The making of the Bible

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The World Without a Bible. . 5 II. A Bible Becomes Necessary. . 21

III. Necessary Limitations to a

Chapter I

The Bible was notjjiYen to man at the beginning of his career.. Only after the lapse of many centuries did it appear, as product and instrument of the growing life of the race. When it did come, it was not one sudden burst of light, but it crept in softly, little by little, as the mind of man slowly readjusted itself to its changing conditions and new method of receiving divine revelations. It was one of the later methods chosen by God for manifesting himself to men. That religion of the highest order and ethical conduct of the finest quality were possible without the Bible was proven by the unanswerable argument that they existed and flourished through long periods and among different nations before there was a Bible. That a Bible was not given is sufficient evidence that it was not necessary to the well-being and religious development of the race in the beginning; God had other and adequate methods. 5

If it had been best for man, God could have given him a written revelation at the first, a perfect guidebook for his conduct which he could not misunderstand. That he did not do it is proof that he considered another form of revelation more effective and better for man's religious development. The appeal must be more direct, and the personal contact closer and more manifest than would have been possible in a written revelation. Man's nature was untrained and undeveloped, and a powerful direct appeal was necessary to awaken a desire for the knowledge of God and for communion with him.

If it is objected that writing was not in use at first, and, therefore, a written revelation was impossible, it may be answered that this is pure assumption. We do not know but that with the gift or development of language there was included a knowledge or development of the art of reading and writing. If that gift was not included in man's outfit for life, it could have been, and certainly would have been, if it had been necessary to his proper instruction in religious knowledge and duties.

Such a gift would have been no more miraculous than were the special direct revelations that were necessary from time to time because of the absence of a written code. It is the unchallenged fact of history that the Creator and Governor of all things, who had power to do whatsoever he saw to be needful to the well-being of man "for whom all creation stood," stopped short in his work without giving him a book of revelation. This must have been because he saw it would be better to use those methods of revelation which history has so fully justified and which our reason can see were better for the race in the early stages of its development than a written book could have been. How long that period was before the beginning of a written revelation is unknown. It was certainly much longer than the traditional view, founded on the unscholarly chronology for which Archbishop Usher is largely responsible, makes it. Recent discoveries in archaeology, in the uncovering of the cities and monuments of antiquity, make it certain that that period must have been from four to eight thousand years, possibly 7 longer, a period of sufficient length to justify the statement that the Bible is comparatively a modern development.

During that long prebiblical period the word of the Lord was not wanting; it filled the earth, but in other forms than that in which we have it. Through all that time, as in every other period of human history, according to Saint Paul's argument on the subject, "God left not himself without witness/* nor ever could leave himself without a sufficient declaration of himself and of his will for the guidance of men in religious knowledge and duty. It is one of the illustrations of our perverse tendency to narrowness of thought in such matters that we are disposed to think that because the written revelation seems essential to us, it must have been so in that early age before the entanglements of history and our more complex life had arisen. But the conclusive evidence that such a revelation was not necessary is the fact that it was not given. It would certainly be a defective administration of the world that would withhold at the beginning of history, when the race was forming character and determining its course, the ministries and agencies that would be most helpful to it in getting upon the right course. To suggest that he withheld anything that would have contributed increased knowledge or moral strength in that formative period of human life in the earth is to charge God with responsibility for those evils against which he inveighs so earnestly and to which he attributes the sufferings of this life. To that early period he gave such revelations as the conditions required, and such as would make the strongest appeal to man's nature and be most likely to receive a favorable response from him.

