The nature and method of revelation

Introduction

The first part of this volume is composed of a series of Articles which were written at the request of the editor of " The Century Magazine," and have lately been published in that periodical. They have now been carefully revised and somewhat enlarged. The additions do not cover a great deal of space, but they will contribute, as I hope, to the better elucidation of the subject. The concluding portion of the volume comprises a number of Essays on important topics in New Testament criticism which are briefly touched upon in the preceding chapters.

There is no apparent diminution of interest in the study of the Bible. Never to so great a degree as at present has it been the object of thorough scrutiny. The interest in biblical study, as distinguished from the mere reading of the Bible for a purely practical end, has spread widely, and is by no means confined to the class whose calling it is to interpret its convi INTRODUCTION.

tents. Under these circumstances it is more than ever important that the Bible should be looked at from the right point of view. In the course of my own studies and reflections, the perception of the relation of the Scriptures to the historical process of Divine Revelation, the end and aim of which was the full introduction of the kingdom of God through him who, although he was " meek and lowly in heart," did not hesitate to style himself " the Light of the World," — the perception, I say, of this relation has become in my mind constantly more distinct and vivid. In this ground-work of historical reality, this gradual entering of God with a transforming energy into the course of human history, I find a solvent for numerous difficulties of Scripture and a help in its interpretation. These are the points which I have tried, with such measure of light as I possess, to illustrate in the following pages.

It is now several centuries since the Bible began to be examined critically, with an earnestness not before applied to the study, by methods more in accord with the canons of true science, and in connection with a marvellous progress of human knowledge in all branches of research. It would be strange indeed if large gains should not have been made through so great and long-continued exertions, in which so many scholars belonging to different

INTRODUCTION. vn

nations have been engaged. Opinions respecting the character of the Scriptures could not remain absolutely unchanged. The Scriptures remain, and must continue to be, the Christian's guide in matters of faith and duty, the normative exposition of Christian doctrine. When they are taken collectively, in their entire compass, the New Testament in connection with the Old, — and only then is their sufficiency affirmed in the Protestant creed, — there is seen to inhere in this body of writings a selfcompleting, and in that way and to that extent a self-rectifying, quality. Not all the specific opinions, however, that were held in former times under the general formula stated above, can be retained now by candid students of the Holy Scriptures. We are not living in the middle of the seventeenth century, but in the last decades of the nineteenth. All the ascertained results of this fruitful period of biblical investigation must be frankly recognized. In the end Christian Evidences will be seen to be the stronger by this allegiance to truth and loyalty to conscience. In these days no real service is done to the Christian cause by stubbornly adhering to dogmatic prepossessions which have been proved to be untenable, — still less by unseemly denunciation of Christian believers who have been led by conscientious inquiry to abandon them. It is wise for vin INTRODUCTION".

those who are no longer young to remember an early resolution of Jonathan Edwards. " I observe," says Edwards in his Diary, " that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because they are beside the way of thinking to which they have been so long used. Resolved, if ever I live to [advanced] years, that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking." In biblical science as in natural science, incidental to all this activity in investigation there are no doubt many unverified speculations. This does not imply that there are no sure gains, no healthful progress. The lesson to be drawn is that new opinions are to be sifted, and the wheat separated from the chaff. There is no better motto for the student than the words of the Apostle Paul : " Prove all tilings ; hold fast that which is good."

Five and twenty years have passed since, in my work entitled " Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity," I reviewed elaborately the critical and historical theories of Baur and his school relative to the origin of Christianity and the New Testament writings, and the rise of the Catholic Church of the second century. It was then confidently proclaimed by many that by this school the last word

INTRODUCTION. ix

of science on these momentous questions had been spoken. Now in the new school of criticism in Germany the fundamental tenets of the Tiibingen critics are pretty generally forsaken. Professor Huxley was apparently not aware of this fact when he referred lately to Baur, Volkmar, Zeller, and others with them, as authoritative expositors of critical science. It simply shows that even a man of so clear and penetrating intelligence as Professor Huxley cannot safely intermit his reading of German divinity. In the land where his authors dwelt, the wind changes too often. In this time of ferment, when the multiform tongues of the Press are everywhere heard, intellectual changes are rapid everywhere, but nowhere, probably, so rapid as among our Teutonic cousins over the Sea. The extent to which the basal propositions of the Tubingen school have already become obsolete, is indicated in the following words from an article by Professor Harnack : —

" The possible picture it sketched was not the real, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple. . . . They [the Tubingen views] have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. But as regards the development of the Church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tubingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars."

