The study of the English Bible

Front matter

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Preface

The following pages embody the results of an earnest attempt to apply the elementary principles of the study -process as ordinarily understood to the English Bible. The book is nothing more and nothing else than this. The explanation and justification of a discussion so rigidly confined to the sphere of method, are to be sought in the peculiar situation in which we find ourselves. In view of this situation it is offered without misgiving or apology.

It is generally conceded that we have fallen upon evil days as regards the popular knowledge and use of the Bible. In many respects our greatest book is as much lost to the people as in the days preceding the discovery of the "book of the law" in the reign of Josiah.

The most serious element in this painful situation is that it is really without excuse. The progressive loss of popular interest in the Bible has proceeded coincidently with general advance in popular education, and, specifically, in Biblical Science. It has

PREFACE gone on in the face of the fact that a trained body of specialists, impressive both in numbers and personnel, exists among us whose task it is to teach the Bible. It has gone on in spite of the fact that the Bible is humanity's chief literary asset and the most interesting book in the world. It is the firm conviction of the writer, based upon observation and experience, that the conspicuous and lamentable failure to keep the Bible in its rightful place is due, primarily, to a wrong method of studying and teaching it.

On the one hand what is known as " scholarship" has considered the English Bible beneath its notice and has consequently lost its way in details of learning which have not been rightly correlated to the mastery and presentation of the Bible as a whole and in its wholeness, which are the only conditions of effectiveness.

On the other hand, students and teachers of the English Bible have too much neglected the necessity of acquiring an exact and scientific method and applying it with industry and precision to their abundant materials. Hence scholars and popular teachers have worked at cross-purposes

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PREFACE with each other, while both classes alike have failed to grasp the fundamental truth that details of information, however interesting to the specialist, remain mere fragments until they are seen in relationship and that the field of popular interest is always occupied by the larger unities of related facts. This conviction, that the tap-root of our troubles, which are both intellectual and spiritual, is an inefficient method of dealing with the Bible, is so deeply fixed in the mind of the writer, that, in the present work, every consideration has been sacrificed, often at the cost of no little self-denial, to the exposition of method.

If in any way this discussion shall contribute to the establishment of a better method, and aid in the great work, to which many hands more skilful must contribute, of placing the study of the English Bible where it belongs in the estimation of those who are entrusted with the responsibility of teaching the coming generations, the purpose of its writing will be fully realized.

Finis opus coronat.

Louis Matthews Sweet.

Contents

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Preface v

I. Study and the Bible 1

II Organization Of The Student Life

In the preceding chapter we have outlined a plan of study which, if followed out, must sooner or later bring the mind into contact with the objective body of facts which we call the Bible.

The persistent study of books will finally carry one through the entire sixty-six. The study of words, seriatim, will one day make our catalogue relatively complete. So is it with poems, groups of books, historical periods. The number of these is not infinite. In the course of time they can be gone over. The extent of the field of study is definite and ascertainable. On the other hand, intensively, the Bible cannot be thus meted out and bounded. Exhaustive study of any portion of it, to say nothing of the whole, touches upon the infinite.

Indeed, it is doubtful whether we know

the meaning of exhaustive study in any

field, or have any right to use the word as

descriptive of our human endeavors. I

3 23 have read of a group of English scientists who formed the project of studying "exhaustively" a square yard of turf. The undertaking was finally abandoned because of its unmanageable magnitude.

It is a commonplace but also a great truth that "art is long and time is fleeting. " The study of the Bible in any adequate sense, which contemplates any accurate and balanced relationship between range and depth of study, calls not only for lifelong consecration, but for intelligent and thoughtful planning. Herein lies the theme for our discussion in the present section. The problem is, how to fit such a plan of study into the scheme of a busy and active life, with its absorbing details and its minute subdivision of time.

The fatal flaw in most plans and methods of work is that they are not carried out. What elaborate and scientific schemes for amassing wealth, in the shape of facts, have I not seen go to ruin, not because they were unworkable, but because they were not worked! A method of study is only a guide to work. After the plan is made, the work remains to be done.

