Revelation and its record

Preface

In current thought there are many who hold to the belief that revelation is a body of truth handed down in the past and recorded in writing. 1 Even some writers of progressive tendency draw a distinction between natural and revealed truth, the first being truth which man arrives at on his own account, the second being truth which came or must come direct from the mind of Omniscience.

All truth is revelation and all revelation is natural. The idea one man would impart to another is, in a limited sense, a revelation, and if he has been successful in imparting it he has also been natural. No outside or unusual force is necessary to reveal the idea. If the one for

i "Revelation and Scripture come to be for us practically synonymous and co-extensive." — James Orr: Revelation and Inspiration, p. 21. See also, Revelation and Inspiration by Reinhold Seeberg (Eng. tr.). Neither of these books came to my attention until my own was in print. They are scholarly and eminently sane discussions, but seem to confuse rather than clarify the idea of revelation when they hold that, on the theory of progressive or natural revelation, "Christ" is relegated as "only one in the series of leading minds who have disclosed Divine thoughts to man." (Seeberg, 119 f., cf. p. 44.)

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whom the revelation is intended cannot receive it on his own account, no kind or amount of extraneous effort would make him receptive. Here is the burden of the whole matter. The ability to receive a revelation must be in evidence as much as the capability to disclose a truth. The deaf man cannot hear music, however sweet or loud the strain may be. His ears must be first uncovered. So the proffer of a revelation is only one side of it; there must also be a receiving side.

The moral sense is so quick and responsive that men have declared our knowledge of good and evil to be the result of "direct revelation." But however the truth is revealed, the revelation must be worked out by him who would profit thereby. As there have been occasions and opportunities for receiving revelation and men prepared at those times to receive it, it would look as though the mind of the Eternal had been disclosed once for all during a certain period of time. Now some truths have come to us with the marks of finality upon them and the book of revelation, so far as they are concerned, has been closed. At least so it would appear to the finite mind.

Among such truths are the Copernican system of astronomy, the law of gravity, and perhaps the law of the conservation of energy. So in the Bible there are truths revealed which

PREFACE vii

in their essence seem to be final. But the finality of such truths is not a confining force which would limit and narrow them, but an expansive power which makes them appreciable by all people and applicable to all times. The discoveries of Copernicus did not fence in the heavens but, in fact, took all, barriers away. The truths which the prophets preached and Jesus proclaimed do not close the Bible but rather throw it wide open. Man must work out every truth declared to him or which he approximates on his own account before it can be a revelation to him. We would not underestimate the forces outside of man which make his conception of truth possible. That there is a power working in him to make truth known is the only explanation we have for the wonderful feats man has accomplished in grasping truth. But we must hold clearly in mind man's necessary activity in the reception of truth. Revelation, in its practical or intelligible result, is the working out by man of the truth God would work in. 2

In the following discussion I have endeavored

2 This "formula" (Phil. 2:19-13) is set forth as "the mandate of evolution" by Francis Howe Johnson in his recent book, "God in Evolution," (p. 145), a mandate which forces one to consider "the living, neverceasing stream of influences that work within and without us." Mr. Johnson's noteworthy book first came into my hands as I was reading the page-proof of my own manuscript.

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to show first, the necessity of revelation because of the nature both of God and man; second, the conditions under which it must be received ; and last, its record in various living and imperishable forms. I have used the noun "record" in a very wide sense, meaning any evidence whatsoever, direct or indirect, written or unwritten, seen or unseen, material or spiritual, by which we can argue for the presence of God in nature, in man, and in the ongoing of the world. Quotations from various authorities are made, not to bolster up my own argument particularly, but to show that many minds in widely different fields have come to substantial agreement on the fundamentals of thought and life. This in itself is evidence to me of a single source and a unifying power of revelation.

William W. Guth.

San Jose, California.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Idea of Revelation ... 1

II The Nature of Revelation . . 17

II

"If we will not admit the possibility of a God speaking to us, it is equivalent to saying, 'If there were a God, by no possibility through endless ages could he speak with the men he has created;' and by such a conclusion we make any conceivable God weaker than we ourselves."' — Eleanor Harris Rowland.