35 INTRODUCTIOX.

There are individuals, to be sure, who show a disposition to fall back on some of the peculiar positions of the Tubingen school concerning the New Testament narratives. This appears to be the case with Holtzmann in his Introduction to the New Testament and in his recent Commentary. But generally speaking, while Baur's services in awakening thought, and the value of his contributions to learning, are highly appreciated, as they ought to be, the leading features of his system are no longer accepted. It seems to be our lot to hear in English the echoes of the conflicts in Germany of a generation ago. Mr. T. H. Green brings back Hegelism with him to Oxford, and gives himself up to the fascination of Baur's historical theories. An outcome of the Hegelian theology thus derived is " Robert Elsmere," a pleasing love-story, steeped in an infusion of Baur and Strauss, but treated by friend and foe as if it contained some new discovery threatening the foundations of the Christian religion. The new criticism in Germany, however, notwithstanding its comparative sobriety, brings forward, by way of substitute for the Tubingen theories, views respecting the evangelical history and the authorship of the New Testament writings — for example, the Fourth Gospel — which are open to serious objections. To some of these hypotheses attention is given in several of the closing Essays of this volume.

INTRODUCTION. xi

The assailant of Christianity in the eighteenth century was Deism ; the assailant, open or latent, of Christianity in the nineteenth century is Pantheism. Deism conceived of God as apart from the world ; it was taken up with the thought of his transcendence. Now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Pantheism is taken up with the immanence of God. Each lays hold of a half-truth. The two half-truths unite in Christian theism, which does not ignore the indwelling of God and his all-present energy, but at the same time recognizes his free, conscious personality. In him we live and move : he is a Father, and hears the prayers of his children. He is neither to be separated from the world nor confounded with it. The influence of the Pantheistic systems that followed Kant is not yet spent. One may liken them in their seductive splendor to the structure raised by the fallen angels, where —

" From the arched roof, Pendent by subtle magic, many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light As from a sky."

Outside of its philosophical statement in the German idealists after Kant, and in disciples of Spinoza, Pantheism gets a lodgment in certain empirical systems where we might not expect to find it. Spencer's

Xil INTRODUCTION.

philosophy has been aptly characterized by Mansel as an attempt to engraft Pantheism upon Positivism. The ;i Unknowable " has no function different from that of a natural force. It is difficult to believe that the proposal to found religion on such a conception of God can be seriously meant.

In literature we are reminded of the prevalence of a Pantheistic drift of thought and feeling by the recollection of Matthew Arnold's resolution of God into "a stream of tendency" on the side of righteousness, or of lines of his like the following, from the poem on Heine's Grave : —

" What are we all but a mood, A single mood, of the life Of the Being in whom we exist, Who alone is all things in one ? "

A like mode of thought pervades the writings of Emerson, although in him Pantheism is not hardened into a consistent creed ; for Emerson to the end clung to the belief in personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this belief the " test of a man's sanity." The Deism of the former day was vanquished. It has no standing in the courts of science. No better lot, it is safe to predict, awaits the Pantheism of the present day. It cannot endure the contact of searching philosophical tests. It is built on assumptions, — definitions converted into

INTRODUCTION. xm

realities, like Spinoza's idea of u substance," or fictitious notions of " the infinite " which have no reality outside of the philosopher's brain. The only religion that is possible under a Pantheistic system is a vague, unsubstantial, unpractical sentiment, prayerless, and with no outlook of hope for the soul beyond the boundary of this fleeting life. To try to collect " the data of ethics " when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost. The reality and profound significance of personality in God and in man, is a truth which is alike essential in all sound philosophy and in all earnest views of human life and duty.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Revelation and the Bible 1

