"WHAT other book like this can awaken dumb or sleeping consciences, reveal the secret needs of the soul, sharpen the thorn of sin and press its cruel point upon us, tear away our delusions, humiliate our pride, and disturb our false serenity? What sudden lightnings it shoots into the abysses of our hearts! What searchings of conscience are like those which we make by this light? And when we have gained a right apprehension of our shortcomings and spiritual poverty, when the need of pardon, the hunger for righteousness, and the thirst for life torture the soul to desperation, what other voice than that of the Son of man has power to allay our pain, convince us of the love of the Father, the love that passeth knowledge, in which all shame and remorse are swallowed up, and the flame of a holy life is kindled in the soul? The word which pierced us like a sharp sword now sheds itself like balm over all our wounds, like consolation over all our sorrows. It becomes a source of inward joy, a strength for life, and a hope which shines beyond death itself. . . . The word which draws us so irresistibly to God and so invincibly attaches us to Him can come from none but Him. ... It has no more need of official verification, of outward attestation, than the light which enlightens the eye, or the duty which commands the conscience, or the beauty which ravishes the imagination. The efficacy of the divine word is at once the inward sign, the measure, and the foundation of its authority."

August Sabatier, Religious of Authority, 242, 243.

Chapter III

THE BIBLE AND FAITH

Changing Views

"WHAT is the place of the Bible in a working » ' faith? A couple of generations ago that question would have been very simply answered: "The Bible is the Word of God. What is in these pages God has written. We are simply to take what is written here and believe it." The answer is not so simple to-day. Nowhere has the change in traditional thought been so great. To multitudes the modern study of the Bible is confusing and disquieting. The foundations of faith seem shaken. We turn to the Old Testament. The scientist tells us that this story of creation does not agree with the record he reads in the rocks. The historian tells us that this picture of a flat earth and a solid, rounding firmament in which the sun and stars are fixed for the convenience of men, is simply taken from ancient stories of the East. The critic tells us that these first books are composed of different narratives which have been joined together, that some of these books were the growth of centuries. The student of religion points out how crude some of the religious thinking is here, and how rude and even savage some of the ethics of such a book as Judges. Our fathers put the books all upon one plane; did it not all come equally from God? We distinguish sharply Old Testament from New, and the ideas of Paul from the teachings of Jesus. For them everything came directly from God: we study sources and authors and editors. For them this history and these writings formed a world by themselves. We find the influence of other nations and know that this current flowed in the great stream of human history. In one word, for them the Bible was a book that came directly from the hand of God. For us it is a great literature that has grown out of a people's life, intensely human, bound up with the things of earth, its history linked with that of other nations. No wonder the questions come: Is the Bible still a Word of God to us.? Has it still authority for us.? What is the meaning of this change that has taken place?

To answer that we must first find out more definitely what this change really is, and try to distinguish the old from the new.

The Traditional View

The old conception of the Bible was perfectly simple. To have a true religion you must know about God. To know about God He must speak to us. The Bible is the book in which He thus speaks: thus God is its Author. Man could not have any real part in it, for then the human and imperfect would be there. Therefore it must be the literal and mechanical product of God. The men who wrote it were simply the "pens of the Holy Spirit;" it was not their thought or spirit or experience that entered in, it was His dictation. If God is directly the Author of all, then all is equally true. The Bible all stands upon the same level. The ethics of Judges are just as divine as the Sermon on the Mount, the psalms of imprecation are just as Christian as Paul's great chapter on love.

Now let us not be too scornful of all this. It is true that the Bible itself condemns it on nearly every page by what it actually shows. But no theory like this, which held the conviction of earnest men for generations, can be without foundation. Back of it lay a great need and a great experience. The great need was man's need of God, his cry for some sure knowledge of God in the midst of all the uncertainty and change of human life. The great experience was that God had met men and spoken to them in these pages, that here they had found the living God and life for themselves. And all our new study of the Bible will be worth very little unless it does justice to that great fact which leaves the Bible still to-day the greatest study for the human mind.

