Modern theology and the preaching of the Gospel

Front matter

S)

MCE

Division Gc BI

Preface

In the fall of 1911 the writer was invited by the Congregationalists of Washington to deliver a series of theological lectures at their State Conference at Seattle. The lectures which form the first four and the last of the chapters which follow were given in response to this invitation. In 1913 they were repeated, with the addition of a sixth lecture (the fifth of the present series), at the Preachers’ Institute of the Southern Methodists at Georgetown, Texas. The first, third, fourth, and fifth lectures were also given at the Preachers’ Institute at Fayette, Missouri, in the same year.

A part of the first lecture has appeared in the Southern Methodist Review for January, 1912, under the title, “‘Modern

[ vii ]

PREFACE

Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel,’ and the entire series in the Biblical World for 1913-14, the first lecture being printed in December, 1913, and the last in July, 1914.

The response to the lectures on the part of those who heard their delivery was so generous, and the requests for their publication in book form have been so many, that they are now given to the public in the hope that they may carry to a larger circle than could be reached by the spoken voice the author’s conviction that the final test of every theology must be its preachableness, and his hope that judged by this standard modern theology may prove to have something of value to offer to the ministers of to-day.

[ viii ]

VI.

Contents

Tue Brsue, Wuat It Is anp How To Use It

Tue Gop OF THE CHRISTIAN

Tue Deity or CHRIST IN THE LIGHT OF Mopern THOUGHT ..

II The Bible, What It Is And How To Use It

Tuerre have been three great themes which in every age have engaged the attention of religious men. The first is authority, the second is God, the third is salvation. What is the source of religlous faith, or, in other words, what is the seat of authority in religion? What is the object of religious faith—the unseen Being on whom we depend, to whom we look up, and with whom we commune? What is the effect of religious faith? How does religion help us practically? What difference does it make whether we are religious or not? These are the three perennial questions of religion. We shall take them up in turn and ask ourselves [ 47 ]

what light modern theology has to shed upon each.

And first, of the source of religious faith, or the problem of authority in religion. This brings us to the subject of the present chapter: the Bible, what it is and how to use it.

There are two reasons for beginning with the Bible. The first is because it is the point at which modern theology began; the second is because it is in connection with the Bible that we find the most pressing and the most difficult of our practical problems.

I propose to raise, and, so far as I can, to answer, the following four questions: First, why do we need a Bible at all? Secondly, how did the old Bible meet this need? Thirdly, what change has modern theology made in our view of the Bible? Fourthly, what practical effect will this change have upon the preacher’s work?

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

Why, then, do we need a Bible? This is our first question. I answer, for two reasons. In the first place, we need it as a source of religious inspiration and guidance for the individual soul, and, in the second place, we need it as a standard for the church.

We need the Bible as a source of religious inspiration and instruction for the individual. It is one of the most familiar features of our religious life that, like all life, it has to be constantly renewed. If it is not fed from without, it will starve. Now, the most natural way to feed the religious life is to draw upon the resources of some one else whose life is rich. Prayer is the supreme example of this renewal of life through contact with a higher source of supply. I shall have more to say of prayer by and by. But one of the perplexing features of this whole matter of religion lies just here—that, while prayer is open to every one of us, we are not always equally in the mood for prayer. What are we to do in such a case as this? There is one very obvious thing that we can do, and that is to come into contact with some other man or woman who has the spirit of prayer. This is the philosophy of churchgoing. Men go to church in order to renew and enrich their devotional nature by contact with others whose nature is richer and fuller than their own. The function of the preacher as from Sunday to Sunday he stands in the pulpit is to vitalise and to renew the starved and parched lives in his congregation by sharing the more abundant resources to which his own life has access.