The historical records give us but brief account of that early period, but what we have is very suggestive on the subject we are considering. There is an account of a man whose knowledge of God and whose love for him was so great that he was permitted to walk with God for three hundred years, if we accept the biblical account of patriarchal long life, and finally to go to live with him without passing through the shaded gateway of death. He lived before the time and without the aid of the Bible. There was another of whom it was said that he "walked with God/' whose character was so good that he was selected out of the whole race as the one most worthy to be saved from the world-destroying flood and to be the new progenitor of the race. Noah lived and died without knowing even that there ever was to be a Bible. Methuselah made his long pilgrimage without any written records to guide him, and yet seems to have been well-pleasing to God. The great father of the faithful who was called "the friend of God/' who stands at the head of the line of believing souls, and whose spiritual children all true believers are, than whom no better character has appeared in all the annals of history, even Abraham, who by simple goodness towers above and sheds a beneficent moral influence over the ages, came from what we would call a pagan land, where there was neither Bible nor church. There was a way then of nourishing a soul in such beauty and richness of moral excellence that all Bible-taught and church-sheltered souls must still look to him as "the father 10 of the faithful." In the outlook to the future which God gave Abraham nothing is said of a coming book or a rising church, but only of a "seed/ 5 in which all the earth should be blessed, and in which book and church lay implicit as parts of that blessing which all the world was to receive through the "seed/' which was Christ. The revelation he then had was adequate to the needs of such an exalted character, and it gave him a satisfying outlook to the future.

Out of that great prehistoric period another remarkable specimen of its high religious characters dips for a moment into our atmosphere to give us a decided mental shock and to suggest that we have but little conception of the glories of that early period of splendid living when man walked and talked with God. All after times have been stirred with curiosity about the person, high religious offices, and priestly character of Melchisedec. The only contact he has with our modern life is through the single incident recorded in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. He is here reported to have met Abraham on his return 11 from the slaughter of the kings and to have accepted tithes from Abraham. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes up the incident and argues from it that Melchisedec must have been a greater religious character than Abraham, for the payment of tithes to him by Abraham was an acknowledgment of his superiority. In developing his argument about the highpriesthood of Jesus Christ he says it was "after the order of Melchisedec." That seems to give him a religious and official standing above that of any of the great characters in the history of Israel. This suggests to us the possible riches in religious character of that unreported, prehistoric age that found ample religious instruction and guidance without a written revelation. Another pagan who does not rise quite so high in character, yet who gives evidence of being a real prophet of the Lord, is Baalam. While his religious character and career were not the best, they do show how widespread was the prophetic office and the religious teaching which it furnished.

The structure of Bible teaching is such 12 as to imply the existence of the conditions here outlined. Everywhere it is assumec that men know of the being of God anc are accustomed to the exercises of religionJ

argued. There is no attempt to prove that or the other great truths of religion. The first verse of the Bible assumes the whole case by simply saying, "In the beginning God created/ 5 without stopping to announce, define, or prove the being of God. That was a well-known and generally accepted fact. It had passed the need of any formal statement or proof. The same was true concerning the being and activity in human affairs of angels; they move out on the theater of action in human affairs as though they had long been known and their mission understood and needed no introduction at the late period when biblical writings began.

If we consider the circumstances of man's early life on the planet, we can see that a highlj religious life might be maintained without a written revelation. He was created with such intellectual and spiritual powers as would naturally awaken aspira- 13 tions and soul-hunger that would lead him to seek after God. Placed in the midst of the mechanism and active forces of the material universe, with the arching heavens above him and the smiling earth about him, his inquisitive mind would begin at once to ask how all this came to be and how it was maintained, and he never would rest till he had an answer to these questions. His spiritual aspirations, soul-longings, and consciousness of the powers and possibilities of his being would lead him out toward God. The human mind was constructed with reference to this environment, with powers and appetencies that when properly used would lead to the apprehension and knowledge of the truth.