It was not the experience, then, that was at fault, but the theory in which the experience was expressed. We can see now what was wrong in the theory and what influences came in from without to cause this. We may note first its intellectual-ism, the idea that religion means a sum of truths which men must know and believe. That meant that men must have a text-book of religion. With the Jews it was a code of laws, for to them religion was primarily something to be done. With the Christian Church it meant a book of teachings, for religion was primarily something to be believed. The great founders of the faith do not speak so, the prophets and Jesus and Paul. With them religion is a life, and God comes to men in fellowship, not as a doctrine.

The second mistake was in the mechanical conception of inspiration. My typewriter is just a machine under my hands. I write with it what I will. I ask from it no insight, no love, no surrender of will or life. God does not play upon men that way. They are never mere pens for His hand. He gives His truth to the life of men, and out of that experience the man speaks of God to others.

The third mistake was in its dualism. That is the theory which divides the world sharply into two parts, the divine and the human, and sets the two over against each other. It seems easy to say: "Either this book is from man, and so is imperfect, or it is divine and perfect. If God is present, then we must rule out all the human; if man is here, then there is no God. This book is either human or divine." Like many other simple answers, this is not true. Life is far richer than such easy logic. What our working faith has emphasized has been not God separate from the world, but God living and working in the world and in man. So far from one excluding the other, we must say, where God is most fully present there is most of man, man at his best and highest. Where man is at his highest, there God is most really present. The Church forgot the meaning of the incarnation when she came to the doctrine of the Scriptures. In her teaching as to Christ she had rejected these heresies of dualism. One party had said, "He is divine, and therefore His human nature is not real." And the other had said, "He is human, and so He can not be really divine." The Church said, "He is divine and human, and both in fullest truth and measure." It is so as to the Bible. It is not in some miracle of loaves and fishes that God is most truly present, nor in some book dropped from the blue sky; it is in a human life, simple, reverent, loving, obedient.

And finally the old vie\^' was wrong in its theory because it left no room for real growth. If the book is literally God's writing, then the first pages must be as absolutely true and divine as the last. Now, religion is life, and life means growth. When men ruled this growth and movement out of the Bible, they left it a lifeless book of the letter.

The Modern View

The modern Bible study begins with the same faith as the old: that God is in the writings, that here is a message for men. But it leaves the old theories to one side, and instead says: Let us look at these writings as they are. It is one thing to say that God comes to men: it is another matter to ask how He comes. The old theory without much regard to the Bible itself determined just how the Bible must have been written. To-day we are asking, with the modern scientific and realistic spirit, What is really here? What we have found as we have looked at these writings in this way is that we have here a human book. Here is no book dropped down from heaven, but something that has come up out of the life of the people. Here are the tales of its ancient heroes. Here is the story of its wars and its oppressions. Here are the wise maxims of its sages, the stirring sermons of its preachers, the book of its songs and prayers, and its laws for every part of life. It is no book of the dead letter. It throbs with life. "Prick it anywhere, and it will bleed." Here are the prayers and tears and hopes and longings, the story of sin and failure, the story of high aspiration and splendid faith and deed. Because it is a human book there is real history here. This life is bound up with other life, and knows movement and progress. The movement is not always upward. The great prophets are like mountain peaks, and the land slopes away on this side as on that. But the forward look is always there, and the dawn yields at last to the full day, and we move up to the Christ. And how intensely human the men are whom we meet: Isaiah with his vision and his boldness, Hosea with his tragic life, Amos outspoken and fearless, Micah with his passion for men and righteousness, Jeremiah with his mingled tenderness and strength! And when we come to the highest of all, the human element is not least, but richest. In all this human book the most human part is the Gospels. Look at their pictures from the life of our Lord: helpless child and loving mother, growing boy and anxious parents, the friends and the craving for sympathy and companionship, hunger and weariness, the hours of prayer, the garden with its struggle and its crying, and the words upon the cross.

If all this be true, if it be this human book, how is it that God comes to us? What place has it in our working faith? Once we had the word of God to men, fixed and definite. Now it seems as if we had nothing more than man's search for God and the picture that he has made of Him. We can no longer simply take word for word and say, Here is what God has written; believe this and do this.