But who is to feed the preacher? Here is where the Bible comes in. The Bible is the great repository of the spiritual life of the past. Through the Bible we meet the men who have been greatest in religion—Moses and David and Isaiah

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

and Jeremiah and St. Paul, and our Lord himself. The Bible is the book of the ideal, holding up before us the standard of truth and duty when our own vision grows dim. The Bible is the book of warning, reminding us, when we are tempted to forget it, of the inevitable consequences of sin. The Bible is the book of comfort, bringing into our loneliness and isolation the consciousness of a divine companionship and an unfailing love. The Bible is the book of hope, gilding the cloud of our discouragement with the golden lining of the ideal, painting before us the outlines of the holy city, the home of righteousness and brotherhood and peace, which is some day to come down from heaven to earth. The Bible, then, I repeat, is the great source of inspiration and of instruction for the individual religious life. The Bible is the book that preaches to the preacher. [ 51 ]

But religion is not simply an individual affair. It is a social matter as well, and this brings me to the second great function of the Bible, namely, its use as a standard. When we look over Christendom we find that Christians are divided into groups, differing one from another in beliefs and practices and, what is still more important, in habits of feeling. These differences constitute one of the great obstacles to the success of our preaching. They are an obstacle at home, multiplying churches where fewer strong churches would be more effective. But they are a far greater obstacle on the foreign field, introducing confusion and distrust where simplicity and directness are all-important. What we need here is some statement to which we can all refer, some platform on which we can all stand, and such a platform we have in the Bible.

There are two ways in which. the

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

Bible is fitted to act as such a standard. It is fitted outwardly because it is the one book as to whose use all Christians are agreed, and it is fitted inwardly by the nature of its contents, for it is the book which gives us the most direct, reliable, and first-hand knowledge of Jesus Christ, the founder, the standard, and the renewer of the Christian religion. The Bible, then, I repeat, if it is to do what we require, must fulfil a double function. It must be the source of religious inspiration and guidance for the individual, and it must be the common standard of faith and practice for the church. Now, this was just what historic theology has asserted of the Bible from the beginning. The Bible, it tells us, is, in the first place, the great means of grace, and, in the second place, it is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We shall ask in a moment how the Bible was supposed to render this double [ 53 | service. But at the outset it is important for us to recognise that the need here pointed out is a real need. We need to-day just the kind of help in our individual and social life that our fathers and mothers found in the Bible.

What kind of a book, then, was this old Bible supposed to be? In the first place, it was supposed to be an inerrant Bible, and by that we mean that it was a Bible which by a special activity of the divine Spirit had been preserved in all its parts from mistake. It was accurate in its history, accurate in its science, accurate in its chronology, accurate, it need not be said, in its morals and its religion. You could open it at any page and be perfectly sure that the sentence which you read came to you as a message straight from God.

From this first characteristic a second followed. It was a book that was all on a level. Ihave said you could open it

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

at any page and find a message straight from God. That was just what the old theologians did. They chose their prooftexts indiscriminately from Genesis to_ Revelation, confident that in a _ book which had God for its author there could be no inconsistency or contradiction.

As a matter of fact, however, there proved to be practical difficulties in the application of this method. When the different passages were compared with one another their teaching did not always seem to agree. There were differences as to statement of fact, such as the two stories of the flood * or the two accounts of the choice of Saul to be king. f What was more serious, there were apparent differences in the moral and religious standards applied. Now God was represented as a jealous God, ruthless in his opposition to evil, calling upon the

[ 55 |

Israelites to exterminate the Amalekites, man, woman, and child,* smiting Uzzah dead when he laid presumptuous hands upon the ark,{t punishing David’s sin by a pestilence that swept away seventy thousand of his people;{ and again he was tender and compassionate, ready to forgive the repentant sinner, however great his guilt, and requiring forgiveness of men even to seventy times seven.§

Now, so long as it was a matter of the individual alone, this difficulty was not an insuperable one. A man seeking spiritual food could always find what he needed in the Bible. When he met a hard passage he could do what we all do in such cases—pass it by and go on to something that is simpler. But in the case of the church at large the matter was more perplexing. It was not possible here to shirk the difficulties.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

One must look the apparent contradictions in the face and find some way of reconciling them.

