the might of prayer. Henry
M. Stanley never had studied the analysis of mental
states, but returning from Africa, he said:
1
"On all my expeditions, prayer made me
stronger, morally and mentally, than any of my
non-praying companions. It did not blind my
eyes, or dull my mind, or close my ears; but, on
the contrary, it gave me confidence. It did more:
¹ Ephesians 3:16.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
177
it gave me joy, and pride, in my work, and lifted
me hopefully over the one thousand five hundred
miles of Forest tracks, eager to face the day's
perils and fatigues.'
"" 1
Whatever else he knew about prayer, he knew the
power of prayer itself. If one can know prayer only
one way, he would better know it so. Far better a boy
who uses a watch to tell time by than a boy who picks
one to pieces and then lacks wit to put it together
again!
Many modern minds crucially need the capacity
to gather up their split and scattered analyses and to
see steadily and whole the things men live by. The
application of this truth to our modern treatment of
the Bible is plain. The process from which the new
views have come is the same ruthless facing of facts,
unobscured by any haze of sentiment, that has given
us our other sciences. We have analyzed the Book
into its constituent documents; we have catechized
each fact that might bear witness to the truth about
the ancient writings, their authors, times, and circum-
stances; we have let no sentiment of reverence, no
time-sanctioned taboo deflect our search. We have
gone at this investigation of our sacred books count-
ing courage a duty and hesitant sentimentality a sin.
"Truth! though the heavens crush me for following
her," as Carlyle said. "No Falsehood! though a whole
celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy." 2
¹ The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 519.
Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, Book II, Ch. VII, Centenary
Edition, 131.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
All this is admirable. A religion that is afraid of
the facts is doomed. But, after all, what is the use of
analysis without appreciation? What is the use of
dissecting the world's supreme book of religion if in
the end we do not find it a more vital inspiration to
our religious life than it was before? What is the use
of laying bare the transient thought-forms of the
Book if we do not in spiritual adventure go past
them to lay hold on the Scripture's abiding experi-
ences? This is the first peril of the modern atti-
tude toward the Bible. Folk analyze the Book and
think that they know it, whereas the Bible at its
heart cannot be known save through spiritual in-
sight.
When one sees the intellectual eagerness, coupled
with spiritual superficiality, with which new views
of the Bible are accepted by some minds, he wishes
that he could make this deeper matter clear. You
who all too readily acclaim the new truth, one would
say, remember that the heart of the Bible is not in
its outgrown forms of thought, but in its reproducible
experiences which can be phrased in other ways of
thought. From Genesis to Revelation these are the
abiding glory of the Book, and here lies its unassail-
able spiritual authority. "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth "that faith in
creative Spirit is reproducible; never let mechanistic
interpretations of the cosmos steal it from you. "The
Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" that fellow-
ship with God is reproducible; never let the pressure
of a pagan world despoil you of that glory of the soul.
1 Genesis: I:I.
2 Psalm 23:1.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
179
"Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as
a mighty stream"-that passion for the social good
is reproducible; God give us more of it! "Come unto
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest"—that retreat of the soul on Christ is
reproducible; alas for the ship on stormy seas that
knows no such harborage! "If any man is in Christ,
he is a new creature"-that regeneration of the life
by the influx of the Divine, forgiving, reconciling, re-
instating, and empowering, is reproducible; he that
does not know it is spiritually barren and bereft.
"To me to live is Christ "4—that devotion to the Lord
of all great living is reproducible and in its repeated
exhibitions across the centuries lies the chief glory
that Christendom can claim. To know the Bible is
to enter through its open door into such experiences
as these.
The Bible is a book of vital personal religion. The
reality, friendliness, and unescapableness of God are
its dominant themes. In a Psalm like the 139th,
where God besets a man behind and before and lays
his hand upon him, where neither the heights of
heaven nor the depths of Sheol can hide a man from
God, nor any wings of the morning bear one to such
distance as to escape him, where night and day are
alike to the all-encompassing Presence so that when
one awakes he is still with God, we have the experience
full blown and beautiful toward which the whole Old
Testament has been aspiring. And in the New Tes-
tament this experience is perfected in the filial fellow-
1 Amos 5:24.
3 II Corinthians 5:17.
2 Matthew 11:28.
4 Philippians 1:21.
•
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
ship with the Father which was the glory of the Mas-
ter's life and with which he sought to inspire his fol-
lowers.
How futile, then, is the idea that one can know the
Bible who does not know what this experience means!
And no analytic, critical faculties can win through to
it. One may know all about the various "Isaiahs"
and still lose it; one may handle the "Synoptic prob-
lem" with an expert's skill and yet miss the vital
matter which created the Gospels in the first place.
To get at the Bible's transforming experiences is an
adventure of the whole soul. A chemist's formula
in the Yosemite is no more futile to grasp the beauty
of the falls than is documentary analysis to compre-
hend the meaning of the Book when, for example, it
calls a man to fellowship with God realized in secret.
prayer. This ideal of praying which Jesus gave us
in the Sermon on the Mount and to which the whole
development of Biblical thought about prayer leads
is not simple and easy. Rather, of all ideals of prayer
it is the most searching and difficult. When one by
one, in the inner chamber, with the door shut, we try
to talk with the Father in secret, how all too few have
thoughts of God and a life with God which make the
experience real and fruitful!
In this regard the church is like the sea. The sea
as a whole is blue: deep blue, light blue, with chang-
ing tints of green. But when you dip up its drops one
by one they are not blue. Blue is only the way they
look in the mass. So the church as a whole, with its
venerable history, its ancient institutions, its rituals,
creeds, and anthems, its innumerable worshiping as-
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
181
semblies, looks very God-conscious. But when you
take its members one by one, they often are not God-
conscious at all; that is only the way they look in the
mass. One by one they too often lack vital personal
religion.
When, then, one has said all that needs to be said
about the new views of the Bible, about critical proc-
esses of study and their results, and in particular
about the obvious changes in mental categories be-
tween Biblical times and our own, how empty is the
issue of it all if it does not liberate our minds from
handicaps and summon our souls the more clearly to
the spiritual adventures for which the Scriptures
stand! Being a "Bible Christian" in this sense is a
great matter. Too often it is made a small matter.
To be a Bible Christian must we think, as some seem
to suppose, that a fish swallowed a man, or that the
sun and moon stood still at Joshua's command, or
that God sent she-bears to eat up children who were
rude to a prophet, or that saints long dead arose
and appeared in Jersualem when our Lord was cruci-
fied? Is that what it means to be a Bible Chris-
tian?
Rather, to be a Bible Christian is a more significant
affair than such bald literalism suggests. To believe
in "the God and Father of the Lord Jesus," creator,
character, comforter, consummator,-that is to be a
Bible Christian. To know moral need which our wit
and will could not meet, and inward salvation from
it through the power of the Spirit, and to live now in
undying gratitude that overflows in service,—that is
to be a Bible Christian. To have found in Christ,
་
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
I
revealer of God and ideal of man, one who calls out
our admiration, captivates our love, centralizes our
ambition, and crowns our hopes,—that is to be a Bible
Christian. To be led by him into a victorious life
which rises above anxiety and fear, is made con-
queror over sin, and which, laboring for the king-
dom of heaven here, is assured of the kingdom
of heaven hereafter, that is to be a Bible Chris-
tian.
If some of us rejoice in the modern use of the Bible
and are thankful for it when we pray, it is because by
it we have been set at liberty from mental handicaps
to pass through transient forms of thought into these
abiding experiences which are the glory of the Book.
III
Another peril, however, springs out of this very
release from literalism in which we have been rejoicing.
An editorial in a New York paper hit the matter off
with alliterative cleverness when it said that in the
present controversy the Fundamentalists lacked
charity and the liberals lacked clarity. Not being
Fundamentalists we may leave the first part of the
charge to the serious consideration of those for whom
it was meant, but the latter part belongs to us and we
would better take it in earnest. Theological liberalism
to-day does lack clarity and the reason lies in the very
attitude which we have been thankfully describing.
It is possible to be emancipated from the bondage of
ancient categories without undertaking the mental
toil of constructing new ones, and the issue of that is
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
183
obscurity and confusion. Liberals often are accused
of being rationalists. That is largely absurd. If
liberals were taunted with being sentimentalists, the
charge would come far nearer the truth. The liberal
emphasis rests upon experience; we regard that, rather
than mental formulas, as the permanent continuum.
of the Gospel; we proclaim our freedom from bondage
to the mental formulas of the past; and often the
total result is that our unformulated religious ex-
perience, refusing the discipline of older thinking and
shirking the discipline of new thinking, lands in
chaos. It is often much easier to discover what
liberals do not think than to discover what they do
think.
How fatal this is should be obvious. Safety and
assurance lie in having the deep experiences of the
soul enshrined in accepted ways of thinking. Let the
experience of redemption through Christ once get
itself expressed in a mental formula which is generally
believed and confidently proclaimed, and the truth
gains both vital and intellectual impact difficult to
resist. Men feel free to rejoice in the experience be-
cause they are so widely supported in their acceptance
of the mental formula which is its vehicle. Mental
and spiritual satisfaction alike come to them in their
religion, and that way lies power.
Moreover, that way lies clarity. At this point the
defenders of ancient theologies have an incalculable
advantage over the modernists. To the sponsors of
old forms of thought Christianity is indissolubly
associated with an historic system of logically in-
terrelated ideas to be accepted by the mind. Some-
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
times this system is regarded as laid down in Scripture.
Sometimes the classic creeds are exalted as the au-
thoritative and final formulas. A recent defender of
this type of thought insisted that a true Christian
must accept every word of the Apostles' and Nicene
Creeds in the sense in which those words were meant
when they first were written. One may rebel against
the obscurantism of this attitude, its utter blindness
to the history of human thought, but the strategic
advantage inherent in it is clear. These defenders of
old theologies know exactly what they think. Their
formulas have been wrought out and written down
for a long time. They can state with embarrassing
exactitude their precise opinions on the great facts of
Biblical history and the great articles of Christian
faith. They, too, plead for the abiding experiences of
the soul with God, but they confidently present them
in clearly visualized mental formulas which, when they
are credible to their hearers, give to their appeal
penetration and power.
Turn, now, to our liberal preaching. How much
of it is intellectually chaotic and obscure! We have
liberated ourselves from older ways of thinking,
bondage to which had become mentally intolerable,
but too generally we have shirked the difficult yet
necessary task of restating in mental categories which
modern minds can confidently use the central ex-
periences of the Christian soul. We have indeed called
men to the life which the Gospel offers, but we have
too often been content to do it through mental formu-
las very disordered and confused.
The primary reason for this lies in the nature of the
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
185
situation. All doctrines spring from life. In the first
instance men have experiences with their own souls,
with their fellows, with their God, which, involving
mental elements as all sane experiences must, are
nevertheless primarily valued for their contribution
to the practical richness of life. Unable, however, to
deny their intellectual necessities, men carry these
experiences up into their minds and try deliberately
to explain, unify, organize, and rationalize them.
They make systematized doctrines out of their ex-
periences. And when the formula has been con-
structed, they love it because the experience for which
it stands is precious. Their affections and loyalties
gather around the formula and the church swings
down the centuries with a shining formula like a
banner at its head.
The days come, however, as they have come now,
when the church moves out into a new generation,
with new ways of thinking and new outlooks on the
universe. Ideas never dreamed of before, such as
scientific law and evolution, become the common
property of well-instructed minds. Then men begin
to have trouble with the old formula. Once they
followed it as though it were their flag. Now they are
troubled and hesitant concerning it.
fought for it; now they fight about it.
understand it, they cannot believe it, because it was
made in times when man used other ways of putting
things. Then comes a period of theological discord
and controversy with all the trouble centering in the
formula. The way out leads inevitably through
liberalism. Some men, to be sure, impatient with the
Once they
They do not
186
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
incredible formula, throw over all religion and go out
from it crying like Clifford, "The Great Companion
is dead," but other souls cannot do that; religion
means too much to them. They discover that their
religion does not consist in the formula but in the
experience of which the formula was a transient
phrasing. They become liberals by retreating from
the formula into the experience behind it, by translat-
ing the formula back into the life out of which it came.
In this they are like Paul. Brought up a Jew,
indoctrinated in the strictest sect of Hebrew ortho-
doxy, he discovered that much of the religious frame-
work in which he had trusted was for him untenable.
He gave up his old interpretation of the Scripture,
dropped circumcision, clean and unclean foods, and
the burden of ceremonial requirement. He gave up
his old view of worship and left the temple behind.
A more radical transition in mental framework and
practical religious expression it would be hard to find.
Paul, however, did not give up religion. He went
deeper into it. His casting off of old forms sprang
from the positive expansion of his religious experience.
Cramped and prisoned in Judaism, he sought more
room for his enlarging life. He became a liberal,
from the standpoint of his older thinking, not because
he was less religious, but because he was more relig-
ious. He struck out for air to breathe and he found
it in the central regenerative experiences which lie at
the heart of the Gospel. And when he was through
he was sure that he understood the depths of the Old
Testament as he never had understood them before.
This is the very genius of liberalism. Its first step is
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
187
-
to go through old formulas into the experiences out
of which all religious formulas must come. In Phillips
Brooks' figure, it beats the crust back into the batter.
Consider, for example, the "divinity of Jesus." As
a formula it is not in the New Testament, but the
New Testament is full of the abounding experience
out of which it came. The early Christians found
God in Christ. They entered into this experience
with the aid of the mental categories of their time, but
they primarily desired it because of the moral renewal
and abundant life which it so richly brought to them.
"We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten
from the Father; full of grace and truth," 1 "the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ" 2-such exultant affirmations have in-
tellectual elements in them but they sound more like
hymns than creeds. Systematic doctrine, however,
inevitably ensued, and now, when the formulated
doctrine, stated, let us say, by the Nicene fathers, is
presented to a modern man, he often does not get it,
cannot understand it, finds it difficult to believe or
else quite incredible, because he habitually uses ways
of thinking that the Nicene fathers never used. It
may even be that impatiently he throws away the
formula and the experience which it enshrines.
The typical Christian liberal, however, takes an-
other course. He believes in the divinity of Jesus, not
because he is content with ancient formulas, but
because he has translated them into the experience
from which originally they came. He makes his
discovery of God in Christ more a matter of spiritual
2 II Corinthians 4:6.
1 John 1:14.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
insight than of systematized formulas. Many of us
have found at least a temporary refuge in this atti-
tude. The deepest question which man's mind asks
and man's life at its very center depends upon,
What is the truth about God? has been answered for
us in Christ. He is the best we know and we will not
interpret God in terms less than that. We see that
truth so clearly, believe in it so triumphantly, are so
sure that God is immanent in his world and in his
people and is best seen where spiritual life is clearest,
that we know well enough what old formulas were
trying to say when they cried that "very God of very
God" was in Christ. We admit that our new age
needs new ways of expressing the same experience,
but we are not troubled by that. We have translated
the doctrine back into the vital discovery of the
Divine in Christ from which all formulas must come.
Or consider the doctrine of the Trinity. Many are
puzzled by it, and who can blame them? As preached
in our Protestant churches the Trinity has often been
little more than a mathematical formula about three
being one and one three. Let it be said to the credit
of the early fathers who introduced the church to the
philosophical treatment of the Trinity, that they did
not deal in such arithmetical absurdity as has char-
acterized our modern pulpits in their identification
of one person with three persons. If, then, any one
is troubled about this formula of the Trinity, the
liberal prescription is familiar: translate the formula
back into the experience from which it came. The
Trinity that matters is the Trinity of experience. To
know God as Father of all, God as revealed in the
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
189
historic Son, and God as the unseen Friend in our
hearts that is to know the Trinity of the New Testa-
ment: "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the
love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit." 1
This appeal from outgrown mental categories to the
experiences which they were trying to express is the
keynote of liberalism. All doctrine comes from life,
it says; all doctrine is the endeavor to understand life,
and, if it be true, can be taken back to life and tested
there.
Nevertheless, this much liberalism and no more is
incomplete. It is not difficult (every year it grows
more easy) to dispossess modern minds of old frame-
works in religion. It is more difficult (how much more
every earnest preacher knows) to lead souls into the
deep experiences which the old frameworks endeavored
to express. But perhaps the most difficult task of all
remains: building up constructive statements of what
we positively do believe in new formulas endowed
with the same persuasiveness and penetrating power
which the older mental categories once possessed.
One acute peril of our modern use of the Bible is
found at this point. We take away old formulas.
What do we put in their place? To say that we put
vital experience in their place is not enough. A deacon.
in one of our churches told his minister that when he
said "God" the picture in his mind was "a kind of an
oblong blur." Deeper experience alone will not
meet this man's need; he must have an intelligible
11 2
1 II Corinthians 13:14.
2 Quoted by James Bissett Pratt: The Religious Consciousness;
A Psychological Study, 200.
190
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
conception of God or else even the experience which
he does possess will grow unconvincing and unreal.
Thoughtful modern minds, with increasing con-
sciousness of our lack, face us to-day saying in effect,
You give up old ways of thinking about God's re-
lationship with us and with the world; very well! but
how, then, do you conceive that fundamental matter?
what is your way of putting the truth so that we can
see it, understand it, organize our faith around it, and
live triumphantly on the basis of it? We cannot
positively live either on negations concerning old
ways of thinking or on experiences expressed in them,
enjoyed but not thought through nor understood.
We want a reasonable faith, and that means a life of
spiritual wealth and fruitfulness set in mental frame-
works that are congenial, convincing, and communi-
cable.
In every realm where the passage of centuries has
broken down man's confidence in ancient categories,
and in particular has made untenable for us Scrip-
tural ways of thinking around which some of the
dearest associations of man's soul have gathered, the
modern world is facing us with this challenge to a pos-
itive formulation of our faith. It is the crux of the
whole matter for liberalism to-day. It is a challenge
to some of the most serious thinking that ever has
been done on this planet. We do well to retreat from
old categories into the experiences behind them, but
we must also enshrine those experiences in positive
formulations even though that means building up a
new orthodoxy which in time will be dissolved by a
new liberalism.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
191
Into this wide field this course of lectures obviously
cannot go. But it is well to chasten our delight in
modern views of the Bible by depicting the sobering
challenge which liberalism faces in consequence of
their arrival. We do have new ways of thinking
about the universe, about man's origin and nature,
about the law-abiding regularity of everything, from
stars to thoughts. We have often said that in these
new categories the Christian Gospel in its essential
meanings and abiding experiences can be persua-
sively expressed. But with more thoroughgoing earn-
estness we must set ourselves to prove that by doing
it. To be sure, the result will not come from swift
and facile efforts. The great Nicene Creed did not
arrive until the church had been thinking for three
hundred years. But with all the work which already
has been done, one suspects that we soon could get
a much more intelligible and presentable statement
of modern Christianity if we keenly realized the need
and with serious cooperative thinking undertook to
meet it.
IV
Such are two major perils associated with the new
position: analytic criticism may smother reverent
appreciation, and unformulated experience may de-
generate into sentimentality. But another danger
plunges even deeper. This peril is not intellectual,
but moral. It is one thing as a matter of theory to
say that the continuum of Christianity lies in its re-
producible experiences; it is another thing seriously
to face what the reproduction of the spirit and quality
192
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
of Scriptural living actually involves. That ethical
challenge must be faced supremely in Jesus himself.
The test of our sincerity and earnestness in claiming
the repeatable experiences of the Bible as the centers
of our faith and devotion comes when through the open
door of our investigations, past the formulas in which
first-century Christianity visualized him, we come into
the presence of the historic Jesus himself and face the
demands of his teaching and his character. The most
far-reaching and prophetic influence playing on the
church to-day is this rediscovery of Christ. What-
ever else happens now, we Christians, if we are to be
sincerely Christian, must take Jesus in earnest.
Moreover, taking Jesus in earnest is the most
searching ethical enterprise ever undertaken on earth.
The Master bore down with tremendous insistence
on moral reality. Never under any circumstances
would he let a theoretical dispute keep him away from
an ethical issue. A lawyer came to him with a contro-
versial question: "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit
eternal life?" It was a popular question in the schools
of the rabbis and the lawyer expected a spirited dis-
cussion. What he got was much more than he bar-
gained for. First, the Master forced him back to the
central and great commandments of the law, full of
moral meaning and demand, "Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind;
and thy neighbor as thyself." When the lawyer, be-
cause of the searching turn which the debate was tak-
ing, raised a technicality, asking, "Who is my neigh-
bor?" Jesus lifted the discussion out of the theoretical
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
193
realm altogether by telling the story of the Good Sa-
maritan and adding, “Go, and do thou likewise."