Let us ask first of all, What is it about which our working faith is really concerned? It is certainly not a matter of dates and authorship. Nor is it an infallible book of doctrine that we must have. Our real concern is this: Is the living God here? Does He speak to us, and does He find us here? This is the real question. No theory can make this book divine for us. And no arguments are needed for it. This experience is the vital matter. The fact remains for our faith that he who comes with open mind and reverent heart, who wills to do His will, shall find God here with His gift of mercy and of a new life. That is what the fathers meant by their teaching about the witness of the Spirit.

But our question is not yet answered. How is God present in this book.? Our answer must go farther back than that. We have misunderstood the Bible because we have started with the Bible, we have made a book the beginning of the Christian religion. Now, Mohammedanism is a book religion. It bases everthing upon these words given to Mohammed from heaven. Mormonism is a book religion. It, too, claims to have begun with words dropped out of the sky. Christianity is not a book religion. Its fundamental fact for faith is not a book dropped from heaven, but a living God in His world, molding that world which He made, moving in history, coming into fellowship with men. First the deed, and then the word; first the history, and then the writing; first the living experience, and then the message. When we start with a book as our foundation, then we must have something finished, external, static, lifeless. And so we have the whole mechanical, lifeless theory of the Bible. Here is something vital, dynamic, with movement and progress. It is God, not dropping a finished book into His world, but Himself present in that world, giving His life to men and speaking through them, with the Scriptures as a great monument and expression of this movement.

We have already gained these great facts for our working faith: A living God in His world, a personal God coming into fellowship with men, and religion not primarily as a belief or a deed, but a fellowship of man with God. Let us see the meaning of this for our present discussion. Here is room, first of all, for God among the nations. Such a God as we hold can not have done less than to seek, and that constantly, to draw all nations into fellowship with Himself. The great word of Revelation applies not to the few among the favored nations, but to all men and all peoples, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock."¹ Not to Israel alone did God come, but to China and India and the isles of the sea. We do not need to decry paganism in order to exalt Christianity. We have been over-narrow in our zeal. Even the Old Testament shows the larger vision. Isaiah lets Jehovah speak of "Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance."² Amos show's us Jehovah judging the other nations just like Israel, assuming their knowledge of right and truth, and declaring in a wonderful passage that He has been in their fortunes as in those of Israel: "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto Me, O children of Israel? saith Jehovah. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"³ Nor can we forget Paul's fine word of the nations whom God hath not left without a witness nor without a law in their hearts.⁴ We need not blind ourselves to the darkness of non-Christian lands. Their faiths could not lift men to confidence and peace. But it has not all been darkness. Everywhere we find some hunger for God, some searching after Him, some ideals of truth and right, some power for good. There is some wheat with the chaff of their sacred books, they had their prophets and heroes, their Gotama Buddha and Confucius and Socrates. We are studying these religions to-day as never before, and at every gleam of light and truth we rejoice and say, Here, too, God was present and speaking to men.

But the God who stands at the door of men and nations forces no entrance. Man's answer conditions His deed. Some doors are closed to Him, others He finds open. One nation above others opened its doors to God. There He found men, leaders, prophets, whose hearts were all attent upon His voice, whose lives were open to His will. Through those men He spoke His clearest word. It was a little people, but He chose it for His great world-plans. This is not theory, but plain history. No nation has such a story as this little people; not China with her long centuries and her teeming millions, not Egypt of immemorial antiquity, nor the Greece of beauty and wisdom, nor the Rome of conquering power. Here was a little nation whose land at the time of its greatest power might be dropped down within the borders of any one of a score of our States. She came a nomad tribe from the desert. Her culture was borrowed. She never had any art of her own. She boasted no philosophers. Her triumphs in war were few. She lay upon the highway that linked three continents, and the world-powers of these great lands trampled her in turn under foot. She had a few brief years of outward glory at a time when her great neighbors were too busy to molest her. Aside from that brief period her history is the tale of the great nations to whom she was subject: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Syria, Macedonia, Rome. She had no Aeschylus, no Plato, no Praxiteles, no Alexander, or Julius Caesar. Two thousand years ago she was scattered throughout the ancient world as she is among the nations to-day. Then as now her people had to face prejudice and contempt and persecution. And yet through all these years Israel has been the teacher of the nations. The nations that have despised her have placed her writings among their sacred books. And when they have turned from art and commerce and war to the higher matters of faith, it is her voice to which they have listened and her God whom they have worshiped.