There were two possible ways which might be taken. One of them was the method of allegory. One might say that the teaching of the Bible was not meant to be interpreted literally. The Bible is a spiritual book, veiling its meaning under parables, only to be understood in the light of the teaching of the same Spirit that inspired it. This was a method very popular in the early church. Origen, the great Alexandrian theologian, used it, and multitudes have followed his example. |

But the trouble with this method is that it goes too far. If you cannot trust the plain teaching of Scripture at one point, how can you be sure that it is to be trusted at any? If you spiritualise the accounts of God’s anger may you not equally explain away the accounts

pots of his love? Our Protestant fathers rejected the method of allegory and substituted the method of harmony. They contended that every sentence in the Scriptures must be interpreted at its face value; that if we read in the account of the flood at one time that the animals went in two by two,* and again that they went in seven by seven,} there were two sets of animals that went in, and so on all along the line. Now, I am not interested here to follow out this method or to criticise it. I want simply to call attention to this one point that, as an effort to meet the practical difficulty for which it was designed, it was a failure, and that for the very simple reason that there was no standard provided to determine whose solution of the particular difficulty in question was correct.

In theory, indeed, the old Protestant view of the Bible was a very simple one. * Gen. 6:19; 7:8, 9. + Gen. 7: 2, 3.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

Every one went to it for himself and interpreted it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The assumption was that the men who went in the right spirit would come to identical results. But, as a matter of fact, they did not come to identical results. They came to very different results. Who was to decide between them? Evidently there was need of some second standard which could be used as a guide in the interpretation of the Bible, and such a standard was actually found in the doctrine and tradition of the church.

If everybody had been in the same church this method would have worked well enough, but as we all know this was not the case. The Protestants themselves were divided into their several denominations. There were the Anglicans and the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists and the Methodists, and _ these again were divided into different schools

[ 59 | and parties. There were the Calvinists and the Arminians. There were the Antinomians and the Legalists, there were the High Churchmen and the Low Churchmen and the Broad Churchmen. Each of these had their own tradition, their own standard, their own creed by which they measured the interpretation of the Bible; and, while in theory they all declared that the Bible was the supreme standard and everybody must be free to interpret it for himself under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in practice they repudiated this principle. As an actual means of bringing about agreement among Christians as to the essentials of faith and practice the older way of using the Bible has not been successful. |

Here modern theology comes to our aid, for it furnishes us with a point of view which makes possible a scientific interpretation of the Bible, that is to say,

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

- aninterpretation whose methods and results shall commend themselves equally to all men of impartial spirit. Let me try, if I can, to state what this view is. There are two points in which the newer view of the Bible differs from the old. In the first place, it lays greater emphasis upon the human element in its composition. The Bible, as we have come to look at it to-day, is a composite book; that is to say, it is a book which is the product of many different authors, writing over a long period of time and making use of materials in part furnished for them by the science and philosophy of their time. It is a book, therefore, which has to be interpreted by the standards which we use in reading other literature of the same kind. We have to distinguish the different purposes which influenced the authors and the different literary forms which they used. We have to ask ourselves what light is shed Lobe on the meaning of a particular passage or book by the conditions of the time or the practices which prevailed among contemporary people at the same general stage of culture. In short, we have to use the same methods which have already proved so successful in the interpretation of the literature of other ancient peoples.

From this conclusion a second follows —that not all parts of the Bible stand on the same moral and spiritual level. The Bible is not a single book but a library; or rather, to be exact, two libraries. It is a collection extending over many centuries and telling the story of a pro-. gressive revelation. Beginning on a comparatively low level of culture and dealing with men of primitive and simple ways of thought and feeling, we rise little by little to the greatest heights of experience and insight which humanity has yet attained. It is clear that in the use of a book of this kind discrimination

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

is necessary. We cannot pick out a text anywhere from Genesis to Revelation and apply it without reference to its context. We must read the earlier in the light of the later; the part in the light of the whole. Isaiah means more to us than Kings, Romans than Isaiah, and the Gospels than all three. We are Christians, and to us Christ is greater than Isaiah, greater even than St. Paul.