That lawyer came in with a theoretical discussion on
his mind; he went out with a moral problem on his
hands.1
A group of scribes and Pharisees brought to Jesus a
woman taken in adultery and raised the moot ques-
tion about the imposition of the Mosaic penalty of
stoning in such a case. Whoever would have dealt
with the situation as he did? He went straight
through all theoretical aspects of the problem, saying,
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast
a stone at her.” And as "they went out, one by one,
beginning from the eldest, even unto the last," what
had happened is clear: they came in with a theoreti-
cal discussion in their minds; they went out with a
moral problem on their hands.2
We often hear it said that it must have been de-
lightful to have talked with Jesus. I am not sure. I
love him; I adore him; but I stand tremendously in
awe of him. It has been said that a man is like an
island sometimes one has to row all around it be-
fore one finds a place to land. Could any figure more
adequately picture what Jesus always did when he
met a man? He rowed around his life until he saw the
real problem and then he landed. He did that with
the rich young ruler and landed on the money ques-
tion. He did it with Zacchæus and landed on his
exactions from the poor. He did it with academic,
rabbinical Nicodemus, all whose batter had turned to
3
1 Luke 10:25-37.
4
3 Luke 18:18-24, Matthew 19:16-22.
2 John 8:3-11.
4 Luke 19:1-10.
194
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
crust, whose free-flowing streams had frozen into ice,
and he landed on the need of spiritual rebirth.¹ He
did it with the woman of Samaria and he landed on
the moral question in her life.2 Were he to talk with
us he would do the same. There would be no use in
raising theoretical discussions. No such device would
serve our turn. He would be after our real problem.
Once more his terrific emphasis would fall on moral
reality.
The Master is very beautiful to think about; he is
wonderful to preach about; but there never could have
been any one half so searching to face. Women might
cry in sentimental praise, "Blessed is the womb that
bare thee, and the breasts which thou didst suck,"
but he came back like thunder: "Yea, rather, blessed
are they that hear the word of God and keep it." Men
might say, "I go, sir," with facile and polite consent
and then go not, but Jesus preferred instead the man
who ungraciously said, "I will not," and then went.4
He wanted people to pray, but above all he wanted
moral reality in prayer: "Whensoever ye stand pray-
ing, forgive, if ye have aught against any one.
He wanted men to worship, but above all he wanted
moral reality in worship: "If therefore thou art offer-
ing thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that
thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy
gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be re-
conciled to thy brother, and then come and offer
thy gift." He wanted men penitently to seek the
1 John 3:1-3.
3 Luke 11:27-28.
5 Mark 11:25.
2 John 4:7-24.
one."5
4 Matthew 21:28-31.
6 Matthew 5:23-24.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
195
Father's forgiveness, but above all he wanted moral
reality in penitence: "If ye forgive not men their
trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your tres-
passes." By any road one travels through the teach-
ing of Jesus, he arrives always at this insistent demand
for moral genuineness: "By their fruits ye shall know
them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord,
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that
doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven"; "If
ye love me, ye will keep my commandments"; "Ye
are my friends, if ye do the things which I command
you.
2
When, therefore, we claim that the heart of the Bi-
ble is its reproducible experiences, we are facing a
most serious and challenging ethical demand. For as
one goes back to the Bible now in search of its repeat-
able experiences, it is clear that whatever else loyalty
to the Book may mean, one element must be put first:
the spirit and quality of Jesus were meant to be repro-
duced in his followers. Nothing is Christian which
leaves that out or makes that secondary. In the New
Testament the Master's life, like music, was meant
to be reproduced. As a score of Bach or Beethoven,
into which the composer's love of harmony once was
poured, is meant to be caught up by each new genera-
tion and played over again, interpreted by organs,
orchestras, choirs, by old instruments that may abide
and by new ones that may be invented, so the life of
Jesus in the New Testament was meant to be repro-
duced in all sorts of circumstances, by all sorts of tem-
peraments, until the whole earth should be full of it.
1 Matthew 6:15.
2 Matthew 7:20-21; John 14:15; John 15:14.
196
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
There are types of old-fashioned orthodoxy which
can leave this central matter out or dim it down and
still have something left to fall back upon. They can
retreat upon theological beliefs or sacramental prac-
tises in which they think they find salvation, or they
can look forward to a cataclysmic second coming of
the Christ. But if liberal Christianity neglects or
dims the Master's ethical demands, it has lost its rea-
son for existence. For according to liberal Christianity
we are here by the grace of God and in the power of
God to bring all men's personal and social life under
the dominion of the Master's principles of living.
So far as I can see, there was just one thing that
the Master's religion was all about: he wanted to
bring men into more abundant life. This objective
turned out in the end to be no undisturbing aim that
he peaceably could prosecute. More than any other
one thing this objective brought the Master into con-
flict with the popular religion of his day. Popular
religion had hardened into stiff and established forms.
Conventionalities had become set and rigid. Then
Jesus appeared. He disregarded the formalities of
popular religion. When they grew intractable and
obstinate he vehemently assailed them and made
himself intolerable to them. Surely the motive be-
hind that is to be found in the fact that Jesus did not
think first of usages, institutions, traditions; primarily
he thought about people who were missing an abun-
dant life. He regarded people as more important
than anything else on earth and thought that to lead
people into a larger life was earth's most important
enterprise. Therefore, when any usage, institution,
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
197
or tradition impeded the prosecution of this aim, it
had to look out.
Here, for example, was a sabbath rule, set, stiff,
and sacred, and here was a needy man crying to be
released from disease on the sabbath day. And Jesus.
crashed through the rule to get at the man in order
that, rule or no rule, that man might have a fuller
life. Nothing else mattered to the Master.
Or here was a synagogue where they had had for
years undisturbed services on the sabbath day, and
here Jesus came to preach. "And he opened the
book... where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor:
He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” 1
That was the text of Jesus' first recorded sermon. It
concerned the bringing of freer, fuller life to people.
And before that sermon was through the synagogue
was in an uproar and old neighbors were leading him
to throw him over the village cliff to kill him.
Or here was a set of regulations honored and metic-
ulously kept concerning the ceremonial cleansing of
the hands, and the Master, unable to see what they
had to do with a more abundant spiritual life, dis-
carded them for himself and his disciples. Nothing
mattered to the Master except those things which
ministered to fruitful living.
That this was the major objective of the Master
1 Luke 4:17-19.
198
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
is made clear in every phase of his ministry. How else
shall we explain his interest in bodily healing? We
should not have expected it from him; he was con-
cerned about the inner life of men. "What is a man
profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his
own soul?" 1 that was his emphasis. He was an
ascetic, one might say, not concerned about the body.
Upon the contrary, he gave himself to healing. Wher-
ever he had the chance he lifted burdens from the
disabled bodies and minds of men. It was one of his
greatest joys to stand before stricken souls and say,
"Wouldest thou be made whole?" 2 And the reason
is that he came to bring men fuller life, and, as Amiel
says, "Health cut off . means life reduced in
attractiveness and utility by five-sixths." 3
Or how else shall we explain the Master's interest
in economic conditions? We might not have expected
it from him. He did not rate financial affluence high.
"Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetous-
ness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth" that was his
emphasis. We might say that he was a teacher with
no economic message. Upon the contrary, when he
saw folk depressed and hurt by greed and niggardli-
ness, his interest and sometimes his indignation.
flamed. Victims left unhelped by the roadside, the
poor lying untended at rich men's gates, widows
robbed of their houses by the rapacity of rulers—
2 John 5:6.
1 Matthew 16:26.
³ Henri Frederic Amiel: Journal Intime, Sept. 1, 1874, in transla-
tion by Mrs. Humphry Ward, 217.
4 Luke 12:15.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
199
wherever he went he was concerned about and was
trying to lift all sorts of burdens from depressed lives.
And if he were to come into our present economic
situation, while, to be sure, he would not be a pro-
gram builder, a sponsor for economic systems, he
would walk through our mills, mines and factories,
would lay his hands on wounded personalities and say,
"Do you have to do that to men and women, to boys
and girls to make your money? I came that they may
have life, and may have it abundantly."
If we wish to see this major objective of the Master
in full flower, we must turn to his religious teaching.
How sharp the contrast is between him and the
popular religion of his day! To be sure, in the rabbis
are insights and intuitions that are deep and beautiful.
A gentile once offered to become a Jew if Rabbi
Shammai would teach him the whole law while he
stood on one foot, and Shammai in indignation drove
him forth with a builder's rod. But Hillel converted
him, for while he stood on one foot Hillel said: "What
is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow; this is the
whole law. All the rest is a commentary. While
at times, however, we do discover these fine insights,
how trivial were the preoccupations of popular religion
in Jesus' day! We keep running on them in the back-
ground of the New Testament: whether Gerizim or
Jerusalem was the proper place to worship; how
ceremonially one should cleanse the pots and pans;
if one took oath by the temple it was not binding, but
if by the gold on the temple, it was; when one swore
"" 1
1 The Babylonian Talmud, Tract Sabbath, Ch. II, in translation
by Michael L. Rodkinson, 2d edition, Vol. I, 50.
200
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
by the altar it was not binding, but if by the gift on
the altar, then it was; if one had a sacred obligation
to support his parents one could say Corban, and be
relieved of the obligation.¹
From all this one turns to Jesus. It is another
world. He never taught anything in religion except
the great matters that make for a richer life. To trust
in God, to be, as the Scotch say, "far ben with God,"
that is, in the inner room with him, he did teach.
that, for that is a fountain of life. The majesty of
the moral law, the sovereignty of God's will, the beam
of whose eternal justice no man can ultimately tip,—
this he proclaimed with austerity and power. The
possibility of moral reformation so that men, inwardly
cleansed, can go out to live in new interests, with
new powers, for new ends, he did teach that, for
that is the secret of life. Love for all sorts and
conditions of men, ungrudging, magnanimous, long-
suffering love, he taught. And the kingdom of
heaven on earth, around which if a man organize
his ambition and his work, living no more an aimless,
meandering existence, he finds life indeed, he did
teach that. Wherever you touch Jesus' ministry,
concerned with health, dealing with practical circum-
stance, teaching the central messages of his Gospel,
he always is working for one objective only: to bring
fuller, richer life to men, to give them "power to be-
come the sons of God."
Liberal Christianity is committed to this idea of the
Master as to what religion is all about. But liberal
Christianity faces the peril of shrinking from the im-
1
¹ John 4:20; Mark 7:4; Matthew 23:18; Mark 7:11-12.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
201
plications of that idea and refusing to undertake the
revolutionary business which it entails. For the full
working out of this idea that the end of religion is a
full, fruitful, abundant life for man is revolutionary
business.
It is revolutionary for the church. Consider the
situation in our modern Protestantism: Lutheranism,
the lengthened influence of the great Martin; the Re-
formed churches, coming up from John Calvin in
Geneva or John Knox in Scotland; Episcopalianism,
the notable consequence of the hesitant reformation
under Henry VIII; Methodism, the prolonged shadow
of the Wesleys; the Baptist movement, inheritor of
the extreme, revolutionary left wing of the Reforma-
tion; Congregationalism, successor of the Puritan
tradition; Unitarianism, the intellectual revolt against
an incredible metaphysic-all these and others, with
their special histories, their accumulated peculiari-
ties, their inherited shibboleths and partisanships,
distribute themselves in our modern American com-
munities or in the foreign field confuse the minds of
the benighted with their varying theologies and pol-
ities. If Jesus should come, what would he say?
Surely, it is not hard to guess: Nothing matters in all
this except the things that lead men into more abundant
life. What a revolutionary principle! It does not lead
men into a more abundant life to be baptized with
more water or less. It does not lead men into a more
abundant life to live under this special polity or that.
It does not lead men into a more abundant life to
have been a vehement Episcopalian and to have be-
come a vehement Congregationalist, or vice versa.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
There are just a few things in religion that lead to a
more abundant life. To have your sins forgiven, to
have the burden of your guilt roll from you as from
Bunyan's Pilgrim at the Cross-that does it. To
know God in your heart and, as you draw from the
physical world the sustenance by which you live so
to draw from the eternal Spirit the power by which
you live indeed, that does it. To know Christ, the
revelation of the Eternal and the ideal of man, and
in a deepening discipleship with him to behold as in a
mirror the glory of the Lord and to be transformed
into the same image from glory into glory—that
does it. To be led up by him into the expanded life
of service and the dignity of helpfulness to man, to
share his hopes of God's triumph on this earth and the
assurance of the everlasting privilege of going on
hereafter that does it. What horizons lift, what
deeps unfold, what heights allure through such a faith!
These are the things that make life rich and full.
God help the church to see it, for if Christ who
walked in the Gospels should walk here now, he would
not like the present situation. Once more he would
stand in the courts of the temple and call us to those
central truths and those great services that make
more fruitful life for men.
Moreover, this approach to the understanding of
Christianity means revolutionary consequences in
our social relationships. When I see the way some
poor families in New York have to live, with such
conditions of ill health and misery as few people dream;
when I walk the city streets thinking of innumerable
boys who never will know any other playground than
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
203
the streets afford, or go into homes where little chil-
dren who ought to be asleep work until midnight mak-
ing paper flowers; when I watch the terrific incidence
of the city's industry upon multitudes of workers or
see the tragedy of the whole world reflected on the
faces that come up from Ellis Island, hoping against
hope to find here a paradise; and when I think of the
thousands in the city who live careless, useless, futile,
frittered lives, with time for business, dress, bridge,
golf, dance, theater, and automobile, but who never
sacrificially think of their brothers living in an earthly
hell or of children robbed of childhood's heritage, I
soinetimes wonder how God Almighty in his infinite
patience lets our miserable lives go on. We need to be
made Christian, but there is no question that it will
be a radically revolutionary performance.
Moreover, taking Jesus in earnest about the major
objective of his ministry will involve profound changes
in our economic system. So long as profit rather than
service is the motive of our industrial life, so long as
money rather than personality is its ultimate con-
cern, so long as autocracy rather than democracy is
its method of organization, and imperialism rather
than international cooperation is its consequence, our
economic system cannot be thought Christian. To
see clearly yet fairly the unchristian elements in our
industrial life, to see also the next step toward a better
order, to present it courageously yet convincingly to
men, to hold steadily before them the Christian insis-
tence that property was made for man, not man for
property, is a task calling for all the wisdom, tact,
courage, and skill, that a minister possesses.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
As for international and interracial affairs, what
taking Jesus in earnest will do with them is becoming
increasingly obvious. In our Western world a con-
flict is on between two traditions. From the days of
the cave-men and before, the tradition of war has
come up among us. Our Western civilization is built
on war; our Western history has been one war after
another. We have bred men for war, trained men
for war; we have glorified war; we have made warriors.
our heroes and even in our churches we have put the
battle flags beside the Cross. But centuries ago a dif-
ferent tradition came into our Western world. It was
not war, but love. Its symbol was not a sword, but
the Cross. Its voice was not a battle-cry, but "God
so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
Son," and at the heart of it stood a Personality that
has captured the choicest aspirations and loyalties of
the race, saying, "One is your teacher, and all ye are
brethren." 2
For nearly two thousand years we have been trying
to make those two traditions blend, have been endeav-
oring to make two antithetical and irreconcilable phi-
losophies of life lie down in peace together. With one
corner of our mouth we have praised the Prince of
Peace and with the other we have glorified war. So
well have we succeeded in blending Christ and carnage,
the Gospel and organized slaughter, that recently a
missionary in an Oriental country, after an address
upon Christian goodwill, was taken aside by a native,
who said, "You must know that the educated people
of this country look upon Christianity as a warring,
1 John 3:16.
2 Matthew 23:8.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
205
blood-spilling religion." Never in the history of the
Christian church was there a more clear-cut and cru-
cial issue than this. We cannot go on blending those
two alien traditions any more. It is not a question
of Christ and war; it is a question of Christ or war.
The preacher who undertakes to stress the objec-
tive of Jesus and to apply his ethical teaching to the
personal life, social customs, economic systems, racial
problems and international needs of this generation,
has undertaken one of the most thrilling, challenging,
and dangerous tasks of our day. Samuel Butler was
right when he described the Christian church as full
of people who would be equally horrified at hearing
the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it prac-
tised.¹ The moral avoidance of the kind of ministry
which takes Jesus in earnest and makes the reproduc-
tion of his life central is the great peril of liberalism.
The reactionary who takes an ancient mental formula
and calls it Christianity is wrong, but he is logical. A
liberal, however, who protests that on the contrary
a modern formula is true Christianity instead is
neither right nor logical. He has betrayed his own
position. Christianity is a way of life, incarnate in
Christ, that has expressed itself in many formulas and
will yet express itself in many more, and the world
will ultimately choose that church which produces
the life, whatever the formulas may be in which she
carries it. No expectation ever was more credulous
than the hope that we can win our case by the mere
rationality of our mental categories. The ultimate
test of any religious movement is the richness of spir-
1 The Way of All Flesh, 73.
206
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
itual life which it produces and the ethical conse-
quences which flow from it.
Now abide three perils of liberalism-irreverence,
sentimentality, and ethical disloyalty to Jesus-and
the greatest of these is ethical disloyalty to Jesus.
i
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Religion and the Mind of To-day, Joseph Alexander Leighton,
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The Religious Revolution of To-day, James T. Shotwell.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
What Shall We Think of Christianity? William Newton Clarke.
Scribner's.
Can We Still be Christians? Rudolf Eucken, trans. by Lucy
Judge Gibson. Macmillan.
Reconstruction in Theology, Henry Churchill King. Macmillan.
Christian Theology in Outline, William Adams Brown. Scrib-
ner's.
Some Christian Convictions, Henry Sloane Coffin. Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Social Law in the Spiritual World, Rufus M. Jones. J. C.
Winston.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience, William Ernest
Hocking. Yale University Press.
What and Where is God? Richard La Rue Swain. Macmillan.
The Enlarging Conception of God, Herbert Alden Youtz.
Macmillan.
Man and the Attainment of Immortality, J. Y. Simpson. Doran.
Does Death End All? John Haynes Holmes. Putnam.
Social Idealism and the Changing Theology, Gerald Birney
Smith. Macmillan.
PERILS OF THE NEW POSITION
207
Christianity and the Social Crisis, Walter Rauschenbusch. Mac-
millan.
Christianizing the Social Order, Walter Rauschenbusch. Mac-
millan.
The New Social Order, Harry F. Ward. Macmillan.
Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory, George William
Nasmyth. Putnam.
The Acquisitive Society, Richard Henry Tawney. Harcourt,
Brace & Howe.
Empire and Commerce in Africa; a Study in Economic Im-
perialism, Leonard Sidney Woolf. Allen and Unwin.
Christianity and Economic Problems, Kirby Page. Associa-
tion Press.
War: its Causes, Consequences and Cure, Kirby Page. Doran.
LECTURE VII
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
I
When in our discussion of the modern use of the
Bible we come to the problems associated with the
personality of Jesus, we have reached the heart of the
whole matter. The central task and the crowning
privilege of the Christian preacher are to present
Christ. Dr. Burkitt's dictum that "Christianity
stands or falls, lives or dies, with the personality of
Jesus Christ"¹ is one, I should suppose, to which all
evangelical preachers would consent.
Indeed, this follows inevitably from the position
we have been maintaining. The abiding continuum
of Christianity, we have said, lies in basic experiences
which phrase and rephrase themselves in different
forms of thought. But in the New Testament all the
basic experiences are essentially associated with Jesus
Christ. Gautama Buddha apparently thought that
his religion could persist altogether by dint of the
doctrines which he had taught without reference to
his own personality. Christianity, however, has been
too keenly aware of its own nature ever to suppose
that it could escape from vital dependence upon the
personality of Jesus.
1 F. Crawford Burkitt: The Gospel History and Its Transmis-
sion, 284.
208
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
209
No one should understand this more clearly than
the preacher. The theologian may be tempted to
reduce the Gospel to its implied philosophic postu-
lates and to present a scheme of logically interrelated
abstract ideas as the essence of Christianity. But
when the preacher stands before his people he knows
that this will never do. His task is to win them to a
new kind of living whose norms he finds in the New
Testament and whose incarnation he finds in Christ.
His perpetual endeavor, therefore, must be to keep
fresh in his own mind and vital in his own life the
experiences of the New Testament, all of which center
in Christ. Christian preaching primarily consists in
the presentation of the personality, the spirit, purpose,
principles, life, faith and saviorhood of Jesus.
To be sure, the preacher's task includes the endeavor
to make explicit and reasonable the structural ideas of
Christianity, but he, better than most men, should
understand that people believe not primarily in doc-
trine but in life. A Gothic cathedral is inconceivable
without architectural doctrine. Every step from a
mud hut up means an involved development of struc-
tural ideas, until in a Gothic temple we reach the
climax of mathematical formulas about balanced
thrusts. When, however, we stand in a cathedral
subdued by its sublimity until in imagination we
hear the very angels singing among its aisles and
arches, it is not the involved mathematical formulas.
that stir us; it is the beauty and grandeur of expanded
spaces and aspiring altitudes.