If you ask what all this means, the answer is not far to seek. Other nations had their own ambition, Israel's passion was God. Other nations had their captains and poets and philosophers, Israel had her prophets. Whatever may be said of the people, you may search the story of all other lands in vain to find such a line of men as these. Here the waiting God found an open door. Here were men who waited until the vision filled their soul. They saw the Lord high and lifted up, and thenceforth feared no man.⁵ They read God's heart of righteousness and mercy, and so rose above ritual and sacrifice. They came from all ranks of life, with priestly lineage, from royal court, from peasant's home. And some of the greatest words come from men whose very name is lost. To-day there are a thousand men who read Isaiah to one who knows a line of Homer, and ten thousand who have hid some psalm within their hearts to one who has ever opened a Plato.

But we have not yet come to the Scriptures themselves. We have simply seen how God found one nation to whom He could give Himself, through whom He could further His plans for the whole world. What came first in His dealings with this nation? The answer is, first the deed and then the word, first the movement in history and then the writing that came forth from it. It is the deliverance from Egypt that writes the first great chapter in Israel's history. To that event prophet and psalmist turn back again and again, how Jehovah took a people that was not a people, and gave Himself to them as their God. God's grace and mighty help, the nation's love and trust and loyalty, these are the rich lessons that flow from this experience. They form Israel's first step beyond a natural religion to a real ethical faith that lifted it above the nations round about. Or take the other great series of events beginning with the eighth century and ending with the exile. Here is the story of the danger from the north, of temporary deliverance for Jerusalem, of final captivity for Judah as well as Israel. What a list of names is linked with these two centuries: Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, and the great prophet of the exile. No other nation, not even the greatest, has given the world in all its history what Israel brought forth in this brief span of her time of peril and shame. But it was not a book that God gave here. It was life, history, and men to interpret the message in living words. Out of it all came forth the imperishable words that we possess, but the life came first.

If we turn to the New Testament it is the same. Here we meet the real foundation of Christianity, and we find not a book, but a life and a deed. For years the early Church grew and thrived and spread abroad, and yet had no collection of Christian writings. The Church was not founded upon the New Testament, but the New Testament grew out of the Church. First the life and the deed, then the writing. Out of the mission work of the Church came the Epistles, out of the preaching of the Church grew the Gospels. In the Old Testament "the word of Jehovah" refers to the living message of the prophet, not to any book or writing. So in the early Church the Gospel meant the good news that passed from lip to lip, with no fixed form of words, but always made fresh again by living experience. It is well past a century before we find the name applied to any of the written accounts which we call the Gospels. This, then, is our first position, God's revelation is through life and history. From this will follow certain conclusions which we may put in order and which the thoughtful reading of the Bible will make plain.

The Historical Revelation

First, this historical revelation of God will be gradual. A book can be written at once, and men may be left to understand it later. But God deals with life, and life means growth and slow development. God shows that to us every day anew. Every child gives the lesson. We do not set geometry before a child of six. We do not argue general moral principles before a child of three. We come with pictures, not abstract propositions; with do and don't, and not with elaborate ideals. God is a good pedagog. The Old Testament shows His training of a race in its childhood. Here are pictures and symbols and myths. Here is much that is crude and imperfect. We have stumbled over this in the past. We have said that this is true or not true, either God is here or not here. Here is a people declaring that Jehovah has commanded them to sack a city and raze its walls and kill not only the fighting men, but women and little babes and cattle and sheep. Had our armies done the same with a single village in the Philippines, no matter what savage, debased cannibals were there, we should have been overwhelmed by the protest from the Christian conscience of the world. Were they right.^ No! Shall \^'e throw these pages overboard then, and say there is no truth or God in them? No! This is truth and life in the making. This nation is moving toward the light, and the mistaken loyalty and zeal will reach higher ends at last. Let us say the same about the psalms which are full of the spirit of vengeance, and about many another place. They are stumbling-blocks only for a wrong theory of the Old Testament, which makes it all equally and absolutely the direct speech of God. Make it the story of the long, slow work of God with a people, and it becomes a history full of movement and inspiration, in which these defects mark only the stages that have been left behind.