Knowledge has its beginning in a venture of faith. We do not come to faith through science, but to science through faith. We undertake to give reasons for our beliefs rather than hold beliefs because of our reasons. Beliefs originate in the spiritual being of man ; reasons issue from his mental being. The belief will have a birth uncaused by him ; the reason will have a development through his conscious effort. The one is raw material, the other a structure.

"Any fact which gives knowledge," we are told, "is a revelation." x But we must be careful to interpret the word "give" in the sense of presenting the material out of which knowl-

i Henry Melvill Gwatkin : The Knowledge of God, Vol. I, p. 5.

edge can be made. For knowledge does not come without effort on our part. There must be a conscious reaction of the mind against the material which is given us for thought. There can be no knowledge without a mind capable of receiving the revelation and fixing it as knowledge. What is given is really the impact of suggestion. What is received is the impulse to work out the suggestion. The working out will be partial and unsatisfactory. No man can fully express himself. There is always something backlying. Knowledge is thus only an approximation. We see in part and cannot produce more than we see. But the part leads on irresistibly to the whole. Man projects the whole even although he feels he cannot realize it. He has a presentiment of the whole. He believes somewhere, in some mind, truth is whole and comprehensive. So he makes a venture of his faith and progresses, as he believes, toward knowledge. He projects an infinite Mind. He sees, he feels, reality about him. He would lead this reality back to a primary and ultimate Reality. Reality in his mind pushes him back to the mind of Reality. He has, therefore, a stimulus for his faith. Vague and intangible though it may be, there is a force which stirs him to faith as surely as the wind bulges the sail. And he can guide his belief as the shipman can turn his prow. There are no paths before him, but he is no more on a trackless sea than is the mariner. His faith is the star that leads him on.

Now what is the stimulus of his faith? Darwin was frequently asked for his religious opinions. He wrote many letters giving his views on fundamental questions. He was exceedingly cautious in all his statements. 2 But in one letter, at least, he committed himself to the very thing he was doubtful about. He was writing to a Dutch student in 1873. After referring to the extreme improbability of "this grand and wondrous universe, including our conscious selves" having arisen "through chance," and saying that "to a certain extent" he deferred "to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God," he closed with the sentence: "The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." 3

2 "The habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence." Letter to a German student, 1879. Life and Letters. Edited by his son, Francis Darwin, Vol. I, p. 277.

s Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 276. The italics are ours. Compare this statement with the conclusion of Borden P. Bowne. "Technically, of course, our faith does not admit of demonstration; neither does any other faith or unfaith. But it does admit of being lived; and when it is lived, our souls see that it is good, and we are satisfied that it is Divine." Gains for Religious Thought in the Last Generation, Hibbert Journal, July, 1910, p. 893.

Here is the real heart of the matter. What is man's duty? To whom is he duty-bound? How is he able to do his duty? Why does he want to do his duty? These questions go deeper than man's intellect. When the noted scientist said, "but man can do his duty," he gave evidence of a conviction not based on knowledge. This conviction, in spite of himself, led him to feel he was duty-bound, and to believe that he could fulfill the obligation. He felt instinctively a dependence, and that dependence was on a power beyond the scope of man's intellect. Even although he was "aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose," yet something in him told him he was under obligation to something, seemingly, without him and that he ought so to conduct himself that his life would be in harmony with this "something."

This is an experience many men have. In fact it is of so frequent an occurrence that we are warranted in saying it is an experience common to all men. Psychologists as well as religionists have studied this "something" and have found it is not without, but within; that it is an instinctive tendency which man develops morally and philosophically. This tendency is described as the religious in man. It is the foundation of all religions. We are not here in the region of hypothesis, but in that of history. The records of historical research fix the fact that man, always and everywhere, has been moved by a tendency which sooner or later issued in religious belief. Whatever the theories as to the origin and cause of this religious tendency, the fact stubbornly remains that man innately or intuitively is religious. No philosophy has been able to create a religion ; and no psychology has been able to find the phenomena of the religious elsewhere except in man. It is not an outward influence, but an inward energy. Man does not acquire it, he is born with it. The center and circumference of religion and of religious instinct man has found in the Being whom, with the concensus of the world's opinion, we call God.