It would seem not inappropriate here to point out that plans of study usually go awry because they are not definitely and organically related to the program of life as a whole. That there is something wrong with the intellectual life of the average teacher, religious and otherwise, no one who is at all conversant with the facts can possibly doubt. This is unhappily true in a great measure of the academic teaching force as well as of men in the pastorate and of laymen whose duty and privilege it is to teach. I have been told, by a leading teacher with a wide clerical acquaintance, that the graduates of that particular institution who are really "doing anything" in an intellectual way form an almost negligible minority. An unusually intelligent layman, a teacher in the Sunday school, said to me not long ago: "I have not read a book in I do not know when." It is a practically universal fact that the majority of men who are engaged in the active work of Christian leadership, both as clerical and lay workers, are living on the accumulation of student days and openly lament the decay of their student life.

What is the difficulty? It is not that these men do not, in the aggregate, read and study a great deal. The great lack in the lives of most teachers and religious workers who ought to be students is a comprehensive plan of study which unifies the student life. Vast stores of valuable energy are wasted in sporadic and desultory study which lacks unity, consecutiveness, and progressive value. How many public men of our acquaintance are marked men as knowing some subject thoroughly and well? How many men among these same supposed leaders of thought are able at call to dip from their accumulated stores a really effective address on any book or passage of Scripture? As a matter of fact, many, if not most, of these leaders and teachers would have to confess that men of the Bible, as they are supposed to be, they do not know it and do not know how to deal with it in effective exposition. In a multitude of cases their only salvation as public speakers is to get away from any chosen passage as soon as possible into the vague, safe region of pious generalities. May I also say, by way of emphasis, that these are

ORGANIZATION OF TEE STUDENT LIFE

not random remarks, but are the essential distillation of many actual personal confessions.

The difficulty is not, as many allege, the lack of time; it is the lack of coordination in the use of time. This failure is evident even in the lives of men whose opportunity and leisure for study are great. The late President Harper of Chicago University has said: "It is probable that the time of the summer vacation is largely wasted by from sixty to seventy per cent of the teachers in our colleges and universities." ("Trend in Higher Education," p. 90.) He continues: "The long summer vacation is in the case of teachers intended, not for rest, but for work, and yet it may fairly be said that the percentage I have named utterly waste it, so far as any tangible results are concerned" (ibid., p. 91).

If the pastor or parish worker is inclined to retort that no such long vacation is at his disposal, he is to be reminded that he has the advantage of the teacher, who works on a regular schedule of hours, in having or in being able to have his mornings at his disposal. There is time enough for all necessary work if it is only used. There is no lack of examples either in literature, art, or industry to show what vast results may be accomplished in the combination of minute increments of labor with a comprehensive plan. Brick by brick the great building is constructed; letter by letter the great book is written; just as in nature, cell by cell, the great tree grows.

Men habitually waste more time than would really be needed for a noble life work in the acquisition and expression of knowledge if only the uncounted odds and ends of time were saved and used. The maker of mosaics may build his wonderful pictures out of the fragments of material cast to the void by other workers.

Waste of time and effort in the brief life of a student and teacher is monstrous and appalling. It ought not to be and it need not be. All that is necessary is to put our intelligence at work upon the task of organizing life as a whole. Every day which is related to other days in a scheme of living which binds all together and brings them to a focus upon a foreseen purpose has a double value, that which belongs to itself and that which it gains from the others. Every bit of work which is part of a continuous process moving toward a foreseen end to which many items contribute gains the same enhancement of value by incorporation into that which is great enough to lend greatness to all its parts. A pillar in a temple is not merely a pillar; it is a part of the temple.

Now, to do this kind of work, in such a way that proportion, in the breadth and depth of the work done, and orderly progression are maintained, calls for the definite organization of the student life so that every moment of industry may contribute to the foreseen issue and result of it as a whole. Why should not an intelligent man, with important work on his hands, plan his life, as an architect plans a building, in such a way that every spadeful of earth which is turned, every stone which is cut, every beam which is shaped, fits into its place and contributes to the result?

A building is not a fortuitous jumble of parts standing out of relationship, but an orderly construction which embodies in its unified complexity a great group of ideas.

The relationship of the parts gives them enhanced meaning through the idea which jointly, not singly, they express.

A life lived in the fufilment of a plan, unified in the pursuance of a purpose, is not a calendar of days, each one of which disappears as the next takes its place. It is not a list of unrelated acts. It is a great edifice into which the days and the acts of life are built and in which they remain.