Second, this historical revelation is personal. The heart of it lies in those men who see the meaning of it all. These are the men whom God has lifted up into fellowship with Himself. Through them He interprets His deeds and His purpose. Through them He calls to the people and leads the people on. In other words, it is a religious revelation, one that comes in a living experience and speaks out of this.

Third, the revelation is more than God showing Himself, more than God giving the truth to men. We must use a bigger word than revelation, and that is redemption. It is God giving Himself. It is God carrying out great purposes. It is God working toward the Kingdom which is the end of history and the meaning of the world. That great redemptive movement, as it takes shape on earth, we call religion. Church, Christianity, life.

Fourth, the Scriptures are the great monument of that movement and that revelation, and they form, in turn, the great agent by which that revelation is brought to others and the life passed on to men.

This, then, is our new conception of the Bible, human and divine at once. What we feel, first of all, is how human it has made the book. The old theory pushed it up into the clouds. Its men belonged to another world. Some of us can sympathize with the little girl who was astonished to find that Jerusalem was actually on the map in her geography. When Conybeare and Howson's "Life of St. Paul" came out, good people were shocked because it treated Paul like a real man, traveling from place to place amid actual scenes. The old view made the Bible a book of law and letter and doctrine. For us it is a book of life. We see not one book, but many, the literature of a nation. All the life of that nation unrolls before us. Above all, its great men live for us again. We have rediscovered the prophets. They are not lonely seers looking into the future and concerned only with what is far a\^'ay. They are the great preachers of their day, watching the horizon of the nation, seeing the distant foe, knowing the political and social problems of their day, filled with the Spirit of God, consumed with a passion for righteousness, and giving their fearless message of reproof and comfort to people and to king. So Paul lives for us again; not the traditional theologian, but the man whose thought grew out of his own deep experience; the missionary who laid broad foundations throughout the old world; the man of vision and courage, who saw the meaning of Christianity as a new world-religion and fought for the freedom of the faith. Courageous, independent, humble, devoted, man of passion and power, he stands out for us as one of the great figures of all time, not a theological figure, but a living, breathing man.

One other gain we have made in getting this human-historical Bible. We have found the variety and the difference. The old thought left no room for this. How could there be difference when all came equally and directly from God? What we see now is not so many words, but so much life which God has inspired. In the Old Testament there is nothing less than the whole literature of a nation in all its varied forms. It is this vital and individual character that lends so deep an interest. But the variety brings us more than this. It has helped us to distinguish the central from the peripheral, the vital from the incidental. The Bible is not a level plain. It has valleys and foothills and mountain peaks as well. It is all needed, but not all of equal value. It is not faith to believe all this, nor religion to practice it all. The prophets of the Old Testament have a message that rises far above the prescriptions of ritual and sacrifice. The New Testament stands above the Old, and Jesus is supreme in it all. And that is our greatest gain. There has been a rediscovery of Jesus; His life, His teaching. His Spirit are clearer to us in their meaning and greater for us in their authority than ever before. And so the new study has helped us to understand better what religion is: not the acceptance of a theory, nor the submission to an outer authority, whether of book or creed or institution, but the humble, loving walk with that God who reveals Himself to the human soul.