The watchmaker carefully studies the mechanism, the force needed to drive the machinery, the method of its application, the possibilities of repair and readjustment, and finally brings forth a creation that works out a given result with remarkable precision and continuity; it was made to attain that result. It may need much care, frequent windings, and occasional repairs, but all that is provided for and adapted to 14 the intelligence that is supposed to use it. It was constructed with reference to its own powers and the capabilities of those who were to have the care of it. We cannot think that God was less thoughtful for man when forming him with his complex nature of body, soul, and spirit to run a course of development and broadening activities through the centuries. He must have carefully computed the force of animal appetites and propensities, of such mental endowments as reason, imagination, and will, and of the equipment of the soul with the gift of conscience, spiritual aspirations, and hunger for God, intending to keep himself in close, helpful, and directing relations to him. Had not some evil influence come in from without, like a grain of sand thrown into the mechanism of a watch, no doubt man would have run his course as faithfully as any timepiece ever made by man's less skillful art. Notwithstanding the perverting and corrupting influence of the evil that entered the race by sin, we must believe that through all those prebiblical ages the phenomena of the natural universe, and the activities, aspirations, 15 and impulses of the mind of man, aided and guided by the revelations given to him, were sufficient to lead him to the knowledge of all necessary truth.

The visitations of angels seems to have served the race, as written revelations have served it in the later centuries, for imparting truth and spiritual inspiration. The very first step from Eden out into the thorn-producing world was under the direction of one of the seraphim with a drawn sword to give suggestion of a punitive administration of government henceforth, with what verbal instruction we are not informed. Angels appeared to Hagar in the wilderness, to Abraham under the Oaks of Mamre, where they revealed the doom of Sodom and lifted the veil of the future from the coming glories of his family. They appeared to Lot in Sodom, they came to carry Elijah home, and they stood guard about Elisha when menaced by a great army. In all the great events of Bible history prior to the completion of the written revelation angels had an important part in revealing, counseling, and directing. As a method of revelation it 16 was most impressive and had immediate effect.

In many cases God himself seems to have spoken directly to men, concealing himself, but declaring his purpose and his person. Thus he spoke to Noah concerning the Flood, giving him directions for building the ark, for collecting within it the living creatures, and his purpose of cleansing the earth by means of the Deluge. He spoke directly to Moses out of the burning bush, giving directions for his visits to Pharaoh, at various times in the journey toward Canaan, and in the closing scenes of his life. How frequent, and in how many different parts of the earth, these personal revelations may have been in that prebiblical period we have no means of knowing. They reached Abraham in Mesopotamia before there was any chosen family or redemptive race, while he belonged to what we would now call a pagan people. Such revelations reached Melchisedec, Baalam, and others. If they were made at all, that is proof that they were possible and expedient, and that the> would be made as often as the needs of the race 17 required. One such direct communication from God would be repeated by men over wide districts and would have a permanent and potent influence.

In addition to these methods of conveying truth to men, tradition must have been a very important means of disseminating and preserving the knowledge of God. The long life of the antediluvians, free from the excitements and business activity of modern life, was favorable to the correct transmission of truth by tradition. Methuselah was the contemporary of Adam and Noah, if we accept the Bible account of his long life, so that Noah might hear from the lips of Methuselah what was told him by Adam, so that the stories of creation and of the garden of Eden passed through but one person to reach Noah. The wonderful character of the events, and of the divine manifestations in connection with them, would insure a deep and lasting impression on the minds of those participating in them and great care in reporting them.

After the beginning of Hebrew history God appealed to and seems to have depended upon this method of disseminating 18 and perpetuating the truth. He commanded parents to diligently teach the facts of their miraculous history to their children: "And thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." The accuracy and reliability of the human memory when it is fully trusted and charged with the responsibility of preserving important truth cannot be doubted. Before we had spoiled our memories by distrusting them and making written records of facts that once would have been committed to their safekeeping great feats of memory were very common. Conspicuous among these, to mention but one case, was the fact that blind Homer went from city to city in Greece reciting to wondering crowds the matchless periods of his immortal epic.

With all these different methods employed for the instruction of men there must have come to them very clear and convincing declarations of truth on all important subjects. Our knowledge of the 19 character and purposes of God, as well as the few glimpses given us of the wonderful religious characters of prebiblical times, seem to warrant the conclusion that there were ample revelations of truth in forms more effective than written documents would have been.