1. The first necessity in the process of unifying life is to organize it on general lines so as to escape the tyranny of specific tasks. The meaning of this possibly somewhat obscure statement is this : Many preachers and teachers of undoubted power are hopelessly desultory and aimless in their work because they are always absorbed in unrelated specific tasks. They never study in the organized and continuous way which produces results, because they are helpless captives of the passing moment. They are always preparing for next Sunday's sermon or next Wednesday's address. There is no time in such a system for orderly and progressive mastery of any great subjects, simply because life is lived, intellectually,

ORGANIZATION OF TEE STUDENT LIFE

from hand to mouth in a constant and unsuccessful attempt to get beyond the pressure of stated or occasional duties. Progressive impoverishment and ultimate mental bankruptcy are the Nemesis of this method.

When a man, who, by every implication of his professional position, is pledged to a life of study, does no continuous study, masters no department of knowledge, has nothing in possession except unrelated items of superficial information, he is a contradiction, and his defeat and downfall are certain. Such a career is inevitable to the man who spends his study time in the fragmentary studies which are directed toward preparation for immediate and pressing publicobligations.

The first step therefore in his emancipation is to fence off and keep sacred to constructive general work, irrespective of immediate obligations, a portion of time. On the basis of personal experience I am prepared to say that, in the long run, any man will preach better and teach better who will give three-fourths of his study time to this general, continuous, cumulative work which has absolutely no foreseen bearing upon his next public appearance.

It will take courage to cut loose from the old method — but the outcome is not in doubt. Out of a full mind, enriched by increasingly wide cultural studies, one will speak with undreamed-of freedom and power. Great sermons and addresses are always dipped from the full current of a mind fed to the overflow by contributory streams flowing out of many hours of continuous study life. The preparation of the man is the best preparation for the occasion.

2. A second element in this organization of student life for the Christian worker is to establish the Bible securely at the center. Theoretically the Bible is at the center of every Christian teacher's student life; actually it is only too often on the periphery. The proof of this assertion is twofold. In the first place, most religious teachers spend far more time in reading books about the Bible than in the study of the Bible itself. This fact, which is adequate and convincing evidence of a wrong method, is too patent to need discussion.

And much so-called Bible study proceeds 32 at a tangent from the Bible. A great deal of it is merely textual and therefore fragmentary. A great deal of it is concerned with general discussions in which the biblical material plays a minor or merely illustrative part. The look of the biblical page, the content of the larger units of literary construction, the movements of thought, the meaning of books as a whole, are strange to many who think themselves students of the Bible. There are many who read discussions of biblical topics, bristling with Scriptural quotations, without the open Bible and without looking up the references. The conditions among us call for wholesale and thoroughgoing readjustment.

Another indication of the same condition is the aimless and fruitless inquiries which are constantly made about books. Any man who studies the Bible for himself will discover that which no book contains ; he will also discover, by an inevitable process of natural selection, the books which he needs. 1

When, therefore, men are chasing wildly about for books which deal with this or that aspect of the Bible there is evidence enough

iSee Appendix, Note I.

that they have not yet escaped from the bondage of random reading to the freedom of true, progressive, and intensive study. The centralizing of the Bible in the study life will involve a twofold change in the intellectual habits of most men. (a) It will involve a restriction in the number of books read. No busy man can study the Bible as it ought to be studied and keep abreast of the current of religious and near-religious literature as it flows from the press. The comforting fact here is that he ought not to attempt this in any case.

I should like at this point to demolish a bugbear which is the curse of many a man's life. It is often said: " The minister should be a man of one book, the Bible. " To this it is said, by way of reply, that he ought to be a man of all books worth while. In the very thought of all these books terror lurks. These apparently counter statements are really two sides of one truth. To be a man of the one great book is to be a man of all books. This is meant, not in the narrow and fanatical sense of the Caliph Omar, but in the spirit of most genial appreciation of all good literature. The point is this, a man is not made broad by wide reading but by thorough reading. True culture involves a rigid selective process in the line of one's own personal aptitudes and the necessities of his life work.