II. The Gradualness of Revelation 46

Chapter I. Revelation And The Bible

In Chillingworth's famous work, " The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation," occurs a sentence which passed into an adage : " The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants." In the sense in which the phrase was used by that acute logician — a writer who had outgrown the narrowness of the school of his godfather Laud, in which he had received his early training — nothing can be more true. It is not from an infallible church that a Protestant derives his creed. With him the Scriptures are the rule of faith. They are the guide, at once authoritative and sufficient or exclusive, on all matters pertaining to religious belief and moral conduct. These are the customary formulas ; and the saying of Chillingworth is a strong assertion of the Protestant position, which stands opposed, on the one hand, to that of the Church of Rome, and, on the other hand, to the rationalism which substitutes, in matters of religion. a subjective standard, be it one's own reasonings or feelings, for the Bible. Statements like this aphorism of Chillingworth have the value and attraction which belong to any terse enunciation of an important principle. They serve as watchwords in defensive warfare when adversaries approaching from opposite quarters are to be repelled. But even Rome, while asserting the authority of tradition, and claiming for the Church the place of an infallible interpreter, does not deny that the Bible is the record of the whole revealed faith. There is small danger of extravagance in praising the Bible, as every one will admit who appreciates what it contains, surveys the influence of this book in the past, and knows its indispensable service in awakening and supporting the life of religion in the souls of men. It is the simple truth, and no mere conventional compliment to the Scriptures, to say that Christian piety cut off from contact with their light-giving and life-giving power would wither away like plants robbed of the sunlight.

But we need not examine the Bible long to become aware of problems and perplexities which the current axioms relative to the sufficiency and authority of Scripture do not clear up. On opening its covers the searcher for truth does not find between them a dogmatic and ethical treatise in which are methodically set down the articles which he is to believe and the things which he is to do. His Bible is not a Tridentine Creed, nor an Augsburg Confession, nor a Westminster Catechism ; nor does it wear the aspect of a systematic account of " the whole duty of man." To be sure, doctrines and precepts are strewn here and there along its pages. But they must be picked out ; and when thus collected they do not always appear at first to agree with one another. The reader discovers that numerous commandments were issued at epochs far back in the past ; that they were addressed to a specific people or to particular individuals, and have no very perceptible application to present circumstances or to himself. The Bible, from which he is expected to ascertain the purpose of life and how that purpose is to be fulfilled, turns out to be a voluminous collection of miscellaneous writings. They emanate from numerous authors, not all of whom are known even by name. These writings were all of them composed long ago and at different times — a portion of them at dates extremely remote. Here are histories, some of them traversing the same ground, and with striking differences in the point of view, to say the least, from which they were written ; poems, among them a copious collection of devotional lyrics, and one metrical drama which may be styled, in the better sense of the term, erotic ; likewise, a book filled with dirges, besides a considerable number of other compilations of discourses by ancient seers ; another drama dealing with the mystery connected with the allotment of evil by Divine Providence ; a collection of proverbs also ; letters of apostles to churches ; the whole ending with a book made up of visions.

This multifarious literature, so far as the older grand division of it is concerned, the ancient Jews distributed into three departments, — the law, the prophets, and the hagio-> grapha, or " psalms ; " the last of the sections being a group that was brought together after the others, and is more diversified in its contents. In the later, or New Testament, division, several narratives of the ministry of Jesus and one narrative of the labors of the Apostles are followed by the Epistles and the Apocalypse. In neither of the two main divisions of the Bible are the component parts united even by the external tie derived from the order in which they were written. In cases not a few, the date of the books is unsettled. Differences of opinion on this point prevail among the scholars who are versed in such inquiries. With reference to certain books, — for example, the first six historical books of the Old Testament, — this diversity of opinion is very wide. No doubt the disagreement on these questions of date is owing partly to the influence of a dogmatic bias in one direction or another, to subjective leanings which are void of scientific value, but rather stand in the way of an unprejudiced verdict. But when allowance is made for the refraction due to innate or acquired prepossession, there is still left no small residue of uncertainty on the topics adverted to. Each of the various authors whose productions have been brought together in the Bible is plainly marked by personal traits which are reflected in both his thought and his style. Obvious limitations belonging to time and place, and to varying types of mind and culture, are stamped upon his pages. The peculiarity of the composite volume which we call " the Bible " — even this title, it is worth while to remark, was originally a plural — is strikingly felt when it is compared with the sacred books of other religions. The Yedas, the ancient Brahmanical scriptures, are mainly collections of hymns. The Koran is composed exclusively of communications alleged to have been made by an angel to one person, Mohammed, and all within an interval of a little more than twenty years. These oracles, flowing as they do from the single mind of the founder of Islam, are identical in their style and their general spirit. It is only a minor portion of the Koran that consists of narratives, and these are simply stories of the patriarchs, drawn from degenerate Jewish and Christian sources, without any direct acquaintance on the part of Mohammed with the Old Testament records. Islam is pre-eminently the religion of a book held to be supernatural in its origin, with nothing before it, or beneath it, or after it.