Such is the secret of Christian preaching. We win
men to Christianity, not primarily by presenting the
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involved ideas, but by presenting their incarnation
in life. Christ is our great asset. He actually lived
the life for which we plead.
I am taking it for granted that we can know this
character who so gloriously lived and died in Palestine.
That school of thought which endeavored to dissipate
his historic existence into myth made much more
noise than either its importance or its following
justified, and it has, I should suppose, been adequately
dealt with. To be sure, on antecedent grounds the
life and influence of Jesus might well seem incredible.
There is always something unbelievable about the
greatest lives, so that if some one in advance had nar-
rated the story of Chinese Gordon or of Adoniram
Judson or of Abraham Lincoln it would have seemed
impossible. But of all the astounding careers with
which we have to deal, where is there anything com-
parable with Christ's? If some one had told us before-
hand that some day a baby would be born in a cattle
shed, be brought up in a carpenter's home, working
at the household trade until he was a full-grown man;
that then he would teach his people at the most for
three years, until he died at thirty-three; that he
would raise no armies, organize no institutions, write
no books, hold no office; that he would be poor and
unbefriended, called "beside himself" by his family,
a heretic by his church, a traitor by his nation; and
that at last he would be taken outside the walls of the
city which he loved and there be crucified as a felon
between thieves: if anybody had told us that two
thousand years afterward there would be no land on
earth where men and women were not gladly laying
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
211
down their lives for the privilege of telling people
about him, that men like George Bernard Shaw,
rebellious, cynical, would be saying, "I am ready to
admit that after contemplating the world and human
nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the
world's misery but the way which would have been
found by Christ's will if he had undertaken the work
of a practical statesman,"¹ and that seers like Brown-
ing would be singing of him:
"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too "——²
2
if anybody had told us this in advance how impos-
sible it would have seemed! But it is true; it actually
has happened; the fact is here. To many of us it is the
most considerable fact that ever took place on this
planet.
Just here emerges a strange thing. Men who call
themselves scientific and who pride themselves on
sticking to the facts often interpret the word "fact”
in such a way as to shut out from their consideration
the major facts of human life. They see that rocks
are facts and they build from them the science of
geology. They see that stars are facts and they induce
from these the science of astronomy. They know that
fossils are facts and from them they read a whole
chapter in the history of the earth. But after all this
building of inductions from physical facts, they will
base nothing on the most dominant, towering, influen-
1 Androcles and the Lion: Preface on the Prospects of Christianity,
xiv.
2 Robert Browning: An Epistle, last stanza.
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tial, spiritual fact in human history. A life that has
changed the whole calendar so that we date every-
thing from the time he came that ought to be a
considerable fact. A life that after sixty generations
of searching investigation makes a cautious and criti-
cal mind like Matthew Arnold's say, "Nothing will
do, except righteousness; and no other conception of
righteousness will do, except Christ's conception of
it”—that ought to be a revelatory fact. Some men,
however, absorbed with subhuman, quantitative facts,
neglect as a basis for induction this major fact of
man's spiritual history. They base immense conclu-
sions on the heavenly bodies; they base no conclusions
on the heavenly character. The primary trouble with
that kind of science is not that it is not religious
enough. The primary trouble with that kind of science
is that it is not scientific enough.
II
When, however, recognizing that the abiding ex-
periences of Christianity center in the Master, we
turn back to the New Testament, saying like the
Greeks to Philip, "We would see Jesus," we find that
even here we are dealing with mental phrasings that
no longer are familiar in our ordinary thought.
Messiah, Logos, and Kurios2 are categories in which
the New Testament habitually conceives Jesus, but
¹ Literature and Dogma, 373.
2 Kurios, Paul's word for "Lord," carrying many special connota-
tions familiar to the religious life of the first century. These lectures,
for reasons of space, specifically deal only with Messiah and Logos.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
213
they are not our categories. We never use them in
any other reference than this. They have to be
translated from first-century Judaism and Hellenism
before we understand them at all. For so long a time
we have taken this situation for granted and have
resigned ourselves to its necessity that we have not
properly estimated the unreality that it has caused.
in the church's thought of Jesus. The first Christians
faced the Master himself, a towering and tremendous
character not yet interpreted, not yet run into the
molds of any mental categories whatsoever. And
when, forced by the necessity of thinking, they began
to interpret his meaning for their lives, they used
categories which were immediately at hand, vivid,
vital, contemporary ways of thinking that carried
with them richly significant connotations. The Jewish
Christians naturally used "Messiah," the Hellenistic
Christians naturally used "Logos," but they all were
using their own familiar ways of thought, not a
second-hand, historic, decoded category which they
had never thought of using except with reference to
Jesus.
The development of the Messianic idea among the
Jews had two aspects. The simpler of the two was the
hope associated with the glory of the house of David.
Beginning with the expectation of a perpetual Davidic
dynasty "kings sitting upon the throne of David," 1
as Jeremiah said-it went on to more definite expecta-
tions of one glorious, specially anointed sovereign who
should redeem his people. When the first Jewish
Christians began interpreting Jesus, they used this
1 ¹ Jeremiah 22:4.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
category. They had radically to alter its meaning,
but, even so, they used it. It was a phrasing of great-
ness in personality with which they were familiar.
The genealogies in Matthew and Luke tracing the
family of Jesus back through David and the many
passages where Messiah and son of David are evi-
dently synonymous show how prevalent this mode of
thinking was and how inevitably the personality of
Jesus was run into its mold.¹
The second aspect of the Messianic thought was
more elaborate. It was associated with the apoc-
alyptic hope which developed between the Testa-
ments. In the New Testament the Messiah became
more than an anointed sovereign; he was the Son of
man from heaven, pre-existent before all worlds and
awaiting the appointed hour when on the clouds of
heaven he would appear. In this familiar form of
thought the personality of Jesus was naturally set.
Scholars differ as to whether, in spite of words as-
cribed to him, Jesus held this thought of himself or
even called himself Messiah at all. Certainly he
broke through and overflowed the ordinary meanings
of Messiahship and was plainly troubled by the mis-
understandings of his mission which the application
of the current category caused. But there is no doubt
that many first-century Christians, when they in-
terpreted the Master, used this familiar, vivid phras-
ing of his greatness.2
Logos was not a Jewish category at all. It was the
most familiar, popular way of interpreting the divine
1 Mark 10:47, Matthew 9:27, 12:23, 21:9, 22:42.
2 Mark 8:31, Matthew 10:23, Mark 14:61–62.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
215
approach to man which the Hellenistic world outside
of Judaism knew. It was in current use in Stoicism,
in Alexandrianism, in Platonism. If one were to be
understood in philosophy in that day, one would as in-
evitably think in terms of that category as to-day one
must think in terms of evolution. Hence, when Jesus
was preached to Hellenists, the Logos idea was used.
Here are three categories in which the personal-
ity of our Lord is enshrined in the New Testament.
He is the Messianic son of David, the Messianic Son
of man from heaven, and the divine Logos mediating
eternal life to men. Were these three categories in
their first-century forms infallible? Are we bound to
their literal terms and connotations? Can we never
think of our Lord except in the categories which the
first-century philosophy set up? Were they adequate
to interpret him in the first place? Much more, are
they adequate to interpret him now? Such questions,
I should suppose, any thoughtful preacher must ask
himself if he is sincerely eager to make Jesus Christ
real to this generation. And in seeking an answer
there are at least three factors that are significant.
First, Jesus did not create any of these forms of
thought in terms of which he was described. They
all had developed before he came, were in prevalent
control of men's thinking when he arrived, and had
been used to describe others before they were used to
interpret him. This is a plain fact whose significance
has all too little been appreciated. When we think
of Messiah or Logos we think of Jesus. We have no
use for the terms, see no meaning in them, except in
reference to him. He has absorbed all the significance
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
which these terms have for us, until his personality
and the interpretative categories have blended into
an indissoluble unity. The very title Christ (the
Greek for Messiah) has in our usage become indis-
tinguishable from a proper name. But the situation
in the first century was as different as possible from
that. The men of that day, like their fathers before
them, had thought from their youth up in terms of
Messianic expectation or of Logos philosophy. Such
thinking was the bread and meat of their daily lives.
It was their native, natural, spontaneous understand-
ing of history and of the world. In Judaism, when
men felt the impact of a powerful personality they
wondered at once if he might not be the Messiah, and
more than once they had followed those to whom they
had given the name. Or, in the Hellenistic world;
men ascribed the greatness of special personalities,
such as Pythagoras, to the presence of the Logos or,
like John's Gospel itself, attributed all wisdom and
greatness everywhere to the "Word" that "lighteth
every man." What we see awaiting the arrival of
Jesus are these prevalent categories of interpretation
in the minds of men.
1
Then Jesus came. He came with his supreme
personality, and he had to be interpreted. Men did
not have time to ask whether their thought-forms
were adequate for the task. Even if they had asked
that question they could not, on the spur of the mo-
ment, have thrown away their working categories of
explanation and gotten new ones. The human mind
never works that way. Always we have in our heads
1 John 1:9.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
217
a stock of mental frameworks and categories of ex-
planation, and when a new fact rises in our experience
we have to do the best we can with any mental ap-
paratus we possess to make sense of the new fact, get
it oriented, and explained. It was not otherwise with
the fact of Christ. Men used the intellectual forms of
thought with which they were equipped. Adequately
or inadequately, they did the best they could to see his
personality truly, to set it where it belonged with
relation to all the other truth they knew, and to
present it as worthily as possible to the understanding
and acceptance of men.
The second significant fact is that the first-century
Christians used about Jesus all the loftiest categories
that they possessed. Had you asked a Jew who, next
to God himself, was the supreme personality, he would
have said the Messiah. Had you asked a Hellenist
what was the supreme Principle, or Being, standing
with God like his alter ego, revealer, mediator, agent
of Deity, or, as Philo said, "the first-born Son of
God," he would have said the Logos. But not only
one of these, both of them, along with other current
categories representing the loftiest ways of thinking
that men knew, like incarnation and deification, were
used about Jesus. Here was a personality who drew
to himself as necessary to his interpretation all the
noblest ways of conceiving spiritual greatness which
men possessed. This is an important fact. It never
had happened before. It never has happened since.
It is unique and it argues a uniqueness in the person-
ality who caused it.
The third fact is that within the New Testament
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itself we have clearly acknowledged the inadequacy
of the categories which the church used at first and
the necessity of getting new ones. The first creed of
the Jewish Christians was simply the Messiahship of
Jesus. But the church outgrew that. She outgrew
it, not only because that form of thought was in itself ill
adapted to represent the deepest truth about Jesus, but
because even if it had been perfectly adapted among
Jews it would have been unconvincing among Hellen-
ists. When, therefore, the Gospel moved out from its
early Jewish matrix into the Greek world, the personal-
ity of our Lord was reclothed in a new interpretation.
He was presented as the eternal Son of God, the Logos,
who came into our humanity and brought life eternal.
If, now, the apostle who in Ephesus so magnificently
preached Jesus as the Logos were preaching, not in
Ephesus, but in New York or London, is it conceivable
that he would fail to do over again what he did so
well before? Would he not reinterpret the personality
of Jesus in terms that are native and natural to the
thought and speech of the people? In the Fourth
Gospel he has given us the charter of our liberty and I
do not think that he would go back on it. He has
shown us that the personality of Jesus is central but
that the mental frameworks by which he is interpreted
may change. The New Testament in this regard is
no friend of the reactionary with his static philosophy.
As Dr. Moffatt has said, that kind of conservatism
"has no right to cut wood for its crutches from the
forest of Church history, least of all from the histori-
cal study of the New Testament.'
" 1
1 James Moffatt: The Approach to the New Testament, 28.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
219
III
The preacher, therefore, who above all else is eager
to make Jesus real to the thought and life of this
generation, must be no literalist, reciting words like
Messiah and Logos, as though they were sufficient
vehicles for the Master's personality. Many modern
minds do not clearly see what these words mean.
The first requisite of a real preacher of the Master is
insight to look through not only the church's elaborate
theologies about him, but even the New Testament's
first phrasings of him, and to become acquainted with,
enamored of, the personality himself, around whom so
many frameworks of interpretation have risen, and
yet who himself is greater than them all. Just as soon
however, as the preacher does this, I suspect that he will
make an interesting discovery; he will find that what
he wishes most to say about Jesus to his people now is
at heart the same message which in the mental catego-
ries of their own time New Testament Christians were
expressing when they called him Messiah and Logos.
Let the preacher try as thoroughly as he can this
experiment of going back to the historic Jesus. In
the last generation there has been an immense access
of new information from travel, archeology, the dis-
covery of old literatures, that has made first-century
Palestine for us a living place, has lighted up the time
when Jesus was alive, has reconstructed the social
life, home life, schools and religious customs of the day
when he walked the earth, until we can visualize his
historic figure more clearly than our fathers could.
People are still alive who can remember the stir caused
2 20
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
when Dr. Seeley published Ecce Homo. It was one
of the first endeavors to recover from the mists of
antiquity a clear visualization of Jesus. We regard it
now as a classic of our English-speaking Christianity,
but it was violently hated when it first appeared, and
even the good Earl of Shaftesbury called it the most
pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell."
The endeavor to recover the historic figure of the
Master, however, has gone on. There is no one of us
who can escape its influence. Say "Jesus" to a
medieval Christian and he instinctively would think
of a king sitting on his throne or coming in the clouds.
of heaven. Say "Jesus" to a man of to-day and he
instinctively thinks of that gracious and courageous
Nazarene who lived and worked and taught in ancient
Palestine. Once the great pictures of Jesus were of an
exalted Judge, like Michelangelo's. Now a modern
painter like Tissot goes to live in Palestine and paints
the figure of Jesus as he must actually have looked,
among people and scenes as they must actually have.
been. Once Te Deums, calling upon angels and
archangels, seraphim and cherubim to fall before the
throne, spontaneously expressed the church's imagina-
tion of the Master. Now we find it much more natural
to sing with Whittier:
"In simple trust like theirs who heard,
Beside the Syrian sea,
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word
Rise up and follow Thee.”
1 See Edwin Hodder: The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury, Vol. III, 164.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
221
When in the Gospels we hear Jesus talk of "the grass
of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into
the oven," we think of the home in Nazareth where
the boys went out to gather hay and stubble for the
fire. When we hear him speak of the "leaven, which
a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till
it was all leavened," we see Jesus in Nazareth by
Mary's side watching the mysterious bubbling of
fermenting dough. When Jesus speaks of a hungry
boy asking bread and given bread, not stone, we pic-
ture the hungry family as they came to a larder which
Joseph and Mary labored to keep ample for their
needs. When Jesus speaks of patched garments, or
of sparrows that in the market-place are sold two for
a penny, we see the practical difficulties which often
faced the home from which Jesus came. When he
talks of eagles circling about carrion, of birds return-
ing to their nests and foxes to their holes, of hens
gathering chickens under their wings, of lost sheep, of
a red sunset prophesying a fair morning, of the wind
blowing as it lists, how vivid the figure of the Master
becomes! So from manger to Cross we naturally
endeavor to picture the Master in a concrete historic
situation, and the result in many minds was well ex-
pressed by a Jewish student: "I do not think he is
the Messiah, but I do love him.”
Nevertheless, let us look more closely at this his-
toric figure and inquire what he has done for men.
If we ask who Jesus is, we may be unsure, we may
share our generation's doubts and uncertainties.
Change the inquiry, therefore; what has Jesus done?
what changes has he wrought? what contributions has
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
he made to life? Such matters belong to history.
They can be stated. And, as we state them, the re-
curring theme of our argument will be: Jesus must
have been the kind of person who could do what he
has done.
For one thing, Jesus has given the world its most
significant idea of God. He supremely-some think
he for the first time in history-took ethical mono-
theism in thorough earnest. He saw the world gath-
ered up into one spiritual sovereignty; his God was
the God of the whole earth and of all men; and the
moral meaning of that insight he took with utter se-
riousness. Fatherhood in God, as Jesus taught it,
was no soft and sentimental quality as much Christian
preaching has represented it. The fundamental attri-
bute of Jesus' God was universal moral will. No.
modern scientist, I think, ever sensed the reign of law
in the physical world more grandly and austerely
than Jesus in the moral world sensed the sovereign will
of God. A moral grandeur is exhibited in Jesus' obe-
dience to the divine will, from the first struggle in the
desert until it led him through Gethsemane to the
Cross, which to many of us makes his relationship
with God the most impressive spiritual phenomenon
in history.
This God of sovereign will Jesus interpreted in terms
of utter goodness. All Jesus' love for men was the
expression of God's will. If under the stars at night
we think of the vast, incalculable universe and argue
behind it a purposeful, intelligent power, we believe
in God, but we have not thereby reached the character-
istic and distinctive quality of Jesus' Father. If we
1
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
223
philosophize until with intellectual satisfaction we
produce an argument assuring us there is a God, we
may believe in him, but we have not thereby reached
the distinguishing characteristics of Jesus' Father.
When, however, we love men, are merciful to the un-
grateful and undeserving, forgive our enemies, re-
claim the lost, and help the fallen, when, in a word,
we respect personality wherever we find it as the su-
preme treasure, then in the eternal love behind our
love, the divine will behind our service, we find Jesus'
God. This idea of God, often hinted at and vaguely
adumbrated, the Master took like so much rough ore,
purified it, minted it, put his image and superscription
on it, and made it current coin. Such thoughts of God,
which had been fugitive and occasional, he clarified,
made them triumphant affirmations, vivified them in
a gloriously illustrative life, and published them so
that what was before sporadic and dubious has be-
come a persistent and conquering Gospel. The word
God is only a picture-frame; all its value depends
on the quality of portrait which the frame encloses.
Into that old frame Jesus put a new picture so beau-
tiful because of his own life, so inspiring and win-
some because of his sacrificial death, that men never
had so thought of God before and never since have
been so moved, melted, and transformed by any other
thought of him. That is an amazing thing to have
done. In this world where so many have groped after
God, guessed about God, philosophized concerning
God, the Master has lived a life of such self-authenti-
cating spiritual grandeur that increasing millions of
men when they wish to think about God can think
224
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
nothing so true, so satisfactory, so adequate, as that
the God they worship is like Christ. Even Paul, who
had been brought up in the Old Testament's noblest
ideas of God, gained a new name for him when he had
met the Master: "The God and Father of the Lord
Jesus."
For another thing, Jesus has immeasurably heightened
man's estimate of his own worth and possibilities. Pro-
fessor George William Knox, who for twenty years
had tried the Gospel out as a missionary in the Orient
before he taught it as a philosophy at home, used to
say that Jesus' faith in the spiritual nature, infinite
value, permanent continuance, and boundless possi-
bilities of human personality was his supreme contri-
bution to man's thought. To believe in men as Jesus
did was in itself a great and adventurous faith; to
believe in men as Jesus did, in spite of all that men
did to him, was magnificent. It was not so much by
his teaching, however, as by his life that Jesus wrought
this heightening of faith in humankind. In himself
he carried our human nature to such heights, so un-
veiled in his own character what manhood was meant
to be, and by his life of divine sonship so challenged
men to claim their spiritual birthright as children of
God, that he has created new standards of estimation
about mankind's worth and possibilities. Wherever
his real message has gone folk have begun to say such
things as this: that they, too, are children of God; and
if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs
with Christ; that now are they children of God, and it
is not yet made manifest what they will be; they know
that, if he shall be manifested, they will be like him;
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
225
that they will attain unto the unity of the faith, and
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown
man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ.¹ Men never have talked like that about
themselves except where Jesus' influence has come.
Yet another thing the historic Jesus has done: he
has made men believe in the possibility of moral re-
clamation and renewal. He was the great specialist
in the conservation of the waste products of human-
ity-its prodigals and outcasts. He came at men from
one angle, saw them in one light-what might they
not become before he was through with them? Habit-
ually he looked at people in terms of their possibili-
ties. He valued men not at all for what they possessed,
not primarily for what they had done, not even for
what they were, but most of all for what they yet
might become. Many people, noting this attitude of
Jesus, ascribe it to kindness, but that misses the mark.
It was not primarily kindness, but insight. When
Robert Browning in the square of San Lorenzo in Flor-
ence picked up a yellow pamphlet for a lira, and saw
in its sordid tale the possibility of The Ring and the
Book, he was exercising not kindness but insight
into values actually there. So always it is the greatest
minds that see the greatest possibilities in the most
unlikely places. The Master exercised this insight
supremely on men, and the worth which he saw hidden
in immature, perverted, wronged human nature he
was sure God saw too, so that for those who would
fulfil the conditions were waiting forgiveness, recon-
ciliation, and moral power to become sons of God.