Chapter II

The changing conditions of the world made a change of method in dealing with it necessary. When the race had grown out of its primitive state, its larger intelligence and broadening fields of action and its more complex life made necessary a fuller revelation with better ordered and more enduring institutions to conserve its religious life. Nations were multiplying, complicated conditions were arising, racial forces were moving more vigorously, a keener mental analysis and a more searching philosophy were dealing with the questions of life and being that were forever pressing for solution, and a clearer, fuller revelation of truth was required to meet the growing needs of the race. Historical facts were liable to become distorted and corrupted by being carried too long in the rather loose form of tradition. Moral and doctrinal teachings would be more uniform and less liable to perversion if they were 21 committed to a changeless form in written documents.

There was, however, a yet greater and more pressing need for a written form of revelation. There was to be introduced a complex and supernatural redemptive system that would require careful and elaborate statement with luminous expositions easily accessible. The great moral duties and the essential elements of religion might be sufficiently made known by the voice of conscience, the light of nature, and the special revelations that God gave to men; but the entrance of Deity into a human body and life, the sacrificial and atoning death of that divine-human Person, the possible entrance of the divine into every human life with regenerating and sanctifying power, and the cooperation in this of three divine Persons in the unity of the Godhead, of whom hitherto there had been no clear revelation — all this would seem to require a definite and full written statement, that there might be a proper apprehension and clear understanding of these great truths.

Great preparations were made to give 22 this revelation a proper setting and a position of strength for its appeal to the human mind. A special family was set apart to project a new nation of people into the stream of history, consecrated to a high and peculiar mission, to embody and express in its own history and national development the great idea of redemption in a succession of educating events and institutions leading up to the manifestation from its own national line of the great Redeemer, the God-man. Such was to be the dignity of his person and the glory of his work that there should be centuries of heraldry going before — incidents, covenants, institutions, and prophetic declarations, which when he should appear would be found to have been a declaration of the fact and character of his Messiahship. That long line of history was to clear a highway for the coming of the Son of God, into the very structure of which would be wrought evidences and proofs of his Messiahship, of its character and purpose, to which he w T ould perfectly answer in his career of teaching, suffering, and death, giving proof of him that could not be re- 23 sisted by the unprejudiced mind. This race of people was segregated from the rest of the world, shut up to the culture and guardianship of its great idea which was the center of its life and the reason for its being, and to hold the deposit of truth given to it which it was unconsciously to expound and confirm in its history. There was to be little commerce or commingling with other nations, lest the purity and sacredness of this deposit should be corrupted. This is the teaching of Saint Paul, when he asks, "What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?" He answers his own question by saying, "Much every way : chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God," that is, the spoken and written revelation, the institutions and the ceremonies of religion, prefiguring and announcing the coming Messiah. This is the fact of history, that while the revelation was being made, and until it reached its culmination in the manifested person of Him who was its life and soul, and for the declaration of whom it was given — while this process was going 24 on, the people within whom it was coming to manifestation were sheltered by the divine covenant and guardianship in a separate and sacred position where no enemy could destroy them nor thwart the purpose of God till it came to glorious realization.

This throws a flood of light on God's constancy in caring for fickle, backsliding Israel. How he could have borne with them in their lapses, rebellions, and apostasies, holding to them as his peculiar people, bringing them back from their captivities, and reestablishing them in Jerusalem, appears only when we remember that he had selected them as the organ and instrument for manifesting his Son to the world. He could not change in the midst of the process from one people to another when the line of evidences and of revelation was half finished, but must continue to use a poor instrument till the work for which it was taken in hand was finished, especially as the identity of the instrument was the voucher for the integrity of the work. When the work was done and Messiah had been manifested to the 25 world, Israel had completed its divinely appointed mission of preparing the way for the coming of Messiah. There have been no divine interpositions to bring them back to Jerusalem since Messiah was revealed.

This fundamental purpose in the calling of Israel is made clear in the terms of the instituting covenant with Abraham. God promised Abraham that he should have a numerous progeny, "as the stars of heaven for multitude/ 5 and that in his "seed all nations should be blessed/ 5 Saint Paul calls attention to the fact that the singular number is here used, and that the term "seed" refers to Christ, "He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. 55 The whole redemptive scheme, therefore, lay implicit in that covenant with Abraham. That was the root idea, the formative germ of the whole Hebrew history and polity, their only reason for being, their justification and explanation.