Now, how does this help us _ practieally? At first sight it would seem as though such a view were anything but helpful. If the Bible is a composite book, representing different grades of moral and spiritual insight, making use of elements derived from other sources which, in turn, differ in value, what becomes of its divine authority? How can we still have confidence in its teaching? How is it fitted to serve as the infallible helper and guide that we need?

Let us remind ourselves again what we

Se need in the Bible. We need two things: in the first place, food for our own souls and, secondly, a common standard of faith and practice.

I say, we need food for our own souls. But who are we, and what kind of food do we need? Well, in the first place, we are people of different degrees of spiritual maturity, and, in the second place, we are, or at least it is to be hoped we are, people who are growing.

We are people who differ in spiritual maturity, and that means that we need different kinds of spiritual food. Some of us are still children, literally, or if not in years, at least in point of view. What we need in our Bible is some interesting story that will bring home the truth in picturesque form and point a moral, simple enough for us to understand—such a story, for example, as that of Joseph and his brethren, or of David and Jonathan. Some of us are plain men

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

and women bearing the burden and heat of the day, too busy to have much time and thought for speculation or hard questions, and what we need is the assurance that there is a good God who cares for us and who gives us the supply that we need day by day. Our standpoint is like that of the simple folk for whom Luther wrote his Smaller Catechism, when he defined creation by saying: I believe that God “has given and still preserves to me body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason and all my senses; and also clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and child, land, cattle, and all my property.”’"* And we find our need best met by the Twentythird Psalm or the sixth chapter of Matthew. And some of us, it may be a very few, are philosophers whose minds are constantly occupied with the puzzles of existence, who have formed the habit of * Schaff, ‘‘ Creeds of Christendom,” III, p. 78. [ 65 ]

inquiry and question and who want some answer that presses back of the surface of things to their ultimate meaning. Job is the book that comes closest home to us, or the story of Paul’s struggle in the seventh chapter of Romans.

But this is not all. Not only have we different needs as individuals, but these needs differ from time to time. We are growing. ‘Those of us who are children will some day be men and women; those of us who were content to take life at its face value may at any time have an experience which forces upon us the ultimate questions of the soul, and the Bible we need is a book which has provision within its broad covers for all these different kinds of needs. We need a Bible that will do, not simply for one age, or for one class, or for one race, but for all mankind, the Japanese and the Chinese and the Hindu and the South American, as well as the German and the

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

Englishman and the American. And we need a Bible that will do for every century, not for the first simply or the second but for the twentieth as well, and, what is quite as important for us now to remember, not for the twentieth only but for the first and the second and all the centuries that lie between.

The Bible that we have is a Bible of just this kind, for it gives us the record of a progresswe revelation. And by that I mean a revelation which unfolds itself step by step in order to meet the varying needs of the varying stages in a growing and developing life. The Bible tells the story of the way in which God has been training mankind from infancy to mature manhood and womanhood. It is a book, therefore, in which you can find something for man at every stage in his moral and spiritual experience.

This does not mean, of course, that there are no fixed standards, that what is true for one man may be false for another. I shall have something more to say of this matter of standard in a moment. But it means that there are different aspects of truth and different methods of approaching it. It means that when I speak to children I must talk the language of children. It means that if I am talking to primitive men I must use ideas that lie within the range of their comprehension. Thus, if I find the biblical writers using conceptions of science and of history that our own age has outgrown, I must remember that they were speaking to men of their day and that if they had talked our language they could not possibly have been understood. I must ask myself what was the particular truth which they designed to teach at the time and see whether it be not one of which I can make use in dealing with some of my own people whose need is similar. [ 68 ]

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

I am far from thinking that this use of the Bible as a graded text-book, adapted to men of different stages of maturity, is a discovery of modern theology. All great preachers have used the Bible in this way, and this has been a chief source of their greatness, but what I mean is this, that the older view of the Bible rendered this use of it more difficult and less intelligent than the new. Practically, to be sure, the preacher used the Bible as a graded book, but in theory he conceived of it as designed from cover to cover for pupils of the highest grade. And the reason for this was that he had not yet gained the historic point of view.