1 Cf. Romans 8:17; I John 3:2; Ephesians 4:13.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Divine forgiveness had long been taught, but Jesus
made the concept thoroughly moral; he cleansed it of
ceremonial elements; he made God's pardon depen-
dent on man's right relationship with man; and in faith
he supplied the power which could work the transfor-
mation. This message Jesus did not originate, but
he clarified it and proclaimed it with a singleness of
interest, a unity of purpose, a beauty of spirit, which
make him its unique expositor. So the possibility of
Roentgen Rays always had existed, latent in the ra-
diant energy of which the universe is full, yet they will
always bear Roentgen's name. He fulfilled the con-
ditions of their production, disclosed them in their
full meaning, brought them out of the darkness into
light, and made them available for use. In some
such way the message of moral reclamation and re-
newal is uniquely Christ's. He revealed its depth and
range, personalized it, practised it, put the seal of his
Cross upon it, and sent it out into the world. That is
an amazing thing to have done. This is a hard world
in which to believe at all that forgiveness and trans-
formation of life are possible. Law and punishment
are the certainties; forgiveness and renewal are the
miracles. Yet Jesus has made men believe in them
and, what is more, experience them. They are his
specialties.
Another item must be added to the achievements
of the historic Jesus: he has given the world its loftiest
ethical ideals. A modern attack has been made upon
the ethics of the Master on the ground that he ex-
pected a speedy end of the world, that he thus fore-
shortened his horizon, and that the kind of living that
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
227
he called for was adapted, not to the real world of
slow progress, but to an utterly artificial view of the
world swiftly coming to an end. Jesus presents, they
say, an interim ethic fitted to the few intervening
months before the kingdom should come in glory
from the heavens, but not fitted to the needs and pos-
sibilities of our progressive world. Suppose that in
answer we grant the charge (although I doubt its
truth) that Jesus' ethical ideals were deeply affected
by apocalyptic expectations. The real question still
remains: what would be the nature of that effect?
Jesus on this supposition was mistakenly looking for-
ward to a speedy end of the age and the swift inaugu-
ration of the best of all possible worlds with God's will
sovereign over all the relationships of life. In what di-
rection, then, would his ethical insight turn? Surely
it would turn to those absolute ideals whose realiza-
tion would be the glory of the coming kingdom.
So, when Edward Bellamy wished to make clear
what he conceived to be the ultimate moral values,
he wrote Looking Backward. He placed himself,
that is, in an imagined ideal state and in terms of
what is right in such a social system defined the goals
and standards of his endeavor. So, too, Plato's clear-
est thought of ethical values appears in his Republic
where in terms of the best social order he could dream
he determined what finally is good and evil. If, then,
Jesus did share the apocalyptic expectations, what
happened in his case was infinitely more vivid and
compelling: he thought the ideal order really was at
hand, that men must be ready on the moment for the
coming of God's perfect kingdom on the earth.
228
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Under such conditions he would not give men pru-
dential maxims such as worldly wisdom might suggest
but he would give them a vision of the ideal life fitted
to the kingdom's coming. Perfect purity, perfect
sincerity, perfect magnanimity and love, perfect devo-
tion to the will of God-such were the ideals he would
lift up. He would exalt the kind of life which would
make men worthy of God's utterly righteous king-
dom. That was, in fact the quality of his teaching.
His ethical principles leave us many a puzzling prob-
lem in this very unideal world, but they have done us
more service than any prudential maxims ever could
have done. By them we check our little maxims up.
By them we decide whether we are going forward or
backward in our personal and social life. They have
gone before us and go before us still like the pillar of
cloud by day and of fire by night leading the way to
the Promised Land.
This first answer, however, based upon a granting
of the charges, does not exhaust the matter. Person-
ally, I think that this absolute quality would have
been in Jesus' ethics whether or no. The plain fact
is that wide areas of the Master's most characteristic
teaching have no natural connection with apocalyptic
expectations at all. The parable of the Good Samari-
tan or of the Prodigal Son, the Golden Rule, the teach-
ing about anxiety, about goodwill even to enemies,
about finding life by losing it, about loving the Lord
our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength,
and our neighbor as ourselves-what has all this to do
with Jewish apocalyptic? The Master's most charac-
teristic teaching is essentially timeless; it would be as
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
229
much at home in our century as in the first, and forty
centuries from now it will be at home still.
Moreover, the real test of any ethical teaching is
not made when folk discuss the frameworks of thought
in which it first appeared, nor yet when they argue
about its abstract rationality. The real test comes
when men apply it, adventure on the basis of it, mold
their lives and institutions to agree with it, and de-
termine what it does when it is put to work. When-
ever that test has been applied to Jesus' ethical teach-
ing, that teaching has redeemed life. Christianity
may well be ashamed of many things in its history, but
of some things it need never be ashamed. Wherever
Christ's spirit has welled up in personal character,
wherever homes have been illumined by his teaching
of self-sacrifice, mutual love, and boundless goodwill,
wherever prison systems have been even a little
affected by his attitude toward despised and outcast
men, wherever his ideals have been applied, in ways
however limited, to industrial and international life,
we need never be ashamed. The Master's ideals are
ahead of us, but they are ahead of us because they are
the loftiest, most challenging conceptions of human
character and relationships that mankind has ever
known. They will not let us rest. They condemn us,
haunt us, rally us, and lure us on. Mankind will not
find itself until it works them out and makes them real
in all of life. This immense achievement the Man
of Nazareth has wrought.
Yet again, the historic Jesus has given the world
its most appealing and effective exhibition of vicarious
sacrifice. Vicarious sacrifice is not new in man's life.
230
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Gravitation is no more deeply built into the structure
cf the physical universe than is vicarious sacrifice
into the essential nature of the moral world. Save
when some one who need not do it voluntarily assumes
the burden of man's misery and sin, there is no salva-
tion from any want or tragedy that mankind knows.
All this deepest realm of human experience, universal
as it is, is summed up in the Master's Cross. He has
given us so perfect and convincing an illustration of
the power of a boundless love expressing itself through
utter sacrifice that he has become the unique represen-
tative on earth of that universal principle and law.
The cold bare words in which we state this truth do
no justice to the fact. The Cross of Christ, like every
other abiding element in man's life, has passed through
interpretation and reinterpretation as the thought of
it has been poured from one generation's mental
receptacles into another's. It has been run into
thought-forms associated with old animal sacrifices; it
has been made "a pious fraud" played by God upon
the devil, who was promised Christ if he would give
up man and who ultimately lost both;¹ it has been
poured into the mold of the feudal system by Anselm 2
and into the mold of later European law by Grotius.³
Yet, warped and distorted out of its vital significance,
as it often has been, by categories that had no relation
with its original meaning and were essentially unfitted
1 St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Great Catechism, Ch. XXVI, in The
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. V, 495-496..
2 Cur Deus Homo.
³ A Defence of the Catholic Faith concerning the Satisfaction of
Christ, against Faustus Socinus.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
231
to represent its deepest truth, the Cross of Christ has
been the most subduing, impressive and significant
fact in the spiritual history of man. Wherever one
meets vicarious sacrifice-in Livingstone voluntarily
assuming the burden of Africa's misery, in Father
Damien becoming a leper to the lepers when he need
not have done it, in Florence Nightingale taking on
herself the tragedy of battlefields which she never had
caused-it always is the most subduing and impressive
fact mankind can face.
But when in the supreme character it is supremely
exhibited, it becomes uniquely significant. To mul-
titudes it has meant alike a revelation of the divine
nature and a challenge to sacrificial living of their own
which they could in no wise escape. It has bowed
them in gratitude, chastened them into penitence,
wakened them to hope, inspired them to devotion.
It has made the one who bore the Cross not alone a
religious and ethical teacher, but a personal Savior
whom to meet, with whom to fall in love, by whom to
be chastened, melted, subdued, forgiven, and em-
powered, has been the beginning of the noblest living
that this world has ever seen.
This leads us to the issue of the matter: Jesus has
supplied an object of loyalty for the noblest devotions of
the generations since he came. Men do believe that this
world is not a senseless chaos, that it is not
"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing," ¹
that it does have a divine purpose running through it.
1 ¹ Macbeth, Act V, Sc. 5.
232
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
But men do not fall in love with and devote them-
selves to the divine purpose in the abstract. It must
become embodied so that they can see it. It must be
lived so that they can adore it. All through the uni-
verse the pervading purpose of God runs like blood
through our bodies, but there must be at least one
place where men can put their fingers on it and feel
its pulse. Just that service Jesus has rendered men.
He has been to them the place where they could feel
the divine heart-beat; he has been the one in whom
the eternal purpose came to the surface where they
could be sure of it. The simplest, deepest, most
searching way of expressing the finest consecrations
of men since Jesus came has been devotion to him.
We need not feel this to be unimportant because it is
not easy to state theologically; it is easy to state
psychologically, and that is just as significant. To
live a life so illustrative of all that men in their best
hours aspire to be that they can find no finer way of
phrasing their noblest devotion than in terms of
personal allegiance to the one who lived it, is an
achievement that would be utterly incredible if we did
not know that it had been done. "The devotion of
the leader to his men and to his cause," wrote Monte-
fiore, the Jew, "Jesus shared it. The devotion of the
led to their leader-Jesus inspired it. He kindled a
flame which was to burn more brightly after his death
than ever before it in his lifetime. 'For the sake of
Jesus.' Of what fine lives and deaths has not this
motive been the spring and the sustainment." 1
1 C. G. Montefiore: Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of
Jesus, 133.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
233
IV
We thus have rehearsed some of the achievements of
the historic Jesus which leap first to the mind, not
because we suppose for a moment that such a statement
can be remotely adequate, but because even so brief
a summary should make clear that, when we try to
recover the historic figure of the Master behind the
interpretative categories which the church has used, we
do not find a diminished man, a thin and uninspiring
character despoiled of its glory, a Jewish rabbi who
by chance was exalted by being called Messiah. What
we do find is a transcendent personality who has done
for the spiritual life of man what no one else ever did.
Whatever else may be said of Jesus, he must surely
have been the kind of person who could do what he
has done. When, therefore, I sum up even the few
things we have been saying, the consequence seems
impressive to the point of awe. Jesus was the kind of
person who could do the things that we have said-
give the world its loftiest thought of God, lift to its
noblest heights man's estimate of his own worth and
possibility, bring to men moral reclamation and
renewal, give the world its noblest ethical ideals, its
most appealing and effective outpouring of sacrificial
saviorhood, its most satisfactory object of personal
loyalty and devotion. These things at the very least
the Master has done for men and he must have been
the kind of person who could do them. And if, facing
these facts, one says that Jesus was the divinely
appointed agent of God's kingdom in the earth, is
that too much to say? Is it not the most obvious
234
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
and simple thing that we could say? I confess frankly
that when I say it I do not think that I have said
enough. Yet to say that is to call him the Messiah.
That is the essential meaning of the New Testament
when it interpreted his personality in Messianic terms.
For Messiahship was simply the Hebrew category of
function and purpose; it was a way of saying that God
had specially anointed one to mediate his sovereignty
over all mankind.
Nothing more clearly could illustrate the non-
speculative character of Hebrew thinking than this
fact that its highest category of personal greatness
concerned a practical function. Divine substance and
nature, ontological equality with God, were not in-
volved in Messiahship at all. No ideas were there
which could lead to philosophies of triunity in God or
of two natures blended in one person. All that spec-
ulative theology came from the Gospel's contact with
Hellenistic thought. Messiahship was character-
istically and altogether Jewish. There were no phil-
osophic discussions in the Jewish writings about
Messiah's nature; his meaning consisted in what he
was to do. Sometimes thought of as a Davidic sover-
eign, sometimes as the pre-existent Son of man, he was
one who had been specially chosen to establish God's
victorious kingdom in the earth. Of course, there are
details associated with these Jewish pictures of the
Messiah which our modern minds have no use for and
cannot vitally believe. But when one thinks of the
crucial matter, the conviction that in Jesus we have
one divinely anointed to make real God's sovereignty
over men, is not that precisely what we do believe?
L
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
235
wiship
a mani
Messiahship is only superficially an outgrown cat-
egory; essentially it is one of the most congenial ways
of thinking that modern minds could use. I do not
see why one should wish to be a Christian preacher
if he does not easily and whole-heartedly approach
the Master so. Immeasurably indebted for his unique,
costly, and irreplaceable work, tracing all my choicest
faiths, hopes, ideals and experience with God to him
and to his Cross, convinced that he was divinely
appointed to be the world's Savior and that he plays
the indispensable part in establishing God's kingdom
in the earth-so I, for one, return from trying to see
him as he actually lived and died in Palestine. There-
fore I call him Christ indeed and when I find an an-
cient Jewish Christian kneeling before him as Messiah
I kneel also, not because I think my fellow-worship-
er's category is adequate, but because I share his
estimate of the Master, his gratitude, and his devotion.
V
For smal
dev-Tion, Fosdich
This centrality of Christ in our life and preaching
has one crucially important reaction upon our use of
the Bible. Men have always gone to any sacred
scriptures they possessed primarily that they might
find out how to live. That the Bible is "the infallible
rule of faith and practise" is one of the most familiar
statements which the church has ever framed, but in
the historical development of our religion in the Old
Testament the second item of that statement came
first. The primary use of Scripture was to guide
conduct, not to control belief. What ought we to do?
236
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
-that was the question with which men first ap-
proached their bibles and on account of which they
first wanted bibles at all. The roots of this desire to
find out what the gods want done go far back into
primitive religion. Here, for example, is a Babylonian
psalm whose cry expresses one of the most ancient
and tragic questionings of man:
"What, however, seems good to one, to a god may be displeas-
ing.
What is spurned by oneself may find favor with a god.
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery,—who can understand it?
How can mortals learn the ways of a god?
He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, of a sudden he is crushed.” 1
Thus, in dim antiquity men groped after ways of
acting, magical, ceremonial, or moral, that would
please the gods. Nor did this elemental need grow
less when the gods became God and his demands on
men were more and more interpreted in terms of
righteousness. Still it was the primary interest of
religious men to know the will of God that they might
do it. When, therefore, among the Hebrews we see
the canon of sacred Scripture growing, when Josiah
swore the people to a solemn league and covenant-
the first example of a formal Hebrew Bible that we
know or when Ezra pledged the nation's loyalty to
the keeping of the Levitical law, the Bible which thus
was coming into being was primarily a book of divine
requirements. It told the people what they ought to
1
¹ Quoted by Morris Jastrow, Jr., in Aspects of Religious Belief and
Practice in Babylonia and Assyria, 333.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
237
do. Moreover, when the prophetic writings were
added to the law, this evident purpose of the growing
Book to help men to understand in order that they
might perform the will of God, became even more ex-
plicit. At last the ingenious technicality of scribes,
endeavoring to apply to each detail of human life the
minute guidance of the Scripture, made legalistic in-
terpretation of the Book a settled and essential use of it.
One might have expected the Christians to break
with this legalistic employment of Scripture, as they) Phoe
did break with many of its old results. While, how-
ever, Jesus himself and Paul after him were anti-
legalists, while they stressed the spirit of men's ac-
tions, their motives, objectives, and ideals, and dealt
freely with the precise commandment of the written
law, the need of an authoritative guide to action was
too deep to be easily outgrown. Men who are in
earnest about doing the will of God must know what
that will is, and they want a book to tell them in
definitive terms. When, therefore, the New Testament
was added to the Old and the whole Book was bound
up into unity by a theory of inerrant inspiration,
Christians used the whole Book as the Jews had used
part of it; it was a divine oracle to tell men how to live.
This has been one of the major uses of Scripture in
Christian history. Ecclesiastical bodies, from the
Roman Church citing a text for its justification, to
Protestant communions claiming the support of
Scripture for their diverse polities and practises, have
employed the Bible as though it were a book of canon
law to define the procedure and organization of Chris-
tian churches forever. Even precise instructions like
238
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
1
Paul's concerning women's uncovered heads or
women's speaking in the churches have been used and
are used still as binding laws, and religious bodies.
still exist which denounce innovations such as Bible
schools and missionary societies because they are not
mentioned in the Bible. Requirements about the
sabbath, first emerging among nomads in the desert
or among captive Jews in Babylon, are preached and
their legal enforcement is attempted in modern cities
as though the written word were infallibly to govern
mankind's conduct on each seventh day for all time
to come.
Whole communities have been founded
upon the Bible as a legal constitution and, since in the
New Testament there is little definite material for the
organization of a state, these theocracies have largely
been built upon Old Testament laws. Cromwell in
England, Calvin in Geneva, the Puritans in New
England were endeavoring what Cotton Mather
described as "a Theocracy as near as might be to that
which was the glory of Israel, 'the peculiar people.
Even detailed economic processes like the taking of
interest on invested capital were forbidden on legal-
istic grounds.³ Long ago, in an agricultural commu-
nity, taking money on a loan would have been trading
on the need of a friend, and such meanness stood in
Scripture condemned and hated. As a result, every
great assembly of the church from Elvira in 306 to
1 Cf. W. N. Clarke: Sixty Years with the Bible, 149-155.
11) 2
2 Irving Berdine Richman: Rhode Island; Its Making and Its
Meaning, 8.
3 For the following point see Andrew D. White: A History of the
Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Vol. II, Ch. XIX.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
239
Vienna in 131I solemnly condemned taking interest;
burial in consecrated ground was denied to any one
who did it; economic expansion was throttled and
interest rates rose to incredible heights because the
church would not recognize changed conditions;
Luther said that taking interest of five or six percent
was robbery; the Jews became money-lenders with
Isaac of York and Shylock typical, because, being
damned already, they were employed to do what no
Christian could do without incurring eternal penalty,
-until at last relief was found in a rabbinical techni-
cality never thought of until necessity required it, that
a low rate of interest was justifiable but that a high
rate was usury.
At times this endeavor to make the letter of the
Bible a binding law has produced the deepest shames
and tragedies that Christendom has known. "Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live," ¹ used alike as a de-
fense of witchcraft's reality and a call to persecution;
the slave laws of the Hebrews, used in defense of
slavery; "Compel them to come in, "' 2 used as a com-
mandment requiring religious persecution-such are
a few samples of the cruel consequences of legalism.
Thus to use the Scripture's detailed laws, so often
formulated under circumstances long since gone, and
sometimes enshrining ethical ideas so outgrown that
to obey the law would be to commit a crime, is worse
than folly. Yet the ancient need which the legalistic
use of Scripture tried to meet is with us still. Men
want to know the will of God that they may do it.
They want the Bible clearly to tell them how to live.
1 Exodus 22:18.
2 Luke 14:23.
240
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
What, then, shall the preacher do who uses the Book
and yet cannot use it legalistically as his fathers did?
1
The spirit and character of Jesus are the answer.
He has revealed the quality and principle of true
living. Said Matthew Arnold, "Attempt to reach
righteousness by any way except that of Jesus, and you
will find out your mistake!" If some one protests
that Jesus does not give us rules and regulations by
which in every situation we may know what he would
have us do, that he furnishes us no dictionary of con-
duct giving us a maxim for each contingency, let us
be thankful that this is true. Had he written a new
Levitical code adapted to his age, the changed circum-
stances of our modern times long since would have
outlawed most of it. Instead, he has given us in time-
less terms expressed in universally applicable life a
form of conduct, a quality of spirit, which changing
circumstances do not affect. What is right in the rest
of the Book in him is consummated; what is dim is
made clear; what is partial is fulfilled; what is mis-
taken is corrected. He is the best we know. He is
love, and love is the fulfilment of the law.
Preach him, therefore, not as those who timidly
suspect that outgrown categories have lost them their
cause, but as those who know that all the categories
ever used about him have been but partial apprecia-
tions of his divine reality.
"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.”
¹ Literature and Dogma, 334.
JESUS, THE MESSIAH
241
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Historicity of Jesus, Shirley Jackson Case. University of
Chicago Press.
Ecce Homo, John Robert Seeley. Roberts Bros.
The Jesus of History, T. R. Glover. Association Press.
Jesus, George Holley Gilbert. Macmillan.
Jesus, W. Bousset, trans. by Janet P. Trevelyan. Putnam.
The Syrian Christ, Abraham Mitrie Rihbany. Houghton Mifflin.
The Character of Jesus, Charles Edward Jefferson. Crowell.
Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, Francis Greenwood
Peabody. Macmillan.
Jesus Christ and the Social Question, Francis Greenwood Pea-
body. Macmillan.
Outlines of the Life of Christ, W. Sanday. Scribner's.
The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ, Arthur C. Headlam.