Such a fact should lead thoughtful men to consider not whether there is a God, but how are we to think of God. The tendency, of course, is to think of Him in human terms and we are quite apt to create Him in our own image. To impart to Him the characteristics and attributes of man is to make Him a tenuous abstraction. Hence Haeckel's scoff at Diety as a "gaseous vertebrate." But can we think differently of God? "Anthropomorphism in some degree is inevitable, because each man must think in terms of his own experience. Into his own personal universe, all that he knows must come." 4 Science must speak of nature in human terms just as well as philosophy must think of God in human terms. There is no term the scientist can use which is not a formula of the human mind. The terms force and cause applied to nature and the ongoing of things are just as much derived from human experience as the terms mind and heart applied to God. "Modify them as you may, all causal conceptions are born from within, as reflections or reductions of our personal, animal, or physical activity: and the severest science is, in this sense, just as anthropomorphic as the most ideal theology." 5

And yet we are told that the idea of God cannot be anthropomorphic, and appeal to the thoughtful man. A crude anthropomorphism that would attach to the Divine Being the limitations of human kind, we cannot, of course, defend. But may we not move out from the idea of God imaged in the form of man to the idea of God thought of

* David Starr Jordan: Stability of Truth, p. 163.

6 Martineau: A Study of Religion, Vol. I, p. 336. For a number of quotations on anthropomorphism see Note 2 to Lecture I, Illingworth: Personality, Human and Divine, pp. 219-232. See also George A. Gordon: The Christ of T6-day, p. 86, and The New Epoch for Faith, p. 265.

essentially as spirit like man? Can we not say that as the real man is spirit the real God also must be? Of course Jesus has told us that God is a spirit. But he added, they who worship Him can worship Him only in spirit. We know nothing of spirit except human spirit. Indeed, we can be sure in our knowledge of only a very little of this. But the human spirit we do know has sufficient marks and characteristics to lead us to believe that it must have a likeness to another spirit from which it derives its power and in which it finds its fullness. If the ancients, or even our fathers, were guilty of thinking about God in a crude anthropomorphism, this is no reason why we should stop thinking about God in the only way and with the only means possible. Our task is to purify our thought ; to bring our ideas of God into perfect harmony with the best we have been able to realize in human life and with our highest ideals.

When man thinks of anything really worth while he thinks of something noble rather than base, something high rather than low. He is conscious of a spiritual impulse which pushes him upward. He has ideas of a great unknown where life is richer, better, more real. A heaven is projected, and a Lord of all. This Lord of all must be good, He must be holy, He must be loving. Hence He must be a self, a personality, and He must have moral relation to those who aspire to reach or know Him. This is a crude thought of God. But it is the thought of countless intelligent people. They are not able to formulate their thought according to the rules of logic. They are hard put to it to give a reason for their belief in God. But they do believe in Him ; and what is vastly of more consequence, they live, or want to live, as though He existed. They are not very far removed, after all, from the scientist who could not formulate a satisfactory reason for the existence of God, but who nevertheless said, "man can do his duty." Men want to be in right relations with the being whom they call God. And this fact, as stubborn a fact as we find in the whole human realm, gives warrant, if not validity, for the presuppositions, crude as some of them are, for the existence of God.

Now we cannot think of God apart from personality. Although much vagueness, and even doubt, exists as to the meaning of the term, 6 we need not lose ourselves here in abstractions. "The principle of personality is a positive and fertile principle." It is "one of the most fertile principles which has ever been able to establish itself." 7 We sense its meaning because we

s "Whatever the Power be that sustains the world, we cannot conceive it to be a person even if we knew what a person meant." G. Lowe Dickinson: Knowledge and Faith, Hibbert Journal, April, 1908, p. 521.

7 Harold Hoffding: The Philosophy of Religion, pp.

cannot understand anything in this world except through the medium of the thinking, feeling, willing self. 8 This is personality. The soul of nature means nothing if we can think of nature only on the basis of mechanism with no personal directing power. The soul of man is nothing but a term if it begins and ends in itself and has no relation to other souls or to the one Soul. Men trust nature, else they would not till the ground and sow; they trust men, else they would not venture on social or business relations ; they trust God, else they could not hold to the trustworthiness of nature and man. Such words as trust and trustworthiness imply personality, and the heart of the implication has a moral significance. The moral relation implies not only activity actuated by moral motives, but for moral ends. Hence, a moral universe and a community of human beings who can be moral. Hence, also, a communion between God and man, a giving and a receiving, an asking and an answering. In the very nature of things, therefore, God

315-316. See also a most instructive discussion of the whole subject by John Wright Buckham: Personality and the Christian Ideal.

s "The self itself as the subject of the mental life and knowing and experiencing itself as living, and as one and the same throughout its changing experiences, is the surest item of knowledge we possess." Borden P. Bowne: Personalism, p. 88.

not only must reveal Himself to man, but must give Himself in all worthiness and dignity to man.