Various as the books of the Bible are, however, in authorship, themes, and style, it is no exaggeration to say that one spirit animates them. He who approaches them in a merely critical, much more in a carping, temper, may miss the perception of it. A certain activity of conscience and moral sensibility may be requisite for the discernment and appreciation of it. This is not to fall back on a mere subjective impression, invalid except for the individual who experiences it. A deaf man or a man with no ear for music might as reasonably bring the same objection to one who is thrilled by an oratorio of Handel or a symphony of Beethoven. I am credibly informed that a noted American champion of disbelief not long ago, on his way home from a visit to Europe, made the remark with all sincerity that the admiration expressed for the masterpieces of the great painters and sculptors is all a pure affectation, having no better ground than a contagious fashion, and that there is really nothing in these world-famed works of art to merit praise or elicit enthusiasm. But where perceptions, be they aesthetic or moral and religious, are confined to no single breast; where they are awakened in a vast number of human beings, and are to a great degree independent of time and place and of peculiarities of race and education ; and where, moreover, they stand related to the noblest development of character as their concomitant or fruit, — they must be admitted to have a catholic worth. They become equivalent to an objective proof. It is vain to decry them as morbid fancies. They are not to be dismissed as the dreams of a mystic. They are the voice of human nature, — a recognition by man of realities, the denial of which on the part of individuals here or there simply argues an abnormal constitution, or an "atrophy" of powers, an eccentric quality of some kind in the dissenting sceptic. How shall we designate this peculiar characteristic of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, taken as a whole ? It may be denominated the spirit of holiness. It pervades the Bible as an atmosphere.

It imparts to it, if one may so say, a supernal quality, — a quality not of earth. Here are not speculations uttered by sages about man's nature, duty, or destiny. Here are not precepts such as may be read in the wisest of the heathen, — for example, in Plato or Epictetus, or in the pensive chapters of the philosophic Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Where there is some likeness in the content, the tone is dissimilar. We feel the breath of God. To say that the ethical injunctions of the Bible are "morality touched with emotion," is too vague a description. It is morality inculcated as by a voice out of the unseen. Underlying all is the relation, taken for granted more often than formally asserted, of man to God and eternity. Sanctions reaching out beyond this world of time and space give a solemn emphasis to the commandment. And the distinction here accorded to the Bible belongs to the Old Testament as well as to the New. Attempts have been made in ancient and modern times to sever the two parts of the book and to discard the earlier collection. Such was the proceeding of Marcion in the second century, and like views have been brought forward again and again in recent times. It is not the force of a settled tradition that has baffled every such enterprise. It is not even the recognition accorded to the Old Testament by the New which has been the prime obstacle in the way of endeavors of this nature. Rather is it the consciousness that the two parts of the Bible, differ as they may, are not at bottom incongruous and hostile, and a prevailing sense of the fact that grand elements belong to them in common. The same spirit of holiness pervades them both, unites them, and lifts them out of the category of literature in general. The Bible not only interprets God, in his holiness and unfathomable love and pity, to man, it is the interpreter of man to himself. Coleridge tells us that, having striven to cast aside all prejudice, he perused the books of the Old and the New Testaments, — "each book as a whole, and also as an integral part." " And need I say," he testifies, " that I have met everywhere more or less copious sources of truth and power and purifying impulses ; that I have found words for my most inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and feebleness ? In short, whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit, even from the same Spirit which of old entered into the prophets." This is not the experience of one mind only, but of a multitude out of many kindreds and tongues, age after age.