It is necessary to guard one's self, on the one hand, against indiscriminate and omnivorous reading, which is a deadly foe to mental power; and, on the other, against the narrowness of over-specialization, which is almost equally destructive of intellectual life in any broad and liberal sense. These two perils may be avoided by generalizing one's specialty. It is a fact, though perhaps not generally recognized, that the intensive process in any field of study yields ultimately the broadest results in the way of general culture. 1

A floating sentence caught my eye some time since: "A man cannot know any subject which requires intelligence without knowing more than that subject." In this fugitive and unfathered sentence I find the deepest philosophy of the study life. To know anything well is to know it in its relationships — and where do the relation-

i See Appendix, Note A.

ships of any fact or group of facts in the universe end? The use of the word "universe" is indication enough that there is no end to such relationships save the limits of the universe itself. Intensive study grips the totality of related facts by the handle of one. I have yet to meet the man too large for a country parish, or too wise for any single department of human knowledge. The truth involved in this principle should be eagerly appropriated by the religious worker in establishing a center for his intellectual life. The lateral outreach of really profound Bible study involves, as belonging to its essential context, whatever men have thought or felt or done. The Bible iji its narrowest dimension is as broad as man and the world. If only the Bible student would venture to restrict his reading to such of the best books as his study and the devout curiosity which that study arouses naturally lead to, going out upon literature, history, science, and art through the avenues which the Bible itself opens, his work would be graciously unified, his time would be saved, while the best of the world's thought would assuredly come into his possession.

(b) The centralizing of the Bible will have another beneficent result, just now suggested, in affording a principle of selection among books. My impression is that most young students, at least, find themselves, in the world of books, like belated travelers lost in a trackless forest. Certainly a rigid process of selection is absolutely essential. But how select? With the Bible itself at the center selection is not so difficult. There are two qualities which one should desire in books for Bible study, and the use of these two qualities as tests will effectively sift the immense mass of literature which is at hand. One needs, first of all, books which will aid to more effective original study. The book which comes between the student and the Bible, and contributes nothing in the way of method or workable principles of interpretation, is to be avoided. The book which is intended to accompany study and which, by its construction, compels to direct personal study, is to be chosen. Books of this character are not the most interesting nor the easiest to read. But one needs tools, not crutches.

The true student wishes direction and 37 inspiration in his work — not to have his work done for him. We wish to be taught how to work, not to have our hands guided. In the last analysis the student must go his own way and depend upon himself. The book which from the beginning teaches him how to do this by demanding much from him is always the best. The other criterion is that the book in its treatment shall give us broader, clearer, truer views of the Bible as it is in its wholeness. Here is where a multitude of books and of dictionary articles fail. As topical studies, more or less completely illustrated by Scripture references, they are well enough, but they leave no distinct and unified impression upon the mind. They lack what in art is called "breadth and simplicity of treatment/' which is defined as "the results of a painter's ability to see the large significance of things; to view his subject, as it were, from afar off, so that it is seen apart from its littlenesses of detail in its essential character." (Caffin: "How to Study Pictures/' p. 485.)

One constantly rises from the reading of discussions, marked by both learning and logic, confused in mind and utterly unable to relate the discussion or to apply it to the Bible, as it stands in the unity of its parts and must be used. It gives a reader the feeling, so acute at times as to be the cause of positive irritation, that somehow the Bible itself has been lost in the intricacies of the discussion. It is like a picture puzzle — "Here is an article on the Bible. Find the Bible." There are so-called biblical theologies in which one looks in vain for any discussion of a continuous and unified passage of Scripture. There are commentaries and introductions which are nothing more than histories of opinion on certain portions of the Bible. Here again the Bible itself is lost under superimposed masses of comments. Teachers of the Bible should remember that it has a definite literary and historical constitution, and that to treat it in this disjointed and fragmentary way is to make a true understanding of it impossible.

It is the hereditary curse of all such scribism that it obscures the sacred page and comes as a veil between the reader and that which he ought to be made to see with open vision. We need the Bible, not mosaics of Scripture texts. We need contact, not with comment and comment upon comment, but with the text itself. The Bible, which is a living book with a vital message, must be allowed to speak for itself.

The habit, to which the learned are peculiarly liable, of copying the copyist is deadly. Creative work in any department is the outcome of direct and fresh contact with reality itself. A rebirth of art always comes when some bold spirit ventures to look past the masters to that which the masters have endeavored to portray. The greatest need of our age in Bible study is the study of the Bible. We need aids in that study, but to fail of personal contact with the actual living Book itself is to put ourselves beyond the reach of aid. 1

3. One other important element in the unification of the student life ought to be recog-

iAs an illustration of the "chasing" for books spoken of a few pages back and also of the method here spoken of, the following is suggested. I have often had people come to me for books on the "difficulties" of the Bible. Ordinarily I decline to make such a recommendation. No student, at least in his nonage, ought to read a book on this subject, for two reasons. In the first place, continuous reading upon such a book is numbing to the mind because dealing with negatives. In the second place, the process is artificial and unnatural. The student should, first of all, deal with his own difficulties as they arise in the actual course of his Bible study. When a passage of Scripture, carefully studied, raises a question it will be time enough to search for an nized and emphasized, namely: the formation of far-reaching schedules of study. A student ought never to be at loss as to the proper use of any hour which may be given to study simply because it should be devoted to a task already in hand which laps over many such hours and demands them all.