It is impossible for man to hold anything good to himself and for himself. In spite of his naturally selfish disposition, in order really to derive benefit from his possession, he must share it with others. A thought can mean nothing to us unless we impart it to others. This must be true even of God. So the goodness of God is meaningless unless man through God's volition can share in it. "One thing, and only one, we can safely say God must do: He must act according to His own nature." 9 If we believe that God is good, that He holds moral relations to man as well as the universe, of which man is a part, we must hold that God is under obligation to make that goodness and that moral relation known to man so that man can benefit therefrom.

As man thus becomes the object of the revelation, it is valid to assume that God will adapt Himself to man. Living matter is "educable" matter. 10 "It is matter selected and put into a course of training; it will profit by experience." X1 If this is true of living matter in the lower forms, it surely must be true of living

sGwatkin: The Knowledge of God, Vol. I, p. 135.

10 Nathaniel S. Shaler: The Individual, p. 22 f.

n Newman Smythe : Through Science to Faith, p. 19.

THE NATURE OF REVELATION Tl

matter in the highest form. Unless man is an end in himself, he is subject to training. In the lower stages of his development we know he must undergo a process of training. This does not end when he reaches maturity. As he finds unoccupied fields in all ranges of knowledge he would like to possess, so also is he conscious of his inability to possess them. He would profit by experience. He gives himself to study in new realms even when, like Cato, he has reached the age of fourscore. Always and ever he hears voices declaring that much remains to be said to him, but that he is not yet able to bear it. Finality nowhere has been reached. The things we see clearly only lead us to the edge of darkness whose depth we cannot determine. Our little candle makes the night more real. But we push on. What light we have penetrates the gloom, we can see our way and in some places can touch the current that floods our standing place with light. Gradually, gropingly, man advances. If he were not drawn onward he would stop in his tracks. But like the explorer he hears a voice ringing

. . "interminable changes On one everlasting whisper day and night repeated — so : 'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges —

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go !' " 12

Gradually and progressively man has moved. He has received revelation not as though there were only so much of it and it was handed out bit by bit until all was gone, but as though each bit was part of an inexhaustible store and was a little more complex and comprehensive than the last. In our human efforts at education we labor gradually and progressively, adapting the lesson to the learner. We cannot believe that God in His education of man would use less carefully thought out and serviceable methods. We cannot conceive of Him being haphazard where man exercises choice, or unmindful of an end where man, so far as his intelligence and experience go, takes each step with a definite purpose in view. If man must work according to the rule that two and two make four and that the whole is equal to its parts, God must work in the same way. For He is dealing, not with His equals, but with finite men who cannot find themselves in chaos but must be led by rule into order. Difficulties, of course, will arise. They will not inhere in the revelation, however, but grow out of man's unpreparedness. A simple axiom in geometry

12 Rudyard Kipling: The Explorer, Collected Verse, p. 19.

will puzzle a pupil in the primary grade but ought not to present any difficulties to a high school student. Revelation will not settle all intellectual difficulties for some men, nor will it settle some intellectual difficulties for all men. If it did, it would not be revelation and there could be no intellectual endeavor. In general, revelation will be intellectually clearing because in essence it will be simple and adapted to its subject.

Revelation, therefore, will not be limited to a particular time nor adapted only to a certain people. It will be received in time by particular individuals. But its scope must be timeless and extra-individual. The word of God must have had the same meaning for the first thinking man as it has for the thinking man to-day. The latter will get more out of it. But this is not because there was less revelation which the former might have had, but because the thinker of to-day can appropriate more of it than his earlier brother could. He takes revelation not only through the experience of the race, but through a larger range of subjects and purposes in the light of which revelation is to be interpreted. Man has heard God's voice at divers times and in various ways. The revelation, as we understand it, always has had reference to the progress of the race and the readiness of the individual man.