J. Murray.
The Ethical Teaching of Jesus, Ernest F. Scott. Macmillan.
Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, Heinrich Weinel
and Alban G. Widgery. T. and T. Clark.
The Life and Teachings of Jesus, Charles Foster Kent. Scrib-
ner's.
Jesus Christ, W. P. Paterson, in the one volume edition of A
Dictionary of the Bible, ed. by James Hastings. Scribner's.
Jesus, A. B. Bruce, in the Encyclopædia Biblica, ed. by T. K.
Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black. Macmillan.
LECTURE VIII
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
I
In our last lecture we laid stress on the indispensa-
ble contributions which Jesus has made to the spiri-
tual life of men. We tried to say in our own words
what Luther once said with his sure instinct for every
question's practical import: "Christ is not called
Christ because he has two natures. What does that
signify to me? He bears this glorious and consoling
name because of the office and the work he has under-
taken." Thus describing Jesus in terms of his prac-
tical function, we found ourselves not only using a
typically modern approach but also understanding
better the meaning of Messiahship in the New Tes-
tament.
Such functional description is congenial with our
modern thinking. When we cannot discover what a
force essentially is, as is the case with electricity, but
can discover what it does, we do not feel bereft. We
are persuaded that anything is what it does and that
when we can sum up the functions of any force we un-
derstand it about as well as there is any use in under-
standing it at all. There is an easy transition, there-
fore, when, turning to religion, we waive metaphysical
1 ¹ Werke, 2d Erlangen Edition, Vol. XII, 259, quoted by H. R.
Mackintosh in The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 321.
242
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
243
questions about Christ's essential nature and confine
ourselves to his practical saviorhood. We feel at
home in that kind of thinking. Perhaps we feel too
much at home.
At any rate, in the New Testament there is another
category besides Messiahship representing another
intellectual interest and tradition. In the New Testa-
ment Jesus is the Logos, the eternal Word of God.
The background of that conception must be sought in
Greek thought, which, setting the realm of pure spirit
over against the realm of matter, tended to make
God remotely and unapproachably distant from man.
The transcendence of God, when highly emphasized,
inevitably makes his vital contact with his world and
his spiritual creatures difficult to conceive. That
problem the Logos solved in the ancient world amid
whose prevalent forms of thinking the Gospel made its
way. The Logos was the forthgoing of God over the
abyss between divinity and man. Sometimes thought
of as a principle, sometimes semi-personified as a
mediator, the Logos involved the central assertion that
God can come into the world which he has made and
into man, his child. This was the category which the
New Testament used, not only in the Fourth Gospel,
but in a disguised form in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
and in the great Christological passages of Paul. Jesus
was not only practically the Messiah; he was essen-
tially the forthgoing of God himself into his world.
This philosophical approach to the understanding
of Jesus is less congenial with our modern minds than
is the more practical category of Messiahship. The
modern mind often feels positive and indignant aver-
244
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
sion against such theological construing of the Master.
Nor is the reason difficult to understand. For so long
a time the theological Christ, with his divine attri-
butes, has been exalted in the church-great creeds
recited about him, great anthems sung to him, great
rituals performed before him—and now after nearly
two thousand years civilization has been shaken by.
the most destructive cataclysm in history. The late
war violated everything Jesus ever taught and, pour-
ing the whole world into almost irremediable confu-
sion, has provoked widespread impatience with purely
theological speculations about Christ. The Jesus who
challenges thoughtful men to-day is crying, "Why
call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which
I say?"¹ Many people, therefore, growing impatient
with the church's worship of the theological Christ,
have been saying:
Give us Jesus the teacher of righteousness,
brotherhood, and peace, the proclaimer of prin-
ciples on which alone civilization can endure.
For nearly twenty centuries you have been prais-
ing your theological Christ and yet child labor
takes our little ones and grinds them like grist
in our mills, while the real Christ said, "It is not
the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one
of these little ones should perish." 2 For nearly
twenty centuries you have been explaining your
theological Christ, yet racial hatreds still well up
bitterly in men, while the real Christ said, "One
is your teacher, and all ye are brethren." 3 For
3 Matthew 23:8.
1 Luke 6:46.
2 Matthew 18:14.
"2
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
245
nearly twenty centuries you have been forming
creeds about your theological Christ yet indus-
trial despotism still grinds its victims with a hard
heel, while the real Christ said, "Whatsoever ye
would that men should do unto you, even so do ye
also unto them." 1 For nearly twenty centuries
you have been controversially debating your the-
ological Christ, but war still curses men, dragging
in its evil train all the abominations that man is
heir to, while the real Christ said, "Blessed are
the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of
God." 2 Have done with your theological Christ
and give us back Jesus the ethical teacher.
I do not see how any one who knows the Master and
cares for him can fail to sympathize with this move-
ment of thought and to welcome all its positive and
constructive elements. The last thing that the Mas-
ter could endure would be to be the object of great
creeds, great anthems, great rituals, in a world which
did not do what he said.
Nevertheless, when you have gotten back Jesus
the ethical teacher, when you have exalted his prin-
ciples of life and have claimed their rightful applica-
tion to all mankind's relationships, is that all? These
principles for which he stood are lofty in themselves
and difficult of application. They are alien from some
of man's deepest instincts, antagonistic to many of
man's ingrained traditions. Purity in the individual,
altruism in industry, peace in international relation-
ships, brotherhood across racial lines-the very state-
2 Matthew 5:9.
1 Matthew 7:12.
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ment of such things to multitudes of folk seems sheer
contradiction in terms. How can any one intelligently
face the revolutionary ideals of Jesus, and imagine
what changes their application would imply in human
nature's habitual reactions and in man's long-settled
institutions without raising inevitable questions: can
they ever be made to work? is this the kind of world.
in which such principles were meant to work? what
kind of world is this anyway? in its innermost nature
and purpose is it a universe where Christlike princi-
ples are natively at home or is it a universe where they
are visionary afterthoughts, intruders which have no
kinship with reality?
So far as I can see, there are two major positions of
which all others are but corollaries, and between which
the allegiance of men tends to divide. On the one
side, some think of this universe as fundamentally
physical. Just as everything in English literature is
the arrangement and rearrangement of twenty-six
letters, so to these folk all existence consists in the
permutations and combinations of eighty-odd con-
stituent elements known to chemistry. Limericks and
great poems, cheap romances and the Epistles of Paul,
advertisements in the newspapers and the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation, are diverse combinations of the
alphabet; so this universe, from top to bottom, is to
some only the rearrangement of original chemical
elements. In this thoroughly materialistic world, with
all spiritual life only an accidental episode, they see
Jesus, an ethical teacher, an idealist, dreamer, vision-
ary, announcing moral ideals and hopes of regenera-
ted life for humankind that have no contact with cre-
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
247
ative reality. His ideals are beautiful, they say, but
do not fit the nature of the world. Said Nietzsche,
"I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive
lie that has ever existed."¹ Of course he thought that.
He knew that in a world with brute force for its crea-
tive fact and final arbiter the ideals of Jesus are mis-
taken, founded on falsehood, that they involve abnor-
mal living, and that in the end, against the dead-
weight of an antagonistic cosmos, cannot be made to
work. He knew that another kind of life than that
which Jesus taught is the natural implication of such
a world as he believed in.
This issue has been forced on us with startling
clearness by the neo-Darwinians. Darwin outlined
a picture of the primitive estate of the animal world in
terms of the struggle for existence and the survival of
the fittest. It was the picture of a hard and bitter
fight. Darwin himself, engaged in solving a biological
problem, solved it brilliantly and was not responsible
for some conclusions that less cautious followers have
drawn. But it is a commentary on our low ideals of
living that a whole race of neo-Darwinian sociolo-
gists has arisen to greet that original animal struggle
for existence as the standard to which they can appeal
in justifying man's inhumanity to man. Nor in prac-
tise have men been less ready than they have been in
theory to avail themselves of this defense. Men in
industry, desiring to crush their rivals and profiteer
upon the public, have done it ruthlessly and have de-
fended it as the struggle for existence and the survival
of the fittest. Imperialists in government, looking
¹ Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power, Vol. I, 163, Sec. 200.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
with avaricious eyes upon the lands of weaker folk,
unscrupulously have seized them, defending their
acts as natural: they corresponded with the way the
universe is run. Militarists, loving war and glorying
in it, have waged it with insatiable blood-lust and
have based their conduct's rationality upon the kind
of world they live in. The struggle for existence and
the survival of the fittest make their actions natural.
This is the Darwinism which Christianity must.
fight-not the biological truth of evolution, with its
endless suggestiveness and value to our thinking, but
a philosophic materialism which conceives the world's
elemental nature as brutal and bloodthirsty, with war
for its basic standard and norm. Nor can this pagan
idea of creation's nature be fought by ethical ideals
alone, however beautiful. The more beautiful they
are the less believable they are in such a world. The
doctrine of no-God can be exorcised only by the doc-
trine of God. We might indeed fight the false science
of the neo-Darwinians by true science, pointing out
that the mammoths have gone but the bees are here,
that the armor-plated ichthyosaurus is as dead as the
moon though the ants are not, that even among the
animals cooperation has carried species through when
brute force has failed. We might insist that even if
"Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine" were an
adequate picture of animal life, which it is not, we
still are men, not brutes, and will not appeal to an
animal struggle as our standard. Slavery was natural
and we did away with it; piracy was natural and it
has gone; religious wars were natural and we think we
have seen the last of them; and to-day race hatred, the
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
249
liquor traffic, commercialized vice, international ar-
maments, autocratic industries are natural, but for all
that we propose to overpass them.
What we Christians, however, are driving at in this
necessary protest against neo-Darwinian sociology is
something deeper than sociology. We are insisting
on another idea of creation's nature altogether from
that which materialism presents. We are fighting for
a view of the world with spiritual elements at the
heart of it and spiritual possibilities ahead of it. Only
in such a world can the ethics of Jesus remain credible
norms of life.
For this is the other possibility to which men turn
when they cannot think that creation is merely phys-
ical. They dare to think that spiritual life in man is
the revelation of creative reality. They come, by
whatever special phrasings, to the fundamental idea
for which the Logos stood: that what appears in man
as light, life, and love, to use John's favorite terms,
comes from God and is God coming into our human-
ity. Then and then only Christ's ideals cease being
visionary; then they become the unveiling of the bases
of the real world.
II
A theological interest, therefore, which goes behind
the ideals of Jesus to consider whether or not we can
see God revealed in him, is not so far-fetched as many
superficial minds are thinking. We preachers would
better feel this deeply. We who stand for Christian
principles of life face a hard fight. We are going out
into a difficult, and it may be desperate, generation,
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Western civilization may go to pieces under us. It
will certainly not be easy to make the way of life
which Jesus represents seem possible for men and
nations. Waves of skepticism and disillusionment
already have overwhelmed the faith of many, and
more folk than one likes to think are crying, "Who
will show us any good?" In such a generation we
cannot make the ideals of Jesus triumphant just be-
cause they are beautiful. The Campanile of St.
Mark's did not collapse from lack of beauty but from
lack of foundations. The ideals of Jesus will as cer-
tainly collapse, so far as our generation is concerned,
if men, believing that the world is a mere sport of
atoms, lose faith in its spiritual bases. Men must
know, not only what it would be ideal to do in this
world, but whether this world at bottom is meant to
have ideals even suggested in it, much more wrought
out.
Recently I spent an evening with a young university
graduate who had made a brilliant record in his course.
and has made a brilliant record ever since. He was
all at sea about God. He was inherently reverent.
He called himself "unescapably religious," and he
did not want to be otherwise. He very rarely went
to church. He did regularly pray, but he was at sea
about God. He told me of his friends, leading men
in their college classes, with whom he kept in touch-
that they were largely alienated from the church,
that they had a kind of private religion which some-
times helped them, that only recently they had talked
together all night long about God and immortality,
but that in the end they still were all at sea. Now,
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
251
the upshot of this familiar attitude is ethical. Men
wonder what right they have to expect much of human
nature and the world. Are not selfishness, brutality,
lust, bloodthirstiness, industrial exploitation, war,
natural in a world where all moral living is only an
accidental episode in an æonic physical process?
Must we not take such things for granted and put up
with them as the inevitable product of an animal
inheritance which it is folly to hope to outgrow?
You might as well expect to find a climate without
its appropriate results in fauna and flora as to find
prevalent materialism without that sort of ethical
reaction.
They say that under the snow and ice of Spitzbergen
are the remains of tropic forests. Once, where arctic
cold now reigns, luxuriant flora grew. If one asks the
explanation for this desolation of a once fruitful ter-
ritory, the answer is plain: the climate changed.
Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the climate which had
made forests possible began to alter. Perhaps genera-
tions passed without obvious effect, but the effect was
there. What once grew naturally at last could not
grow at all. So religious faith in the spiritual nature
of creation, its divine origin, meaning, and destiny,
creates a climate. That is perhaps the most important
thing religion does. And in that climate it is natural
for Christ's ideals of life to grow. But Spitzbergen's
forests no more surely surrendered to the ice than
those ideals will vanish from a world where material-
istic naturalism takes the place of religious faith.
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III
Said in other terms, to be sure, but rising from this
basic interest in the nature of creation, the idea of the
Logos took its place in early Christian thinking. Dr.
Henry Sloane Coffin made a wise remark when he
said that the deity of Jesus "is not primarily a state-
ment concerning Jesus. . . but a statement con-
cerning the invisible God." 1 How shall men think of
God and where shall they find him? how shall God
enter into men and redeem them?-these are the
profoundest questions of religious life and thought.
And men were framing answers to these deepest
questions when they said that in Christ the Logos was
unveiled, that through him God had crossed the
chasm that divides divinity from man, and, taking
flesh, had dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself;
in his face we see the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God; he is the effulgence of God's glory and
the very image of his substance; in the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God-this message is an essential part of the New
Testament. He who does not proclaim it is not
preaching the New Testament; he has parted company
not only with the church's theology but with the
experience of God in Christ which belongs at the very
center of original Christianity. For, in whatever
philosophic terms you may phrase it, the norm of
Christian experience in the New Testament was to
find in Christ, not simply the ideal life, but the in-
¹ In a Day of Social Rebuilding, 58.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
253
carnate God of the world where that ideal life must be
wrought out.
Nevertheless one must sympathize with the per-
plexity of the man upon the street when he sees this
question of Christ's divinity debated as a theological
controversy and perhaps tossed into the newspapers.
One wonders what he thinks when he hears church-
men call one another Arians, Monophysites, Mono-
theletes, Apollinarians, and other unpronounceable
kinds of heretic because they differ in construing the
person of our Lord. So much confusion is there in
this realm that some people believe in the divinity
of Jesus who are not quite sure what that signifies,
and many others want to believe in it and try to but
find it so beset with knotty questions that they have
no freedom and joy in their belief at all. That the
divinity of Jesus is not at heart a dry-as-dust theo-
logical speculation at all but a warm and vital asser-
tion of religious experience is a fact that multitudes of
folk never suspect.
Let us clarify our minds at once by stating plainly
that whatever questions there may be about Christ's
divinity, there is none about his humanity. Jesus
was true man and his divinity must always be asserted
and interpreted in such ways as will not cast doubt on
that unmistakable fact.
Surely, this is clear in the Gospels. The Master's
body was normal like our own. It grew, was weary,
hungry, thirsty; it suffered and it died like ours.
The Master's emotional life was normally human, too.
Sometimes he was astonished, as at the people's lack
of faith, or the centurion's excess of it; compassion
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moved him when he looked on multitudes unshep-
herded, or, swinging round the brow of Olivet, saw
Jerusalem crowned with the Temple's golden dome;
indignation sometimes swept his spirit like a storm
as when he saw ceremonial law rated higher than
human need, or found his Father's house made a den
of thieves, or faced the cruelty and meanness of
hypocrisy; at times he rejoiced and at times he was
grievously depressed, crying, "My soul is exceeding
sorrowful even unto death," or "My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?"
The Master's mental life, as well, followed the
course of a normal human youth: "Jesus advanced in
wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men."
He learned the best traditions of his people in his
family, was trained as all children are by habits of
reverence even more than by abstract teaching, and,
later, in the synagogue school he sat on the floor with
the boys of Nazareth and recited in concert the lessons
which the rabbi dictated. The information which his
mind used was gathered, as ours is, by observation
and experience, and was retained by memory, and his
parables illustrate the penetration of his insight and
the tenacity of his recollection. He grew up as we do,
sharing the characteristic forms of thought of his age
and country, and, using thus the ways in which every-
body thought to express the truth which he uniquely
saw, he was understood in his own day and so was
preserved for ours.
Beautifully human, too, was his spiritual life. That
is evident in his prayers. Sometimes he prayed in
triumph, as with shining face on the Transfiguration
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
255
Mount, and sometimes he prayed in grief, as in Geth-
semane when it was written, "And being in an agony
he prayed more earnestly." Occasionally he prayed
all night or went out early in the morning to the hills
alone or at evening withdrew in solitude to seek his.
Father's help. At the very center of his spiritual life
was his filial dependence on God. "The Father is
greater than I"; "The words that I say unto you I
speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me
doeth his works"; "I can of myself do nothing"; "He
that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on
him that sent me"-such Johannine sayings interpret
the habitual attitude of Jesus' life.¹ When men
praised him inordinately he resented it: "Why callest
thou me good? none is good save one, even God."
All his life was lived, his work done, his worries borne,
his temptations faced, in this spirit of humble, filial
dependence on God.
"12
With this assertion of Jesus' real humanity in the
Gospels most of us are familiar. But many are not
familiar with the further fact that the church through-
out its early history fought some of its most serious.
theological battles to maintain his real humanity
against those who doubted it. The central struggle
of the early church was not to get people to believe
in the divine origin of Jesus. Rather, after the church
achieved power and Jesus was exalted as Lord, cur-
rent philosophy made it comparatively easy to be-
lieve that he came from the supernal realm, that he
was the influx of the Divine into the world. It was
much more difficult then to believe that at the same
1 ¹ John 14:28; 14:10; 5:30; 12:44.
2 Mark 10:18.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
time he possessed a genuinely human life. The dif-
ference between the early centuries and our own in
this regard is sharp and clear. They started with the
certainty that Jesus came from the divine realm and
then wondered how he could be truly man; we start
from the certainty that he was genuinely man and
then wonder in what sense he can be God. Schmiedel
is one of the most radical of critics, and Sanday was
one of the most cautious and conservative of men,
yet Sanday quoted Schmiedel on this point with full
approval: "It is not for an instant doubtful that
Jesus must be considered as man in the full sense of
the term, and that anything divine may be sought in
him only under the condition that his humanity is
not put in question." This is the almost inevitable
attitude for any modern mind when it approaches the
personality of Jesus. But the approach through the
early centuries of classic theology was precisely the
opposite. Jesus was certainly the incarnation of God,
but his real humanity often seemed dubious.
It is the more remarkable, therefore, that the early
church so steadfastly maintained her insistence on the
reality of the Master's human nature and so fiercely
attacked and excommunicated those who doubted it.
The Gnostics asserted our Lord's deity, but they
thought he was not really man, and the church fought
the Gnostics tooth and nail for years and drove them
out. The Docetists, some of whom were Gnostics
and some not, did not doubt Jesus' deity; they as-
serted it so extremely that they destroyed his man-
hood, until in their theology he only seemed to be born,
1 William Sanday: Christologies Ancient and Modern, 209.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
257
seemed to possess flesh, to suffer, and to die. And the
church fought the Docetists and drove them out. The
climax of the church's effort to maintain its hold upon
the real humanity of Jesus despite the pressure of cur-
rent philosophy came with Apollinaris. Even a the-
ological student might be pardoned for supposing that
since this arch-heretic broke with orthodoxy over the
question of Jesus' person he must have denied Christ's
deity. On the contrary, he asserted it completely and
absolutely. He hated the Arians as much as Atha-
nasius could have desired. What he denied was that
Jesus had a human will and soul, and the church con-
demned him utterly and threw him out. When one
understands the tremendous pressure of contemporary
thought urging the church so to conceive Christ's
divine nature that he would not be man at all, one
cannot too much wonder and admire as he watches
these battles, long drawn out and valiantly fought,
in which the real humanity of Jesus steadfastly was
maintained.
There are some Protestants in our day, who pride
themselves on being orthodox, who need to take this
very much to heart. They take a phrase such as
"Jesus is God," not to be found either in the Scrip-
tures or the creeds, and set it up as a standard of reg-
ularity in doctrine. But to suppose that the phrase
'Jesus is God" is an adequate expression of the Chris-
tian faith even in its creedal forms is to display abys-
mal ignorance of what the church has stood for. That
statement alone is not orthodoxy; it is heresy. It
leaves out of account the unmistakable fact that Jesus
was also man.