It is true that in thus characterizing the Bible, discriminations are to be made. Not all its books are in this regard, in their power to sound the deep places of the soul, on a level. We find ourselves from the beginning in an elevated region, yet a region where there are hills and valleys. It is vain to pretend that, in the quality referred to, all parts of the Bible are on the same plane. Isaiah and the Psalms, John the Evangelist and the leading Epistles of Paul, are among the portions of the book that rise like lofty peaks in a mountain range. There are many pages within the compass of the canon which, while not without their significance and value as parts of the collection, lack comparatively the spiritual quality which I have attempted to point out. Most readers of Scripture seldom turn to them. There is another fact to be noticed here. There are parts of the Bible which it is hard to understand. Wholesale assertions about the perspicuity of Scripture have to be qualified. The learning of the most erudite scholars and the sagacity of the most expert critics fail to decipher the meaning of a not inconsiderable number of passages in the sacred volume. Protestants have always been obliged to encounter the Roman Catholic objection to the popular use of the Scriptures, that they cannot be understood by the generality of readers. The only way of meeting the objection is that adopted by Chillingworth; namely, to insist that all essential truth — truth essential to salvation and the conduct of life

— is easily discernible on their pages. In this answer it is tacitly conceded that there is left a pretty broad margin which is — to the common man, to say the least

— obscure. Even one of the canonical writers pronounces some things in the Epistles of Paul abstruse (2 Peter iii. 16). Why is this so ? it might be asked ; why all these dark places in Scripture, if it was written for the direct purpose of serving as an authoritative text-book in religion ? When one considers the difficulties of the Bible, not in any captious spirit, as if to hunt up materials for an attack, but fairly and dispassionately ; when one looks at the difficulties which obtrude themselves upon the attention of those who are at all familiar with modern discoveries in natural and physical science, and with modern studies in history and ethnology ; still more, when one takes into view moral difficulties in certain parts of biblical doctrine, especially in portions of the Old Testament, — one may be pardoned for inquiring, Was this body of writings, in its primary intention, designed to be a manual of religious and ethical instruction ? We may concede joyfully a high providential purpose in connection with the composition of the books which it contains, with their preservation, — although it must be remembered that they themselves allude to lost books which were regarded evidently as of equal authority with those in the canon, — and with their foreseen place and office in the Christian Church. But this is quite different from saying that they were originally composed with all this in view on the part of their authors. Especially does it leave out of sight a fact respecting the Scriptures which is in the highest degree important for the understanding and the right use of them, — a fact that furnishes a clew for the solution of the major part of the difficulties which have been adverted to.

The thesis to be here propounded is this : It was not the Scriptures that made the religion, but the religion that made the Scriptures. And the religion was no abstract body of doctrine standing apart from the life of humanity. The Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments are the offshoot of a great historical movement, begun and carried forward to its consummation by an agency supernatural and divine, yet a movement that is, notwithstanding, an integral part of the history of our race. The roots of the sacred literature must be sought in the historical events and transactions that gave rise to it. It were as strange an error to consider the records of the French Revolution, the memoirs of the leaders and minor actors, the discourses and expositions called forth, at the time and afterwards, by this series of momentous events, the songs and ballads of that stormy period, — to consider these multiform writings the Revolution itself, and in a confused way to confound them with it, as it is to identify the books of the Bible with the religion out of which they sprang. To see the justice of this remark, it is only needful to glance at the origin of the New Testament Scriptures. John the Baptist wrote nothing. Jesus wrote nothing. He lived and taught, he gathered about him a band of disciples, he died and rose from the dead, and the Holy Spirit, the source of a new spiritual power and enlightenment, descended upon his disciples. Jesus laid the foundation for an organization of his followers.

He created a society. It was not books that had been written or that were to be written that he styled " the light of the world " and the " salt of the earth." It was the men who believed in him and followed him. It was through them personally that the good which he brought to mankind was to be diffused abroad. By them the proclamation of God's forgiveness and love, or the Gospel, was made. Some time elapsed before anything was written, before even the sayings and doings of Jesus were recorded. It was the living interest taken in those real occurrences, — a curiosity on the part of Christians to know more of them, and, as we learn from the introduction of Luke's first narrative, an increasing sense of the value of a correct knowledge of them, — that occasioned the composition of the four Gospels. The book of Acts owes its existence to a similar cause. As to the Epistles, of course the churches had to be founded before they could be addressed. It is desirable to remember that Christianity was preached and believed in before anything was written about it. In an age of letters it was inevitable that the events which form the subject of the New Testament should very soon give birth to writings. We can understand why it was impossible that the American civil war should pass by without giving rise to the composition of letters by those actively engaged in it, and the publication of books of history and reminiscence. There was a like impossibility in the case of the planting of Christianity by Christ and the Apostles. If the number of those who desired to know the facts and to be taught the significance of them was at the outset small, it rapidly increased, and their interest in the subject was deep and absorbing. Of course the creation of the New Testament literature was an act of