Only by an undertaking large enough to require not merely days and months but years for its completion can the average man's life, otherwise broken into fragments by the divisions of time and countless distractions, be brought into anything like unity. Hence the necessity of forming comprehensive schemes of study and conforming one's habits to them. One can hardly venture to suggest specific plans of work for others; circumstances, needs, and personal gifts vary so greatly. We ought to recognize

answer. By this method the student comes upon the difficulty through the study of that which has a positive quality and more often than not an answer may be found, at the very point of question. Most difficulties are due to misunderstanding. A course in Apologetics ought to be open to mature students only, be very brief and, above all, constructively biblical. Seeberg says ("Grundwahrheiten der Christlichen Religion," 5th German Edition, p. 4.) one of the most evident causes of modern unbelief " is the horrible and to a degree disgraceful ignorance of our educated men in religious things" (see whole paragraph). He, therefore, undertakes, in the interests of Apologetics, nothing more than careful and accurate exposition.

the fact that the educational values as well as the practical utility of courses of study differ with individuals differently constituted and differently placed in life. Nothing is attempted here beyond certain suggestions sufficiently general and fundamental to admit of wide application.

(a) One needs, of course, a principle in accordance with which one may form a comprehensive and progressive scheme of Bible study. This can be constructed most easily and most logically along lines of natural formation by studying the biblical books in succession. 1 Book study, of course, involves word study, structural study, and the study of historical periods as they appear in each book, while, at the same time, placing the books in orderly succession keeps the historical factors in which the books are set and the whole Bible in which they culminate continually in view. By this method a wholesome balance between the extensive and intensive dimensions of study is maintained, and the mind is exercised in the various modes of application which make Bible study so invigorating and inspiring

1 See Appendix, Note H.

as mental discipline. For thorough work one should contemplate the study of two to four books a year, according to the size of the books and the amount of time at one's disposal. The student should be careful, above all things, to begin the work in the book itself without other aid or comment than the open page diligently studied, to train himself in minute observation, in the power of fruitful comparison, in responsiveness to suggestion, in fertility of interpretive thought.

(b) In the second place, I should urge the adoption of a specialty; that is, the choice of a department of study of which one is fond and to which he spontaneously turns when the mind is free. Such a study, once interest in it is fairly kindled, becomes at once a discipline and a recreation. It stimulates to greater energy by introducing the element of change and rest and insures against the waste of intervals of time, one of our most serious losses. It builds under one's whole life a structure of enduring interest. It does more than this; it guarantees that in the course of time there shall be at least one subject which the minister or Christian worker shall know thoroughly. It is impossible, at the present stage of human knowledge, for any man to know everything, or even anything about everything. But it is possible for a man of industry to know everything that is to be known about something. But such a mastery even of a limited field means education, it means freedom, it means power.

Such work overflows its banks and pervades with its influence one's whole life. To spend years on a single book, a single word, means that during the whole time every phase of one's work shall be better done. The results are to be measured by their effect upon the whole man as he goes out upon his entire work.

(c) A third and final suggestion is this: Everyman called to a student life, who wishes to grow, ought to have continually before him a bit of difficult work which puts his best powers on the stretch. There is a very definite bit of psychology behind this suggestion. The most insidious peril of professional men, certain classes of them, at least, is that, in the presence of formal obligations which can be met without excess of effort, the life, in spite of the appearance of industry, shall become fundamentally indolent. Teachers who are called upon for the same subjects year after year, preachers whose audiences are not critical, must find stimulation to work as inner impulse and principle, or lapse into idleness. The best corrective of this tendency is for one to keep driving at a hard task, to hold one's self habitually to a bit of investigation, translation, philosophical or doctrinal reading, which really puts a constant and steady strain upon mind and will. Self -discipline of a severe and strenuous order is the only alternative to impairment of vigor and loss of usefulness through a fatally easy lapse into habits of waste and idleness.