66
258
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Jesus was man, and he must be God in what sense
he can be God being assuredly man.
IV
This approach to the Master's divinity by way of
his obvious and undoubted humanity, so far from be-
ing strange, is precisely the approach which the first
disciples made. We would better make it ourselves.
if we wish to understand the reality and power of their
experience when they found God in Christ. For the
divinity of Jesus was not primarily a doctrine; pri-
marily it was an experience. The disciples felt in him
something not of this world. They were sure about
his manhood, but it was manhood suffused and irra-
diated. It subdued them, awed them, fascinated, and
mastered them. The glory of their lives came to be
that they had known him, loved him, believed in him.
They did not start by believing in opinions about him,
doctrines concerning him; they started by believing
in him. The objective of their faith was not a theory;
it was his personality, his life.
" 1
They found it impossible, however, thus to believe
in him without believing in something more. When
the Fourth Gospel reported Jesus as saying, "He that
believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that
sent me,
a vital and prevalent experience of the
early Christians with their Master was summed up.
His life always had a reference beyond itself; it always
seemed revelatory of a reality behind him as well as
in him.
1 John 12:44.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
259
One
There are two sorts of greatness among men.
was illustrated in Napoleon. In many gifts of per-
sonal power and genius he deserves to be called great,
but his life had no reference beyond itself; he did not
stand for nor reveal abiding truths; he was a huge,
isolated monolith thrust up out of humanity represent-
ing little that mankind finds it possible to love. Think
of Copernicus, however, and you think not so much
of Copernicus as of the permanent truth which he
discovered to the world. Think of Faraday and your
thought cannot dwell on Faraday alone; it inevitably
goes on to dwell upon the universal force which he
unveiled. The significance of such men lies in some-
thing which they revealed, into which we can enter
now and by which our lives can be enlarged. Such,
in the higher realm of spiritual life, was the effect of
Jesus on his first disciples. Their thought started
with him as an individual but it never could stop there;
it went through him and beyond him to the spiritual
realities for which he stood, the relationship with
God which he illustrated, the divine world to which
he was the way and the door. There was nothing
artificial about this. It was so truly the natural,
spontaneous effect of Jesus' personality on his fol-
lowers that I do not see how any one can know him in
the Gospels even yet and not reduplicate their ex-
perience.
This spiritual quality in Jesus that so differentiates
him from the rest of us and makes him the supreme.
revealer of spiritual life faces us with a dilemma. We
can do one of two things with it: we can conceive it
to be an accident or a revelation. So a man may
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
handle pieces of metal until for the first time he finds
magnetized iron. Something new is there. A strange
and powerful element has come into his ken. What is
it? It may be an accident; it may signify nothing at
all beyond its own mysterious uniqueness. But, on
the other hand, it may be a revelation-the discovery
of a universal force everywhere available and belong-
ing to the substance of creation.
So the first Christians faced the Master, and alike
their own immediate impression of his personality
and their later reflections on it convinced them that
his unique and glorious life was not an accident. Do
we think that it was? That differential quality in
Jesus is the most impressive spiritual fact that this
earth has seen. It is the best we know. It is the
fairest production that the race has to show for its
millenniums of travail. It has made more difference
to the spiritual life of men than anything besides. To
call it an accident seems to me the most irrational
thing that could be said about it. It is a revelation
of creative reality.
Those first Christians, therefore, went out into the
Roman Empire with an ardent and convinced asser-
tion, not simply that they had found the ideal life,
but that they had found the God from whom it came.
When they tried to put their conviction into intel-
ligible and conveyable form they used such categories
as they had at hand-in particular, the idea of the
Logos was convenient and congenial—but behind all
such contemporary formulations of their message was
their basic experience.. God had welled up among
them. God could come, had come, into human life,
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
261
:
and they had seen "the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." At their
best they went out to strive for the ideals of Jesus, not
thinking that those ideals were interloping after-
thoughts in an unfriendly universe, but crying tri-
umphantly, "In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God."
V
This Gospel of God revealed in Christ, released
from literal bondage to old categories and set free to
do its work in modern terms of thought and speech,
ought to be the central affirmation of our preaching.
So far from being a labored, speculative matter, to
one who has a spiritual interpretation of life it ought
to be a spontaneous and glad expression of his faith.
We are wrong when we make belief in the divinity of
Jesus a technical, philosophical affair. The men of
the New Testament were not primarily philosophers,
metaphysicians, theologians. They were primarily
men of profound religious life endeavoring to get their
vital experiences conveyed to others in such terms as
were at hand. I believe that they would have agreed
with George Eliot's Adam Bede: "I look at it as if the
doctrine was like finding names for your feelings.'
""
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus was thus the (?) ched
expression in current terms of the central experience
of the Christian life-finding God in Christ. The
divinity of Jesus is not something first of all to be
treated as a formula; it is something first of all to be
vitally discovered, experienced, and lived upon.
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
In many minds this experimental approach to the
divinity of the Master is impeded and embarrassed
by the complicated theological developments which
have taken place between the New Testament and
our own day. The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed,
the Athanasian Creed, are taken as intellectual norms
of true belief, and, failing to understand their terms
or to believe them when understood, men suppose
that they have surrendered the substantial truth
which lies behind them. This is the nemesis of all
creedalism: the creeds are promulgated to protect
faith, and then, their forms of thinking being at last
overpassed, insistence on them becomes the ruination
of faith.
Nevertheless, it is a pity that even in churches
which are not bound to these ecclesiastical creeds of
the patristic age, we cannot have a better under-
standing of what they really meant to say. Personally
brought up in an ecclesiastical tradition which has
not used these venerable expressions, I have never
subscribed to them nor repeated them. But, stand-
ing thus outside the tradition to which these creeds
belong, when I hear some fresh and flippant modern.
mind condescending to them, treating the fathers who
wrote them as quibblers and fools, I am strongly
tempted to bear a hand in their defense.
The Nicene Creed, for example, the noblest of them
all, faced a serious problem and handled it in a large
way. Still the church was dealing with the old
Greek thought which tore God and man apart and
left them disparate and unrelated. That chasm be-
tween deity and man the idea of the Logos once had
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
263
bridged. But still the chasm was there and in many
Christian minds had its disastrous effect upon the inter-
pretation of Jesus. So far off was God from man that
it was easier to think that Jesus was some superior
angel, some demigod from heaven, than to suppose
that in him men could find the very being and quality ·
of God himself; or, on the other side, if he were the
influx of God himself, then he could not have been
real man, but only a fantom in appearance like a man.
So the unstable thought of the church wavered back
and forth. Now this horn of the dilemma, now that,
was favored, as the Greek inheritance separating God
from man made it desperately difficult to believe in
the essential affinity of God with man. And to save
her very life the church fought all compromise on this
crucial question, and in the Nicene Creed made a
resounding declaration that "very God of very God"
had come into human life. Of course, they made this
declaration in terms of current philosophy. What else
could they do? It never would occur to me to use the
Nicene Creed as the natural expression of my faith,
but the crux of the matter at which the Nicene Creed
was driving is my faith. If the church ever loses it the
church will have denatured the Gospel. For Chris-
tianity is the religion of incarnation and its central
affirmation is that God can come into human life.
This truth may readily be translated into present-
day terms because we moderns find it easier to con-
ceive than the Nicene fathers did. When they as-
serted that God in Christ came into human life they
were struggling against a philosophy that tore God
and man apart. Arius said that God was so utterly
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MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
transcendent and aloof that he was inscrutable to his
own Son. When, therefore, Athanasius against Arius
struggled for the Nicene theology, with "very God
of very God" incarnate in Christ, he was endeavoring
to bridge a chasm that to many seemed unbridgeable.
With us, however, the most prevalent and character-
istic way of thinking we have had since the middle of
the nineteenth century involves the immanence of
God and his immediate presence in our lives and in
his world. Our poets and prophets for years have
been singing and preaching to us that, wherever else
God is, he is here. After the sterile frigidity of
eighteenth-century deism which put God in exile far
from the interests and affairs of men, there came in
the nineteenth century a renaissance of life and
thought whose most typical intellectual expression
is the doctrine of the immanence of God. This up-
welling of reliance on and joy in an indwelling, spiri-
tual presence, this rebirth of confidence in the rights
of immediate experience to be considered a revelation
of eternal reality, was so wide-spread, so deep-seated,
so truly a Zeitgeist that no realm of thought and life
in the nineteenth century escaped it. The Romantic
revival in literature is one expression; the typical
theology of Schleiermacher, making the inner emo-
tion of dependence on God the essence of religion, is
another; monism in philosophy, in all its forms, as
against the preceding deism, springs from the same
source; and in evangelical Christianity the fresh in-
sistence on the Holy Spirit as the agent of regenera-
tion reveals the same drift. Divine immanence, as
Dr. McGiffert says, has often been called the char-
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
265
acteristic religious doctrine of the nineteenth cen-
tury.¹
The poets sing it. Says Mrs. Browning:
"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes." 2
Prophets proclaim it. Says Carlyle:
"Or what is Nature? Ha! why do I not name
thee God? Art not thou the 'Living Garment of
God?' O Heavens, is it, in very deed, He, then,
that ever speaks through thee; that lives and
loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?" 3
Even scientists assert it. Says Sir Oliver Lodge:
"We are no aliens in a stranger universe gov-
erned by an outside God; we are parts of a de-
veloping whole, all enfolded in an embracing and
interpenetrating love, of which we too, each to
other, sometimes experience the joy too deep for
words." 4
Long since, preachers have resorted to it. Says John
Herman Randall:
"The relation of this Infinite Power, or God, to
the universe, is the same as the relation of man's
¹ Arthur Cushman McGiffert: The Rise of Modern Religious
Ideas, 189.
2 Aurora Leigh, Book VII, p. 275 of Author's Edition, 1857.
³ Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, Book II, Ch. IX, p. 150 of
Centenary Edition.
4 Suggestions Towards the Re-Interpretation of Christian Doctrine,
in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. II, 475 (July, 1904).
266
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
soul to his body. The universe as we see it is
God's body; then God is the soul of the universe,
just as you are the soul of your body. Can you
lay your finger on yourself? Is your hand, you?
Is your foot, you? Is your brain, you? Where
are you? Can anyone localize you in your
body? You pervade your body through and
through . . . You are immanent in your body.
There is not one atom of your body where you
are not-but still, you are not your body." 1
Hymnologists are giving it wings in song:
"Thou Life within my life, than self more near!
Thou veiled Presence, infinitely clear!
From all illusive shows of sense I flee
To find my center and my rest in Thee." 2
And the theologians themselves no longer can escape
it. Says Professor H. R. Mackintosh:
"One true mode of describing Christ, ac-
cordingly, is to speak of His person as represent-
ing the absolute immanence of God." 3
Wherever you look at the underlying presuppositions
of men's thinking about God to-day you find, not the
old dualism against which the ancient church had so
long and fierce a conflict, but a gladly recognized
affinity between God and man. In our theology no
longer are the divine and human like oil and water
that cannot mix; rather, all the best in us is God in
1 The Real God, 26-27, sermon, The Universal Mind.
2 Eliza Scudder.
3 The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 434.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
267
us.
This makes faith in the divine Christ infinitely
easier than it was under the old régime. One takes
up the Westminster Confession and reads a passage
like this about Christ: "Two whole, perfect, and
distinct, natures, the Godhead and the manhood,
were inseparably joined together in one person, with-
out conversion, composition, or confusion." 1 But
that metaphysical puzzle, which Dante put in pic-
turesque form when he portrayed Christ as a griffin²
a single creature, composed of an eagle and a lion—
is utterly unreal to our thinking, not because what
the Westminster Confession was driving at is not
true, but because the background of abysmal distance
between the divine and the human which the Con-
fession had perforce to bridge, is no longer in our
minds. The presupposition of all our thinking is the
conviction, not that there is a vast distance between
God and man, but that God and man belong together
and in each other are fulfilled.
This modern mode of thinking accords with the
Christian experience of the New Testament. Where
is God in the New Testament? "In him we live,
and move, and have our being"; 3 "God is love; and he
that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth
in him"; 4 "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?"5 "Pre-
cious and exceeding great promises; that through these
ye may become partakers of the divine nature; "6
¹ Ch. VIII, Sec. II.
2 E. g., Purgatory, Canto XXIX, vv. 108–115.
3 Acts 17:28.
5 I Corinthians 3:16.
4 I John 4:16.
6 II Peter 1:4.
268
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man
hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to
him, and will sup with him, and he with me." 1 In
the New Testament Christianity is a religion of in-
carnation and its central affirmation is that God has
come and can come into human life. When, therefore,
the Christians of the New Testament rose up with joy
to say that they had found God in Christ, their state-
ment was no tangled, speculative, philosophical matter;
it was the glad, spontaneous expression of their relig-
ious experience. If we should regain their vital discov-
ery of God in Christ, should interpret it, as we have
a right to do, in terms of our thought of divine im-
manence the modern counterpart of the Logos
doctrine without the antecedent difficulties which the
Logos doctrine had to meet-we could make the
divinity of Christ once more, not a dry formula, but
a living and experienceable reality. Let us refuse to
see Christianity reduced to terms lower than that!
God is a living God, not far off, but here; he can come
into human life and in the face of Christ we have
seen the effulgence of his glory.
We need not quibble, either, about a supposed
difference that is not really there between his deity
and his divinity. That distinction rests back on the
old endeavor to think of God in terms of metaphysical
Substance, Pure Being, conceived apart from spiritual
quality, and then to define Christ's relations with him
in the same terms-an endeavor useless for religion
and properly outlawed from good philosophy. In
everything that matters to our spiritual life, very God
1 Revelation 3:20,
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
269
came to us in Christ. To be sure, nobody should ever
go to Jesus, to his manger and his Cross, to find the
omnipotence which swings Orion and the Pleiades.
Omnipotence in that sense is not revealed there. No-
body in his senses ever went to Jesus for the latest
news in physics or astronomy. Omniscience in that
sense is not revealed there. "He that hath seen me
hath seen the Father"-such was the Master's state-
ment of the truth. That side of God-character,
purpose, redeeming love-we do find incarnate in
Christ.
VI
Such an approach to the divinity of Jesus makes
him as he is in the New Testament, not only unique.
but imitable, keeps him not only our Lord but our
brother. Too often the deity of Jesus has been so
presented as to separate him utterly from man until
his injunction, "Follow me," has lost all meaning.
Devotees of his ethical ideals who could not share the
church's faith in his divinity have said: if he was the
incarnation of God, that puts him at a distance from
us impossible to cross, but think of him as a good man
and we can aspire to be like him. I never heard an
argument that seemed so to stand the truth upon its
head. Jesus was, indeed, an extraordinarily good
man. As Sidney Lanier sings,
"What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,—
:
?
270
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
wiity
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?" 1
Jesus was a marvelously good man. His goodness was
about the only thing he had with which to make his
impress on the world-no wealth, no prestige, no
worldly learning, nothing but his goodness-and
every year that goodness looms so much the higher
that there are millions of us who are sure that its chief
influence lies, not behind, but ahead. Indeed, he was
so marvelously good that one wonders how, being a
good man like that, we can cheerfully and hopefully
set out to imitate him? A sick man in a hospital,
surrounded by other sick men, hearing an athlete,
perfect in physique, calling others to imitate him, would
not be stimulated; he would be discouraged. So may
we well be if Jesus, calling us to follow him, be only
a good man.
If, however, that is not all the truth, if, not simply
a good man, it was God in him who created his quality,
and if the same God is seeking entrance to our lives,
trying to live out in us, according to our degree and
capacity, the same spirit, then we may hope. Let us
say it abruptly: it is not so much the humanity of Jesus
that makes him imitable as it is his divinity. If he be
only a good man, he is an isolated phenomenon, like
Shakspere or Napoleon in other realms. How can
we, pulling on our own bootstraps, set out to lift
ourselves by imitation to the likeness of such? But
if Jesus is divine and if divinity hedges us all about
like the vital forces which in winter wait underneath
the frozen ground until the spring comes, that is a
¹ The Crystal, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier, 32.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
271
gospel! Then the incarnation in Christ is the prophecy
and hope of God's indwelling in every one of us.
Such is the Gospel of the New Testament about
Jesus and his relationship with our lives. He is not
an isolated phenomenon-he is "the first born among
many brethren;" 1 "Now are we children of God, and
it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We
know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like
him "; 2 "till we all attain unto the unity of the faith,
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-
grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful-
ness of Christ."3 Even in a lofty Johannine passage
where Jesus says that he is in the Father and the
Father in him, he also prays "that they may all be one;
even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that
they also may be in us." 4
This is the reason why the New Testament is so full
of hope about redeemed humanity. Not alone because
Jesus was human, but because Jesus was divine, the
revelation of the living God who seeks to be incarnate
in every one of us, does the whole Book vibrate with
expectancy. If one says that we cannot hope to be
fully equal to him here, that is painfully obvious. As
Emerson said, "A drop of water has the properties of
the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. So we reveal
God without the deeps and tides and currents which
Jesus knew, without the relations with the world's life.
which his influence has sustained. He is unique.
"25
"No mortal can with him compare,
1 Romans 8:29.
4 John 17:21.
Among the sons of men."
2 I John 3:2.
3 Ephesians 4:13.
5 Representative Men, 100 (Swedenborg).
272
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
Yet the God who was in Jesus is the same God who
is in us. You cannot have one God and two kinds of
divinity. While like drops of water we are very small
beside his sea, yet it was one of the supreme days in
man's spiritual history when the New Testament
started men singing that they were "children of God:
and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-
heirs with Christ."
Of all foolish things, I can think of nothing more
foolish than, looking back over our race's history and
discerning amid its tragedy and struggle this out-
standing figure spiritually supreme, to minimize him,
to tone down our thought of him, to reduce him so that
we can all be like him. Rather let us exalt him! If
God be not in him, God is not anywhere. The best
hope of mankind is that the living God is in him and
through him may flow down through all the secret
runnels of the race.
Here, then, ends our study where any study of the
Bible ought to bring us, standing in reverence before
our Lord. For the message of the Book is summed up
in Christ. The Book as a whole is best described as
the record of the historic preparation for Christ, the
earthly ministry of Christ, and the first impacts of
Christ's personality and teaching on the lives of those
who welcomed him. Nor have the modern uses of the
Bible dimmed this fact. They rather have illumined
it. From them have come, not simply intellectual
liberation from an old literalism, but incalculable
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD
273
spiritual enrichment as well through a quickened and
clarified knowledge of Christ.
Let me bear a personal testimony as my closing
word. From naive acceptance of the Bible as of equal
credibility in all its parts because mechanically iner-
rant, I passed years ago to the shocking conviction
that such traditional bibliolatry is false in fact and
perilous in result. I saw with growing clearness that
the Bible must be allowed to say in terms of the genera-
tions when its books were written what its words in
their historic sense actually meant, and I saw that >
often this historic sense was not modern sense at all
and never could be. There, like others, I have stood.
bewildered at the new and unaccustomed aspect of the
Book. But that valley of confusion soon was passed.
I saw that the new methods of study were giving far
more than they were taking away. They have re-
stored to us the historic Christ. They have led us to
the abiding, reproducible experiences of the soul
revealed through him. They have given us his im-
perishable Gospel freed from its entanglements, the
Shekinah distinguished from the shrine, to be preached
with a liberty, a reasonableness, an immediate applica-
tion to our own age such as no generation of preachers
in the church's history ever had the privilege of know-
ing before. Have no fear of the new truth! Let us
fear only our own lack of wisdom, insight, courage,
and spiritual power in using it for the redemption of
the souls and societies of men.
No more than a
glonfeed rand,
274
MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christologies Ancient and Modern, William Sanday. Oxford
University Press, American Branch.
The Early Christian Conception of Christ, Otto Pfleiderer.
Putnam.
The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, H. R. Mackintosh.
Scribner's.
Modern Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel, Ch. V,
The Deity of Christ in the Light of Modern Thought,
William Adams Brown. Scribner's.
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
GENESIS
EXODUS (cont.)