This difficulty modern theology has removed, for it has taught us the steps through which our Bible came to be and so showed us the uses which each part was designed to serve, not only for our day but for its own. In doing this it has not only helped us to a better understanding of the Bible we know but has recovered for spiritual use large sections of the book which but for its help would have fallen almost altogether into the background.

There is that old story of the creation which for so many years was the battleground on which the champions of religion and science waged interminable war. On the theory of inerrancy the story bristles with difficulties. It is, to say the least, exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with the modern view of the creation of the world. Butif we read it historically, in the light of the parallel creation stories of Babylonia and Assyria, we see for the first time its true significance. The picture of the world in the two accounts has striking similarities, but the conception of God is fundamentally different. In the Babylonian story it is the strife of two rival monsters which is responsible

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

for the making of the world. But in the Bible creation is due to an act of will. It is the fiat of that free Spirit who formed the world to be the scene of the redemptive purpose which was to culminate in Jesus Christ. ‘“‘And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.’’* So read, the first chapter of Genesis remains for us to-day as truly revelation as ever it was in the past.

Or take an illustration of an altogether different kind. There is that great section of the Bible that lies between Isaiah and Malachi. When I was a boy all this part of the Bible was a sealed book tome. It was prophecy, and that meant that it was prediction. It was a part of the Bible in which God had foretold what was going to happen by and by in that great crisis lying somewhere in the future with which as a boy I as yet felt little concern. When I tried to read the proph-

Cala ecies I could not understand what they meant, and as I grew older and consulted the commentaries I was not much better off, for I found that each commentator had his own scheme for the interpretation of prophecy and that these schemes differed one from another.

Now the scientific study of the Bible has helped us to a new understanding of these difficult passages, for it has shown that they have an entirely different meaning. They are not exclusively concerned with the future, as we had supposed. They have a present reference. The prophets were men of their own day, wrestling with specific evils, moral evils many of ‘them, social abuses, economic wrongs, just the kind of questions that you and I face to-day as we pick up our newspapers and read of the last congressional investigation, or, the last instance of the shameless flaunting of wealth. They were men, I say, who were facing

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

a situation of this kind and who brought to bear upon it the principles of ethical religion, faith in the God who judges not by the outward appearance but by the heart, faith in the God who is not the God of Israel only but the God of the whole world, the God who loves so much that he is not afraid to punish, the God whose will, however it may seem for the time to be thwarted, will in the end certainly prevail.

Here is a whole mine of homiletical material which has been opened to us by the studies of such men as George Adam Smith and others—just the kind of message that we need to bring home to _ an awakened conscience that is facing for the first time in its full meaning the fact of social wrong. |

It is because Isaiah and Jeremiah are books of this kind that they are, in the highest and truest sense of the word, prophecy. Just because they are con-

Lav) | cerned primarily with the needs of the present, the sins and the sufferings and the salvation of the men and women who were living at the time, do they furnish the most direct preparation for the Christ who was to come, the great Servant who went about doing good and who gave his life a ransom for many.

Or suppose we take our illustration from the New Testament instead of the Old. How many of us there are who would be obliged to confess, if we were honest, that we had found the Epistles hard reading. We had been brought up —I know I was—to look upon such a book as Romans as a text-book of theology, dealing with such doctrines as original sin and justification by faith, and we were not particularly interested in doctrine—doctrine, as such, I mean: doctrine in text-book form, divorced from life.

But modern theology is showing us that the divorce is only in our own minds.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

Instead of being theological treatises, Paul’s letters are transcripts of his personal experience, bits of autobiography which give us an insight into the life history of one of the greatest men who ever lived. They tell us of his struggle after righteousness and of his failure, of his agony and despair, of the amazing transformation which Christ wrought in his life, of the revolution which it brought about not only in his conduct but in his way of thinking, of his consecration of himself to the service of this new Master, and of his effort through long years of the most varied experience to interpret the gospel of Christ to men of different intellectual antecedents and social environment. They show us, in a word, a man facing the same kind of questions that confront us to-day; whose experi- : ence, therefore, can be practically helpful to us at the point where we most need help. [ 75 ]