The Meaning of the Book

We have been busy trying so far to distinguish and to define, but the most important task for our faith is not definition, but appreciation. And that appreciation does not mean the general reverence that goes so often with specific ignorance. What we need is patiently and earnestly to live with this book, to let its spirit speak to us, to let its life gain power over us, to find its great ideals that have set so many free, to meet the great spirits of the past that speak to us through it, to meet and know the greatest of them all, Jesus Christ, and let i Him lead us out of sin and doubt and weakness into the life of peace and strength that is in the presence of God. What shall we find as we read this book with thoughtful mind and open heart? What have men found there for themselves in the past? They have found here, first of all, the book of God. We speak of the Bible as literature, but that is not why we study it. It is historical, and yet we do not go to it as history. Why should we concern ourselves with this feeble folk that lived so long ago in their petty, far-off land? We study it because we find the answer here to the deepest quest of human life, the search for God. The Bible is the one great religious book of antiquity. We have spoken of its variety. It is a library, not a book. And yet the Church has been right in all these centuries in calling it the Bible, the Book. There is one passion that breathes through it all: the passion for God. Its opening words set the key: "In the beginning God."⁶ Its histories are no ordinary narratives, for its tales of kings and wars are but texts from which to speak of God. Its poets cry, "My soul thirsteth for the living God.'"⁷ Its prophet-statesmen sound the same note, "I saw the Lord high and lifted up."⁸ Its last picture is a wonderful symbol of this same passion for God, the picture of the city that needs nothing else because God is there: "And they need no light of lamp, neither light of sun; for the Lord God shall give them light."⁹

But it is the book of God in a deeper sense. One of its writers says. We love God because He first loved us. All of them carry the deep conviction, not of their search for God, but of God's search for them; that God has plans for this people, that God is moving through their nation and speaking to them. And as we read there comes the same great truth to us: Surely God is in this place. And then we come at last to its great central figure, and see with Paul "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."¹⁰ And that is why the book lives. The theory is an incident. This fact means everything, that through all these years men have found here the mercy of God reaching down to their needs, the will of God lifting up their lives, and the presence of God made real to their faith.

It is the book of man. It reveals man as truly as it does God. Albrecht Duerer once drew a picture of the prodigal son, and when his friends looked at it the face of the prodigal was the face of Duerer himself. That was Duerer's way of confession. He had seen his own self in that story. We can all say, "In the roll of the book it is written of me."¹¹ Here we see our sin and know how deep it is. How many have found the Fifty-first Psalm as if written for themselves. The first great help of the Bible is to show men the great moral demand and their great need.'' But it shows us, too, the man that is to be. It takes the highest and noblest, nothing less than the Christ Himself, and says. This is your life; this you can be. And it is the book of man because it stands for human life and human right above all else.

And it is the universal book. It belongs to every age and every nation, and it speaks to every need. "Born in the East and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is a servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wise men ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a word of comfort for the day of calamity, a word of light for the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wicked and the proud tremble at its warning, but to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother's voice. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayer with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers on our ear long after the sermons which they adorned have been forgotten."¹²

The Authority of the Bible

We have one question yet to ask. What is the authority of this book for our faith? The old idea was very simple. These are so many words of God, which we are simply to accept and believe. It is not simply our better understanding of the Bible which prevents this, but our better understanding of faith. No merely external thing can be authority for us. To bow to a Church or a creed or a book is not Christian faith. Christian faith is the surrender of our lives in obedience and trust to some person, to some other life; and the conviction of faith is the conviction which that person wakens in our heart. Only God Himself can be the final authority for our faith. But right here it is that the Scriptures gain their meaning for us, and in a real sense their authority. God comes to us through them. They are not only the great monument of His work in the world: they are the great avenue through which He still comes to men. Through them He commands our conscience, condemns our sin, stirs within us confidence, quickens within us the new life. The authority of the letter is gone. We do not bow before every word that is in the Bible. Only as God speaks to us through them are these words authority for us. But these pages show us as no others the living God working out His great plans in the world. These pages bring to us the great souls that were open to God and through whom God wrought and spoke. Above all this book brings to us Him in whom the grace and truth of God were perfectly revealed. And so, not because of the theory and not on account of the letter, but because the living Spirit of God speaks to us and commands us here, the Bible is still authority for us.