CHAPTER
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
10-11, 56, 60, 178
7-10
150
I
I:I
12, 27, 47, 51-53
7:12
53
178
7:20-11 and 12:29-31
163
1:3-5, 1:16-19
35
14:21
137
1:6
35
17:10
42
1:6-8
46
19:16
16
I:7
46
20:5
17
1:14-18
46
20:19
16
1:26
9
20:19-21
19
2:8
27-28
20:24
16, 42
2:8-9
74
21:7-11
72-73
2:8-14
77-78, 80
21:23-25
92
2:21-23
3:1-5
27, 89
22:18
239
89
23:19
42
3:8
22, 123
24:10
35
3:15
84
25:10-22
42
4:17
27
25:40
89
5:24
99
28:30
42
6:13-8:19
82
32:15-16
89
6:2-4
118
33:18-23
74, 89
7:11
46
36:8-39:31
74
7:14-15
89
40:38
16
8:22
134
LEVITICUS
11:1-9
22
21
16:1-6
75
I-7
89
16:7, 13
123
2:4-7
76
17:14
75
II
42, 92
18:1-2
9
16:4
42
19:30-38
75
16:10
118
24:67
55
24:9
92
29:21-30
31:11, 13
35:4
35:25-26
37-47
75
NUMBERS
123
21
42
5:11-31
43
75
20:11
150
19 25:7
20
EXODUS
DEUTERONOMY
3:1
3-12
4:24-26
166
99996
14
5:17
23
15
14:21
23
275
276
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
DEUTERONOMY (cont.)
II KINGS (cont.)
CHAPTER
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
24:1-2
92
6:5-7
35, 53, 136, 149, 163
25:4
73
6:18
149
32:17
118
9:24-26
17
9:35
23, 24
JOSHUA
13:21
34, 149
3:15-17
150
20:11
34, 149
6:20
150, 163
7
I CHRONICLES
17
10:12-14 34, 50, 150, 163, 181
21:1
119
21:1-14
23
JUDGES
13:2-25
87
ESTHER
13:5, 16:17
89
1:1-9
I SAMUEL
1:9-22
86
15
2:5-6
88888
86
86
86
3
166
3:6
86
15:3
14, 89
9
26
15:22
14
JOB
21:1-6
92
23, 56
II SAMUEL
1:6-12
119
I-7, 9-20
150
2:1-7
119
II:2-4, 27
23
5:9-11
137
26:6
26
21:1-9
17
26:7
46
I KINGS
26:11
46
I-2
150
37:18
35, 46
3:2
16, 42
PSALMS
II:7-10
13
17:6
149 3
17:8-16
149 3:5
88
87-88
17:17-24
149
4:6
250
18:38
149
19:1
63
23
19
II KINGS
23:1
178
1:9-12
149
24:1-2
46
2:7-8
149
34:7
126
2:11
35, 99, 149
39:13
26
2:13-14
149
45:6
87
2:23-24
149, 163, 181
67:6-7
9
4:1-7
149
73
26
4:18-37
149
78:23
46
4:42-44
5:1-14
149
88:12
26
149
91:11-12
126
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
277
PSALMS (cont.)
JEREMIAH (cont.)
CHAPTER
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
93:1
46
18:1-8
138
94:17
26
22:4
213
104:2
46
23:6
87
104:3
46
31:32
171
104:5
46
EZEKIEL
106:37-38
118
107:17-21
137
149
108:9
18
18
123
136:6
35, 46
DANIEL
137:4
137:8-9
61
ΙΟ
124
26
12:2
100
139
179
139:7-10
18
HOSEA
148:4
46
21, 149, 171
148:6
134
6:6
92
PROVERBS
AMOS
21
8
ΙΟ
149
I:I
21
ECCLESIASTES
5:24
179
26
3:19
25
JONAH
9:4-6
25
15
1:17
137, 181
SONG OF SONGS
1:17-2:10
163
71
ZECHARIAH
6:6
79
3:1-2
119
ISAIAH
MATTHEW
19
9:6
87
146
II:12
35
1:1-16
214
14:9-11
19:25
46
2:1-10
49-50, 147
15
2:13
124
26:19
ΙΟΟ
4:1
121
40:22
53
53:11
46
4:11
124
23
5-7
8, 19, 27, 92-93, 94, 180
104
5:3
107
55:8
36
5:8
57
63:8-9
126
5:9
245
66:13
171
5:17
24
5:21, 22
27
JEREMIAH
5:23-24
194
21, 40, 148-149
5:38-39
92
16:19
18
5:43-48
228
278
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
MATTHEW (cont.)
MATTHEW (cont.)
CHAPTER
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
6:6
16, 57, 128, 180
27:51-54
147
6:9
171
27:52-53
6:15
195
28:2-3
34, 181
124
6:30
221
MARK
7:9
221
7:12
228, 245
146, 147
7:20-21
195
I:10
148
8:10
253
I:34
148
8:11
15, 108
1:35
255
8:28-34
147
2:21
221
9:13
92
2:25-26
92
9:27
214
2:27
92
9:32
35
3:1-5
197, 254
10:23
214
3:21
210
10:29
221
4:36-41
137
10:39
228
5:1-20
147
II:28
179
5:13
53
12:7
92
5:22-23
148
12:22
35
6:6
253
12:23
214
6:34
253-254
12:24
137
6:45-51
13:44
108
7:1-8
13:45-46
108
7:4
14:22-33
147
14:23
255
7:11-12
7:15-23
137, 147, 164
107
199-200
200
92
15:1-9, 13
QI
8:31
214
16:18
22
9:17
148
16:23
122
9:25
35
16:26
198
10:2-12
92
16:27
124
10:14
107
17:15, 18
35 10:18
255
17:27
164
10:46-52
147
18:12-13
221
10:47
214
18:14
244
II:12
253
19:16-22
193
11:12-14, 20–21
147
20:29-34
147
II:17
254
21:9
214
11:25
194
21:18-19
147, 164
12:30
228
21:28-31
194
12:34
107
22:42
214
14:34
254
23:8
204, 244
14:47
147
23:16
199
14:61-62
214
23:18
200
15:34
254
23:37
221
15:37
253
26:53
124, 126
15:38
147
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
279
LUKE
CHAPTER
JOHN (cont.)
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
147
1:9
216
1:26-35
2:9-14
147
1:12
200
147
1:14
187, 252
2:52
253, 254
1:43
269
2:13
124
2:1-11
148
3:23-38
214
3:1-3
194
3:22
148
3:8
221
4:17-19
197
3:16
204
4:40
148
4:6
253
5:1-11
164
4:7-24
194
6:12
255
4:20
200
6:46
244
4:24
19
8:27, 35
35
5:4
53
8:35
137
5:6
198
8:41-42
148
5:30
255
9:29
254-255
8:3-11
193
9:38
148
8:44
122
9:58
221
9:1-7
148
10:25-37
193
IO:10
199
10:30-35
81-82, 228
11:1-44
148
II:20
107
12:21
212
11:27-28
194 12:44
255, 258
12:15
198
14:9
269
12:22-34
228
14:10
255
13:18-19
108
14:15
195
13:20-21
108
14:19-23
109
13:21
221
14:28
255
13:29
15, 108
15:14
195
14:23
239 17:21
271
15:10
126
17:37
221
17:21
107
19:28
253
18:18-24
193
20:26
164
19:1-10
193
20:27-28
164
19:30-35
19:41
20: 46-47
22:3
76
ACTS
254
2:1-4
166
254
3:1-8
146
122
4:22
146
22: 43
22:44
I24
5:15-16
146
253, 255
5:19
124
22:51
24:42-43
147
8:26-40
146
164
9:1-9
166
9:39-41
146
JOHN
101, 108-109, 120, 148, 218, 243
12:7
124
12:10
146
I:I
252, 261
16:10
146
280
INDEX OF BIBLE REFERENCES
.
ACTS (cont.)
GALATIANS
CHAPTER
PAGE
CHAPTER
PAGE
16:10-17
145
3:5
145
17:22-31
42
4:21-31
73
17:28
20:5-15
20:9-12
21:1-18
27-29: 16
28:3-6
28:8
22, 267
EPHESIANS
145
146
3:16
176
145
4:13
225, 271
145
4:31
57
146
146
PHILIPPIANS
1:21
179
ROMANS
37
I THESSALONIANS
2:7
103
4:13-17
109
8:17
225
8:29
271
PHILEMON
II:24
135
20
15:19
145
HEBREWS
I CORINTHIANS
243
3:9
IIO
II-2
8, 31
3:16
22, 267
1:3
252
9:9-14
73
2:4
145
10:4
73
12:22
124
12:8-11
145
12:28-29
145
II PETER
13
19
1:4
267
15:35-38
ΙΟΙ
15:50
99
I JOHN
15:53-55
25
2:15
97
II CORINTHIANS
3:2
225, 271
4:16
57, 267
3:18
202
4:6
187, 252, 261
JUDE
5:1
59
Vs:.9
125
5:4
102
REVELATION
5:17
179
5:19
252
10, 60, 101, 109, 178
11:14
122
3:20
11:31
181, 224
5:11
13:14
189
21:2
268
124
53
GENERAL INDEX
Abbott, Edwin A., 144.
Abraham, 9, 73, 75.
Acts, 145-146.
Akiba, Rabbi, 71.
Allegory, New Testament found in
Old by, 9; things not liked dis-
posed of by, 28; prevalent in time
of first great exegetes, 37; Ch. III,
The Ancient Solution, 65-96.
Amos, 21, 149.
Angelology, angelic visitations, 43;
angels stir water of wells, 53;
Tertullian on, 112-113; apostro-
phized in Te Deums, 220; Ch.
IV, section on angelology, 123-
129; result if angelology had been
controlling element in Scripture,
173.
Angels, evil, fallen, see Demonol-
ogy.
Animistic view of the world, 133-
134.
Anselm's interpretation of the
Cross, 230.
Anthropomorphism, 28, 66, 74.
Antipodes, attitude of Lactantius
and Plutarch toward, 47-48.
Apocalyptic, causing trouble to
many, 5; not modern category,
45, 169; replaced in John's
Gospel by eternal life, 101; illus-
tration of abiding experiences in
changing categories, Ch. IV,
Sec. II, 104-110; Jesus relation-
ship to, 106-108, 214, 226–229.
See Second Coming of Christ.
Apostles' Creed, see Creed.
Appreciation versus criticism, Ch.
VI, Sec. II, 174-182.
Archeology, 7, 37, 41, 219.
Ark, holy, 16, 42.
Ark, Noah's, 82, 89.
Arnold,
212, 240.
Mathew, quoted, 106,
Arnold, T., 81.
Ascension, 99, 109, 149.
Asshurbanipal, library of, 41.
Assyria, 15, 38, 105.
Astrology, 49-50.
Astronomy, 34-35, Ch. II, Sec.
III, 45-54, 58, 211, 269.
Athanasian Creed, see Creed.
Athanasius, 10, 257, 264.
Atonement, 229–231. See Cross.
Aytoun, R. A., 31.
Azazel, wilderness demon, 118.
Babylonian, creation tablets, 52-
53; psalm, 236.
Bacon, Benjamin W., 96.
Badé, William F., 64.
Balfour, Sir Arthur, quoted, 90.
Barton, George A., 64, 130.
Baruch, Jeremiah's biographer, 148–
149.
Basil of Cæsarea, quoted, 48.
Beelzebub, 137. See Devil.
Bellamy, Edward, object in writing
Looking Backward, 227.
Bethlehem, star of, Chrysostom's
effort to dissociate from astrology,
49-50.
Bewer, Julius, 7, 31.
Bible, the preacher's problem, 1-2;
necessity of dealing with it, 3-6;
first effect of modern study on it,
6-8; a new approach to it, 8 seq.;
development of thought in it,
12 seq.; four ways to know it, 19
seq.; results of new approach to it
281
282
GENERAL INDEX
24 seq.; second effect of modern
study of it, 33 seq.; seeking orig-
inal meaning of texts, 36 seq.;
converging effect of various schol-
arly disciplines on it, 38 seq.;
the resulting conflict, 43 seq.;
cosmogony and cosmology in it,
46 seq.; permanent elements in it,
56 seq.; allegorical interpretation
of it, Ch. III, 65-96; outgrown
categories in it, Ch. IV, 97–129;
idea of miracle in it, 136 seq.;
miracle stories in it, 145 seq.,
162 seq.; perils in modern attitude
toward it, Ch. VI, 169-206;
interpretation of Jesus in it, Chs.
VII and VIII, 208-273. See Old
Testament; New Testament; In-
errancy of Scripture.
Biography, in Bible, 20-22.
Blau, Ludwig, 130.
Blindness, ascribed to demons, 35,
120; cured in Bible, 147, 148.
Bousset, W., 241.
Bowen, Clayton R., 168.
Box, G. H., 168.
Brewster, E. T., 51, 64; quoted,
53-54.
Briggs, Charles A., 96.
Brooks, Phillips, 187.
Brotherhood, 15, 58, 244, 245.
Brown, William Adams, 130, 167,
168, 206, 274; quoted, 157.
Browning, Elizabeth
quoted, 138, 265.
Browning, Robert, 211, 225.
Bruce, A. B., 241.
Barrett,
Buddha, Gautama, 208.
Bunyan, John, 114-115.
Burkitt, F. Crawford, quoted, 208.
Burns, Robert, 115.
Butler, Samuel, 205.
Calvin, John, great exegete, 8, 9;
strength of his work, 37; quoted
on idea of interpreter's task, 37;
hostile to allegory, 83-84; con-
sidered a heretic, 84-85; most
successful in practising Reforma-
tion principle, 85; his use of pas-
sages in both Testaments to prove
deity of Christ, 87; influence of
his literalism, 88-89; Reformed
Churches coming up from him,
201; endeavoring a theocracy in
Geneva, 238.
Campbell, R. J., quoted, 126–127.
Canney, Maurice A., 137.
Canticles, see Song of Songs.
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 265.
Caroli, 84.
Case, Shirley J., 241.
Celsus, III.
Ceremonialism, 23, 92 186, 197,
199, 226.
Charles, R. H., 130.
Chemosh, 13.
Cheyne, T. K., 21.
Child labor, 203, 244.
Christ, references to him found in
Old Testament, 9-10; climax of
Biblical development, 28, 30; his
timelessness, 57; allegories of him,
73, 78; proof-texts concerning
him, 87-88; his method of Scrip-
tural interpretation, 91-94; his
attitude toward the kingdom, 106
seq.; his angelology, 128; his
attitude toward miracles, 156;
his ideal of prayer, 180; his divin-
ity, 187 seq.; his ethical emphasis,
192 seq.; his major purpose, 196
seq.; his conflict with popular
religion, 197 seq.; his interest in
health, 198; his interest in eco-
nomic conditions, 198-199; his re-
lationship with war, 204; his
Messiahship, Ch. VII, 208-240;
his historicity, 210-212; the inter-
pretation of him in Scriptural
categories, 212-218; recovery of
his historic figure, 219-221; his
contributions to human life, 222-
GENERAL INDEX
283
232; an anti-legalist, 237; the
exemplar of righteousness, 240;
the interpretation of him as
Logos, Ch. VIII, 242-273; op-
position to theological constru-
ing of him, 243-245; reasons for
validity of interest in Logos inter-
pretation of him, 245-251; his
humanity, 253-258; meaning of
his divinity, 252-253, 258-272;
the central significance of Scrip-
ture found in him, 272-273. See
Saviorhood; Atonement.
Christianity, its essential continuum
abiding experiences not changing
categories, Ch. IV, 97-130, Ch.
V, Sec. I, 169-174; two concep-
tions of Christianity, 102-103;
modern Christianity's world-view,
158-162; the spirit of Jesus essen-
tial to it, 195-196; revolutionary
consequences of, 202-206; re-
garded as a bloodspilling religion,
204-205; Christianity and Christ,
208-209; Christianity's triumphs,
229; Christianity regarded as a
lie, 247; the religion of incarna-
tion, 263.
Chrysostom, J., 36, 49–50.
Church, controversies in, 4 (see
Controversy); puzzled attend-
ant at, 33-34; early church's
catholicity, 42; youth alienated
from, 61; its use of new forces, 62-
63; allegory of it, 78–79; question
facing Christian church, 101; two
parties in it, 102-103; its problem
with miracles, 132; medieval
church and miracles, 140; dan-
gerous position of Christian
church on miracles in eighteenth
century, 154; church's mistaken
attitude to-day; 156; religious
life of Christian church, 180-181;
Christian church facing new ideas,
185; the denominations, 201;
church and war, 204-205; test of
church, 205-206; first creed of
church, 218; church depending on
texts, 237; church and the taking
of interest, 238-239; women's
speaking in church, 238; Christo-
logical controversies in it, 253,
255-258.
Cicero, 67.
Circumcision, 16, 42–43, 186.
Clarke, William Newton, 32, 64,
206; quoted, 2.
Clement of Alexandria, 42, 77.
Clifford, quoted, 186.
Coffin, Henry Sloane, 206; quoted,
252.
Common Law, 3.
Comparative religion, 41-43.
Constantine, 153.
Controversy, 4, 102-103, 182, 185,
253, 255-258.
Copernicus, 50, 51, 56, 259.
Cosmic order, development of idea
of, 138-141.
Cosmology, Biblical, ecclesiastical,
and modern, Ch. II, Sec. III,
45-54.
Creed, Apostles', 98, 184, 262;
Athanasian, 84, 262; Nicene, 90,
184, 187, 191, 262, 263, 264.
Creelman, Harlan, 7, 31.
Cromwell, 19, 238.
Cross, 22, 23, 202, 204, 221, 222,
226, 230, 231, 235, 269.
Crump, C. G., quoted, 55.
Cumont, 39.
Daniel, the book of, 100, 124.
Dante, 267.
Darwin, 247.
Darwinism, 247–248.
David, 23, 150, 214.
Day of Judgment, 98, 100, 101, 102,
106-109. See Apocalyptic.
Deafness, ascribed to demons, 35,
I 20.
Deification, 217.
Deism, 264.
284
GENERAL INDEX
Deity of Jesus, see Divinity of Jesus.
Democracy, 44, 45.
Demonology, Biblical category, 5;
familiar ailments ascribed to, 35;
demonic visitations familiar in
man's early religious life, 43; in
Semitic thought view, 44-45;
in modern thought, 45; interpre-
tation of "foreign people" in
allegorization of a Jewish law, 73;
no longer used in ordinary life, 89;
Ch. IV, Section III, on Demonol-
ogy, III-122; disbelief in visita-
tion of, 129; animistic idea of
miracles, 133; healing of demo-
niac, 147; demoniac boy, 148; re-
jection of demonology, 169; re-
sult if demonology had been con-
trolling element in Scripture, 173.
See Devil.
Determinism, 160.
Deuteronomy, ethics of, 14.
Devil, Calvin attributes allegory
to the, 83; development of idea,
118 seq.; chief of demonic host,
119; Tertullian's reference, 112;
in early drama, 115; rebellion of,
120; works miracles, 137; Protes-
tants attribute church miracles
to him, 152; in Paradise Lost,
173; atonement explained as fraud
on him, 230. See Demonology.
Divinity of Jesus, 187 seq., 252–253;
258-272.
Dobschütz, Ernst von, 130.
Docetists, 256–257.
Doctrine, of Trinity found in Old
Testament, 9; identity of doc-
trine supposed to be in Bible,
10, 30, 90; of devils, 116, 119;
doctrine and life, 184-191, 208–
209; need of doctrine, 189-191,
209; doctrine of no-God, 248;
doctrine about Christ, 258 seq.
Documents, of Bible, chronologically
arranged, 6 seq; miracle-stories in
successive documents, 143-150.
Dragon, in Semitic mythology, 52.
Dreams, 116, 124, 125.
Driver, S. R., 21, 38, 64.
Dumbness, ascribed to demons, 35,
I20.
Duty, development of idea, 8, 13
See Ethics; Righteous-
seq.
ness.
Ecclesiastes, 26; quoted, 25.
Economics, 44, 45, 58, 131, 198-
199, 203, 205, 238-239.
Eden, 53, 74, 77–78, 80, 89.
Edwards, Jonathan, 86.
Egypt, 15, 150, 163, 166; inscrip-
tions of, 38-39.
Elijah, 99, 149, 163-164.
Eliot, George, Adam Bede quoted,
261.
Elisha, 34-35, 149, 155, 163-164.
Emerson, Ralph W., 271.
Enoch, 99, Book of, 39.
Ephesus, 218.
Epilepsy, ascribed to demons, 35,
116, 120.
Eschatology, see Apocalyptic; Res-
urrection; Second Coming of
Christ; Immortality.
Esther, Book of, 26, 86.
Ethics, development in Bible, 13
seq.; contrast between Old Tes-
tament and New Testament,
26-27; ethics rated by Jesus above
ceremony, 92; Jesus' ethical chal-
lenge, Ch. VI, Sec. IV, 191–206;
ethics of Jesus defended, 226-231.
Jesus, ethical teacher, 244-245;
inadequacy of ethics, 245-251.
See Duty; Righteousness.
Eucken, Rudolf, 206.
Eusebius, quoted, 48.
Evolution, 44, 51, 61, 185, 215.
Exegesis, versus spiritual insight, II,
79; Golden Rule of, 37; ancient
versus modern equipment for,
37 seq.; allegorical exegesis, Ch.