But as we assume God to be One and Unchangeable, so must we regard His truth. In this sense His revelation has been full and complete, man's knowledge of it partial and received by defined stages. A fullness of time must come before man can see through the further purposes of God which existed from the beginning. And we must assume that God will use certain means of leading man to see His truth. But we cannot suppose truth grows with God, as it does with man. God is the truth. In ways best known to Him He gives Himself so that man can appropriate more and more of Him. In nowise could He limit Himself to a particular time or to a particular way of revealing Himself. Such a question as the revelation of God to so-called heathen peoples cannot arise when we consider that, from the beginning, God has been revealing Himself. We find His presence in the literature and the life of peoples who lived ages before the patriarchs of the Old Testament. And we need not be surprised when the literature of such peoples shows a deep insight into the being and purpose of God. For if God loves his children, we must assume that He has loved them from the very beginning, and not that He permitted the race to begin and grow for a long period of years before He turned His kindly countenance upon it and reached down His arms to take it into a loving embrace. God revealed

Himself long before the first child of Israel was born. Nay, we must even go further and say that God was in readiness to reveal Himself before any son of man was born. We read that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork." Man discovered this fact. As he contemplated it he was lost in wonder and praise. But he only discovered the fact. It existed long before he was born, and shows God's evident purpose in revealing Himself to man. He left His mark on the rocks in the hills, on the stars in the heavens, on the waters of the deep, all for the purpose of making Himself known to man. Revelation, with man as its object, will also be moral and livable. We may say it will be ethical and not metaphysical. It will have to do with the practical ; not with the theoretical phases of life. We cannot see or know the sun except as we have certain indications concerning it. Men believe it exists and that it gives light and heat. But the sun itself we cannot know. So, metaphysically speaking, we cannot know God. He does not reveal His actual self to us. But men believe He exists. As they live by appropriating the light and heat of the sun, so do they think they find life in God by living the truth which they believe He reveals. This faith has a satisfying content. Men know error is not livable. They base their actions on what they know to be true and dependable, even although they have a very little amount of truth. As this tendency of man finds its cause in God, we assume that God's impartation of Himself is moral and ethical. Men take it to be so and feed upon Him. And the result of their nourishment is a healthful, ruddy, wholesouled life which means soundness and sanity. It also means not only a desire to be good, but a large amount of goodness actually achieved. If the truth of God in its expression to man has a spiritualizing effect, we can dispense with the formal rules of logic in trying to ascertain His nature. We can look at the countless lives which have fed on this belief of His moral and ethical nature and have assurance of the kind of Being He must be. We can regard metaphysics as the theory of God's being and ethics as the fact thereof. The one would be theoretical, the other practical. Only the moral and ethical revelation of God would be livable. And if man could not live the truth of God it would have no value for anyone but God. To think of God shut up to His own truth is impossible.

Revelation is the unfolding of God to man. It has meaning for man only as he makes effort to understand it. It is adapted to man's capacities. It is gradual, progressive, timeless, universal, moral and livable.

Ill

"Man's life now, as of old, is the genuine work of God; wherever there is a man, a God also is revealed, and all that is godlike; a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its meanings, lies enfolded in the life of every man." — Carlyle.

As man is the object of revelation it may be well to consider Job's question of old: "What is man that thou shouldest magnify him, and that thou shouldest set thy mind upon him?" The chemist and the zoologist both have an answer to the question, what is man? The one reduces him to his chemical compounds ; the other classifies him in the animal world. But we go neither to the chemist nor to the zoologist for an answer to the question. What do so many pounds of carbon or lime, so many ounces of sodium or iron or potassium or magnesium or silican, so many cubic feet of oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen mean to us? Or how much wiser are we when we are told that man is a featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus homo? Carbon is not conscious, lime cannot think, phosphorus does not suffer. Neither does the 35 animal kingdom as we commonly understand that term supply any analogy from which we could deduce our idea of man. He resembles the body of lower animals, speaking in the most general terms, and is properly classed among them ; he is controlled by the common laws of physical and chemical action, he is material in a vital and important sense. But he is so differentiated from the material that when we speak of man we unconsciously leave the material out of consideration. We look not to his body ; we look for the man behind the exterior form. He manifests himself to us in action, and only by the nature of his action can we tell what he is.