III, 65-96; principle of Reforma-
GENERAL INDEX
285
tion in exegesis, 85-87; Jesus'
method, 91-94.
Exile, 18, 100, 123.
Exorcism, 114, 120, 151.
Experience, separable from thought-
forms, 6; most abiding element in
human history, 54 seq.; abiding
experiences and changing cate-
gories, Ch. IV, 97-129; basis of
Bible's appeal, 169-174; neces-
sary to understand Bible, 180;
heart of Bible, reproducible ex-
periences, 195; abiding continuum
of Christianity, 208; doctrine and
experience, 184-191; experience
of God in Christ, 252-253.
Ezekiel, 18; Book of, 149.
Ezra, 236.
Fairweather, W., 31.
Farrar, F. W., 84-85, 96.
Fatalism, 49-50.
Firmament, 35, 44, 46, 52.
Forgiveness, Jesus' gospel of, 225-
226.
Fourth Gospel, spiritualizes second
coming, 108-109; sublimates de-
monology, 120; heightens mirac-
ulous element, 148; charter of
liberty, 218; using Logos, 216,
243.
Froude, J. A., 115.
Fullerton, Kemper, 37, 93, 96.
Fundamentalists, 163, 182.
Galen, 49.
Galileo, 50-51.
Gamaliel, 73.
Geffcken, Johannes, 96.
Genealogies, in Matthew and Luke,
75, 214.
Genesis, use of by Luther, 9, 10;
use of by Pfeiffer, 10-11; alle-
gorized by Origen, 74-75; use
of by Calvin, 83-84; versus
Babylonian myths, 51-53.
Gfrörer on allegory, 77.
Gilbert, George H., 71, 96, 241;
quoted, 10, 83.
Gillies, J. R., 21.
Ginzberg, Louis, 71; 73, 96.
Glover, T. R., 241.
Gnostics, 256.
God, development of idea, 8, 12-
19, 22-24; Origen on unworthy
ideas of God, 74-76; Hebrew
versus Greek and Indian thought
of God, 138, 170 seq.; God's
relationship with world-order in
modern Christian thought, 158-
161; Jesus' idea of God, 222 seq.;
Jesus as revelation of God, Ch.
VIII, 242-273; modern ideas of
God's immanence, 161, 188, 264
seq.; 268. See Trinity; Provi-
dence of God.
Good Samaritan, Parable of, 193,
228; Wyclif's allegory, 81-82.
Goodspeed, Edgar J., 32.
Gordon, A. R., 53, 64.
Greece and Greek thought, 27, 28,
39, 65-66, 72, 101, 105, 108-109,
137-140, 170, 212-213, 215-216,
217, 218, 234, 243, 262-263.
Gregory the Great, 114.
Grotius, 230.
Harnack, Adolf, 130.
Headlam, Arthur C., 241.
Healing, 137, 144, 145, 146, 147,
148, 151, 165, 166, 198.
Health, Jesus' interest in, 198.
Hebrews, Epistle to the, 8, 31, 243.
Heraclitus, quoted, 66.
Higher Criticism, 2, 5, 6-7, 8, 174
seq., 180.
Hillel, Rabbi, 199.
Hinduism, 68-69.
History, contribution to Biblical
scholarship, 40-41.
Hocking, William E., 206.
Hodder, Edwin, 220.
Hogg, A. G., quoted, 154.
Holmes, John Haynes, 206.
286
GENERAL INDEX
Holy Spirit, 264.
Homer, 56, 65-67, 69.
Horne, S., quoted, 20.
Hosea, 21-22, 149, 171.
Hugo, Victor, 117.
Hume, David, 153.
Hunnius, 85.
Husic, I., 118.
Huss, John, 82.
Huxley, John, quoted, 163.
Immanence of God, 161, 188, 264-
266, 268.
Immortality, development of idea,
22-23; in early Hebrew religion,
25-26; associated with physical
resurrection, 45, 98; modern ideas
Platonic, 54; interpreted in chang-
ing categories, Ch. IV, Sec. I,
98-104; modern interest in, 250.
Imperialism, 44, 203, 247–248.
Incarnation, 217, 252–253, 256, 263,
264, 268, 269, 271.
India, allegory in, 68; ideas of God,
170 seq.
Individual, treated as part of cor-
porate group, 17-18.
Industry, 203, 229, 245, 247, 249,
251.
Inerrancy of Scripture, 30, 163, 237,
273.
Inquisition, 153.
Insanity, ascribed to demons, 35,
115-116, 120, 137.
Inspiration, 30, 68.
Interest, taking interest condemned
on textual basis, 238-239.
Interim ethic, 226 seq.
Internationalism, 15, 203, 204-205,
245, 249. See War.
Intervention, miracle regarded as,
139-141, 162.
Isaiah, 15, 19, 23, 149, 180.
Ishmael, Rabbi, 71.
Jacob, 75.
Jastrow, Morris, Jr., 64, 236.
Jefferson, Charles E., 241.
Jehovah, see God.
Jeremiah, 18, 21, 40, 138, 148–149,
213.
Jerusalem, 81, 146, 181, 199, 254.
Jesus, see Christ.
Job, Book of, 23, 56.
John, Gospel of, see Fourth Gospel.
Jonah, 163; Book of, 15.
Jones, Maurice, 31.
Jones, Rufus M., 206.
Josephus, 39.
Jude, 125.
Judgment day, see Day of Judg-
ment.
Justin Martyr, 98, 119.
Karlstadt, 93.
Kautsch, E., 31.
Kent, Charles Foster, 31, 32, 241.
Kháyyám, Omar, Ecclesiastes lik-
ened to Rubáiayát of, 26.
King, Henry Churchill, 206.
Kingdom of God, 100, Ch. IV, Sec.
II, 104-110, 129. See Apocalyp-
tic.
Kingsley, Charles, quotation from
letter of Huxley to, 163.
Knox, George William, 224.
Kohler, Kaufmann, 118, 124, 130.
Koran, 69-70.
Kurios, 212-213.
Lactantius, quoted, 47–48.
Lanier, Sidney, quoted, 173, 269.
Law, see Common Law.
Law, Biblical, allegory of laws, 76;
Jesus' appeal from oral to written
law, 91; Jesus' appeal from cere-
monial to moral law, 92; Jesus'
recognition of outgrown elements,
92-93; Luther on Old Testament
laws, 93; rabbinical summary of,
199; legalistic use of, Ch. VII,
Sec. V, 235-240.
Law, natural, miracle and law, Ch.
V, 131-167.
GENERAL INDEX
287
Lecky, W. E. H., 157; quoted, 151.
Legalism, Ch. VII, Sec. V, 235-240.
Leighton, Joseph A., 206.
Lewis, Frank G., 32.
Liberal Christianity, 169, Ch. VI,
Sec. III, 182-191, 196, 200–201,
205-206.
Literalism, 50, 51, 70, Ch. III, Sec.
IV, 83-90, 93, 169, 181, 182, 219,
261, 272.
Lobstein, Paul, 168.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, quoted, 265.
Logos, Ch. VIII, 242–273.
Longfellow, H. W., quoted, 2.
Loyalty, object of, supplied by
Jesus, 231-232.
Luke, 146, 147, 214.
Luther, Martin, found doctrine of
the Trinity in Genesis, 9; his
claims for Genesis, 10; contempt
for Copernicus, 50; in art, 82;
quoted on allegory, 85; quoted on
understanding of Hebrew proph-
ets, 87; his interpretation of
Psalm 3:5, 87-88; quoted on laws
of Old Testament, 93; one method
of overcoming devils, 115; his
conversion, 117; Lutheranism,
201; his opposition to taking in-
terest on capital, 239; quoted on
reason for the name "Christ,
242.
""
Machen, J. G., quoted, 102–103.
Mackintosh, H. R., 274; quoted,
266.
Man, development of idea, 8, 22;
obligations limited to social group,
13; why created, 52-53; relation-
ship with God, 243, 262-268 (see
Personal religion).
Mark, 146-148.
Massie, J., 96; quoted, 70.
Materialism 161, 178, 246–251.
Mather, Cotton, quoted, 238.
Matheson, G., quoted, 57.
Mathews, Shailer, 130, 206.
Matthew, 146–147, 214.
Mauritanians, 80.
McCurdy, J. F., 118.
McGiffert, Arthur C., 64, 117.
Medicine, 35, 49, 155.
Medieval age, 42, 72, 81, 118, 140,
220.
Menegoz, E., 167.
Messiahship, 45, 100, 105-106, 109,
Ch. VII, 208-240.
Micklem, E. Romilly, 167.
Milton, John, 172–173.
Miracles, 43, 89, Ch. V, 131-167,
169, 173.
Moffatt, James, 32, 131; quoted,
57, 218.
Monism, 264.
Monotheism, 52, 222.
Monte, Cardinal, 144.
Montefiore, quoted, 232.
Moore, Edward C., 31.
Moore, G. F., 98, 100, 145.
Moses, 16, 50, 74, 89, 93, 125, 150,
165.
Muhammad and Muhammadanism,
69, 85, 118, 145.
Myers, Frederic W. H., quoted,
164-165.
Mystery religions, 39.
Nasmyth, George W., 207.
Nature, modern use of word not in
Bible, 135.
Nazareth, 221, 229, 254.
New Testament, culmination of
Old Testament, 8; reading New
Testament meanings into Old
Testament, 8-9; New Testament's
idea of God, 18-19; hope of im-
mortality in New Testament, 26;
affected by mystery religions,
39; most ancient extant Greek
manuscript, 40; allegorizing in,
73; Origen on discrepancies in,
75; New Testament's apocalyptic,
101, 106, 108, 109; explanation of
sin and misery in, 120; angelology
288
GENERAL INDEX
in, 124; heightening of miraculous
in, 145 seq.; reliance on miracles
in, 152; divinity of Jesus in, 187;
the Trinity in, 189; norms of living
found in, 209, 252-253; catego-
ries for Jesus, 212-216; no friend
of reactionary, 218; meaning of
Messiahship in, 242; Logos doc-
trine in, 243; the New Testament
Gospel about Jesus, 271.
Newton, 51, 141, 142.
Nicodemus, 193.
Nietzsche, quoted, 247.
Old Testament, ethical conceptions
in, 5; leveled up to New Testa-
ment, 8-9; doctrine of Trinity
found in, 9; early moral ideas,
13-14; geographical limitation of
Jehovah in, 13; conceptions of
God in, 15-18; denials of immor-
tality in, 26; Philo on anthropo-
morphisms in, 28; most ancient
extant manuscript, 40; allegorized,
72-73; Origen on anthropomor-
phisms in, 74-75; Calvin's use of,
87; Christ's method of interpre-
tation 91-94; Luther on laws of,
93; idea of nature in, 135; height-
ening of miraculous in, 148 seq.;
culmination of idea of God in,
179; used as basis for theocracies,
238.
Onesimus, 20.
Oral law, discredited by Jesus, 91.
Origen, 39, 74-77, 83, 85, 88, 101-
102, III.
Orr, James, 168.
Orthodoxy, 84, 119, 186, 190, 196,
257.
Page, Kirby, 207.
Palmer, Frederic, 168.
Pantheism, 69.
Parks, Leighton, 206.
Pass, H. L., 130.
Paterson, W. P., 241.
Pathological psychology, dreams,
melancholia, hysteria, etc., 116.
Paul, supreme passages, 19; letter
to Philemon, 20; Paul of the in-
dwelling Christ, 22; on immortal-
ity, 25; breadth of vision, 42; alle-
gorizes, 73; on nature of resurrec-
tion, 99, 101, 102; on second com-
ing of Christ, 109; sublimates
demonology, 120; his conversion,
166; his power in prayer, 176; his
liberalism, 186; his idea of God,
224; an anti-legalist, 237; his
Christology, 243.
Peabody, Francis G., 241.
Peake, Arthur S., 31, 32.
Persia, 105, 119, 124.
Personal religion, 15, 17, 18, 21,
122, 179, 181.
Peter, 22, 146, 147.
Peters, John P., 31.
Pfeiffer, quoted, 10-11.
Pfleiderer, Otto, 274.
Pharisees, 137, 193.
Philo Judæus, 39, 45, 77; quoted,
27-28, 217.
Philip, 146, 212.
Plato, Platonism, 68, 72, 89, 112,
171, 215, 227.
Pliny, 49, 56.
Plutarch, 48.
Polygamy, 44.
Poynting, J. H., quoted, 159.
Pratt, James B., 189.
Prayer, development of idea, 15-19;
Jesus' praying, 128, 254-255;
power of prayer, 166-167, 176-
177; secret prayer, 180; moral
reality in prayer, 194.
Preachers, problem with Bible, 1-3;
need of Bible, 6; helped by new
approach, 12, 15; allegory in
preaching, 76 seq.; difficulty in
harmonizing Bible and modern
thought, 89; need of familiarity
with contrasts, 97; inspirational
preaching, 61; preacher's re-
GENERAL INDEX
289
sponsibility, 122; his main busi-
ness, 173, 208-209; liberal preach-
ing, 184; preaching a challenging
task, 205; need of new categories,
215, 218; must be no literalist,
219; centrality of Christ, 235;
no legalist, 240; preaching Christ,
240, 249, 252, 261; modern
preacher's privilege, 273.
Pre-millennialism, 61, 109. See Sec-
ond Coming of Christ.
Prodigal Son, Parable of the, 228.
Prometheus, 138.
See spe-
Prophets, agents of progress, 14;
understood when contemporary
situations are known, 20; make
righteousness central, 23; Luther
on interpretation of, 87; influence
Jesus, 106; absence of miracle in
books of, 148-149.
cial names.
Protestants, Protestantism, criti-
cized Calvin, 85; indulge in alle-
gory, 85 seq., difficulty in us-
ing Scriptures, 88-90; ascribed
church's miracles to devil, 152;
situation in modern Protestan-
tism, 201; denominations claim-
ing support of Scripture, 237.
See Reformation.
Proverbs, 10, 21.
Providence of God, 110, 126, 136,
151-152, 157, 159, 166–167.
Psalms, 9, 18, 19, 26, 134, 179.
Ptolemy, 49, 50.
Puritans, 201, 238.
Pythagoras, 216.
Rabbis, 70, 71, 73, 119-120, 192,
199, 239.
Race, racial problems, 205, 244,
245, 248-249.
Randall, John Herman, quoted,
265-266.
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 207.
Reformation, Protestant, 10, 86-
88, 93, 152. See Protestants.
Regeneration, 179, 186, 246, 264
Reitzenstein, 39.
Religion, Bible necessary to relig-
ious thinking, 3-4; religion and
inherited thinking about Bible, 5;
universalized by Jesus, 15; early
Hebrew religion and the indi-
vidual, 16-17; Jeremiah, pioneer
of personal religion, 21; early
Hebrew religion and immortal-
ity, 25-26; comparative religion,
41; other religions, 42-43; modern
difficulties over, 61; Hebrew re-
ligion and demonology, 118 seq.;
miracles in all religions, 151;
religion and superhuman power,
158; religion's fruits, 166; un-
formulated religious experience,
183; experimental religion, 186;
Jesus' religious aim, 196 seq.;
ultimate test of religion, 205-206;
religious faith versus material-
ism, 251; profoundest questions
in, 252; Christianity religion of
incarnation, 263, 268. See Per-
sonal Religion.
Resurrection, hope of among He-
brews, 12, 18, 26; "resurrectionem
carnis," 54, 98; resurrection of
body, 98-102; Paul on resurrec-
tion, 101, 109; resurrection and
Greek thought, 101, 108; resur-
rection in New Testament, 109;
resurrection of flesh not essen-
tial to immortality, 129; resur-
rection as miracle, 137, 144, 147,
148, 149, 151; resurrection of
Christ, 164-165.
Revelation, book of, 101, 109.
Richman, Irving B., 238.
Righteousness, 12, 23, 59,
236, 240, 244. See Ethics;
Duty.
212,
Rihbany, Abraham M., 241.
Robinson, H. Wheeler, 31, 32, 99;
quoted, 33-34.
Ruskin, quoted, 56, 63.
290
GENERAL INDEX
Sabatier, Auguste, 131, 167.
Sabbath, 92, 197, 238.
Sacrifice, development of idea, 12;
vicarious sacrifice, 23-24; animal
sacrifice, 42, 89, 230; Jesus'
sacrificial life and death, 229–232.
Saint Ambrose, quoted, 48.
Saint Augustine, 47, 77–81, 139.
Saint Francis Xavier, 143-144.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, 230.
Saint Hilarion, 114.
Saint Jerome, 39, 40, 114.
Saint Louis of France, 126–127.
Saint Thomas à Becket, 144.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 116.
Salmond, Stewart D. F., 130.
Samuel, 14, 15, 166.
Sanday, W., 241, 256, 274.
Satan, see Devil.
Saul, 14, 15, 17.
Saviorhood, 125, 170, 209, 231, 233,
235, 243, 269, 271.
Savonarola, 82.
Schleiermacher, 264.
Schmiedel, quoted, 256.
Science, scientists, 43, 44, 48, 49,
50, 63, 116-117, 138, 140-143, 155,
158-159, 160, 177, 185, 211-212,
248, 265.
Scott, Ernest F., 109, 130, 241.
Scripture, see Bible.
Scudder, Eliza, 266.
Second coming of Christ, easily
picturable in old world-view,
104-105; spiritualized by Fourth
Gospel, 108; increasingly dis-
believed, 110; abiding meaning
in, 129. See Apocalyptic; King-
dom of God.
Seeley, John R., 219-220, 241.
Seneca, 49.
Sermon on the Mount, 8, 19, 27,
92-93, 94, 180.
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 220.
Shammai, Rabbi, 199.
Shaw, George Bernard, quoted, 211.
Sheol, 26, 99-100, 102, 179.
Shotwell, James T., 206; quoted, 40.
Simkhovitch, Vladimir G., 130.
Simpson, J. Y., 206.
Sin, development of idea, 8, 12;
change in definition, 44; perma-
nent experience, 56-58; Thomas
Aquinas on devils' sin, 116; Bib-
lical explanation, 120; deceit-
fulness of sin, 122; reality of sin,
129; conquest of sin, 182; for-
giveness of sin, 202, 225-226;
punishment for sin, 19. 23, 100,
226.
Sinai, 16, 19.
Skinner, J., 21.
Slavery, 44, 239, 248.
Smith, George, 41.
Smith, George Adam, 1, 21.
Smith, Gerald B., 206.
Smith, Henry Preserved, 76, 96.
Smith, J. M. Powis, 31.
Sociology, neo-Darwinian, 247-249.
Solomon, Song of, see Canticles,
Song of Songs.
Son of David, 214, 215.
Son of God, Ch. VIII, 242-273.
Son of man, 106, 214–215, 234.
Song of Songs (Song of Solomon),
71, 79.
Spratt, Bishop, quoted, 156-157.
Stade, 53.
Stanley, Henry M., quoted, 176.
Star of Bethlehem, Chrysostom's
effort to dissociate from astrology,
49-50.
Stoddard, Richard H., quoted, 127.
Stoics, 67, III, 215.
Suffering, development of interpre-
tation of, 23-24.
Sufis, 69.
Swain, Richard La Rue, 206.
Syrian school of interpretation,
36.
Tabernacle, 75, 89.
Talmud, Babylonian, 120, 199.
Tawney, Richard Henry, 207.
GENERAL INDEX
291
Taylor, Jeremy, 83.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 240.
Tertullian, quoted, 112-113.
Texts, 4, 50, 87, 93, 237.
Textual criticism, 39-40.
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 8, 36.
Theocracy, 45, 238.
Theology, see Doctrine.
Thompson, J. M., 145, 167.
Thomson, J. A. 56, 159.
Thorburn, Thomas J., 168.
Thorndike, L., 48, 49.
Tillotson, John, 152-153.
Toy, C. H., 12.
Transcendence of God, 123, 140,
243.
Trinity, 9, 85, 188–189, 234.
Villari, P., quoted; 82.
Virgin birth, 146, 147.
Walker, W., 84.
War, 44, 204, 205, 244, 245, 248, 251.
Ward, Harry F., 207.
Weinel, Heinrich, 241.
Wesley, John, 51, 116, 201.
Westminster Confession, 267.
White, Andrew D., 11, 64, 104, 114,
115, 130, 144.
Whittier, J. G., quoted, 220.
Widgery, Alban G., 241.
Witchcraft, 115, 116, 239.
Woolf, Leonard S., 207.
Wordsworth, William, quoted, 175.
Worship, 8, 12, 16, 66, 186, 194.
Wyclif, 81-82.
Youtz, Herbert Alden, 206.
Zoroastrianism, 100, 101, 102, 119,
123, 125.
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