This new epoch in world development and race culture in religious knowledge and life made new agencies and methods necessary. 26

The proposition that God should actually come down among men and become incorporated into the life of the race by taking on himself a human body, being born of a woman that he might redeem and sanctify the whole body of humanity, was a scheme so vast that it would justify two thousand years of educational preparation and notification, and the introduction of a more permanent and adequate method for announcing and expounding the facts of this great redemptive movement in written records, such as we have in the Bible. The Holy Scriptures were one element in the development of the holy "seed" that was to be a blessing to "all nations/' If not the greatest, these writings are one of the richest blessings that have come to the nations out of that covenant with Abraham. As soon as the great redemptive idea kindled the intelligence of man with larger and brighter thoughts about God and concerning his own being and destiny, the impulse to record, expound, and prophesy must have come into the soul of man as an impelling inspiration. This lifted the ethical and spiritual nature of 27 man above the domain of nature and natural suggestion could no longer minister adequately to these higher reaches of life; the divine life coming into fellowship and alliance with the life of man made necessary the incoming of divine truth in larger measure than nature could give. Special divine revelations would no longer be adequate, for the broader fields of knowledge now opening to the minds of men and the larger development of the nations would invite and insure careful scrutiny and earnest discussion that could not be successfully conducted without written documents that could be compared with each other and with known facts. This wonderful system of redemption, that burst forth like a new dawn on the world's growing intelligence, would require ample statement and exposition in forms that could be pondered and studied. Nature is quite silent here. She has no voice pitched to the key of redemption; her register does not include the high notes of redeeming love. Even an angel's jubilant song is not sufficient unless it can be recorded, so that the mind of man may turn to it often when 28 nature seems dry and empty. The high and transcendental are so woven in with the low and natural that we should be whelmed in endless confusion and perplexity if we had not "a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto we do well that we take heed/ 5 that is ever accessible for our enlightenment and instruction. The work of redemption makes a personal appeal and contemplates a personal life unto holiness that makes necessary a daily counselor in righteousness and truth such as the Bible is. The noble living, the worldgirdling service, and the missionary efforts of the Christian men of this age would not be possible but for the instruction and inspiration that come out of the book.

Yet it is a most delicate thing to give such a revelation as is here supposed, for rules of safety themselves create great danger by leading to overmuch confidence in them when conditions arise to which they do not apply, and by disarming that watchfulness and care which are the best guarantees of safety. If the Bible had been intended to be a guidebook in the 29 sense that it would tell us just what to do — how often to pray, how often to fast, how much to give, with all the other details of a good life — it could all have been done plainly, so that there could have been no mistake, in a document not larger than one of Saint Paul's epistles, but it would have been a false leading, a betrayal of humanity in its most sacred interests. Humanity would have rotted in moral decay and spiritual death under such a system. The revelation must be in such a form as respects and preserves man's freedom, and develops his sense of responsibility for seeking, finding, and interpreting the truth, and for applying general principles to individual acts. It is necessary for man's spiritual and intellectual development to place the truth, as God has placed the gold, the grains, and the fruits of the earth, where we must search and dig to get it. Hence revelation comes to us, like the narrow veins of gold that run high up over the crest of the mountains and can be reached only by hard climbing and keen-eyed vision, tucked away in scraps of history, bits of poetry, 30 sparkling proverbs, thrilling dramas, deeptoned, far-sounding prophecies, fascinating love stories, charming epistolary letters to friends, and world-embracing apocalyptic visions.

That written revelation synchronizes with the history of redemption, that it was part of its machinery and equipment, and that its great necessity rose out of it, appears not only in the fact that it began under Moses, who first gave the redemptive movement organized form, that its writers were limited to the redemptive people, and that redemption both of Israel and of the world was its distinguishing and predominant theme, but also by the fact that the volume of written revelation closed with the recording and exposition of the events connected with the culmination of that history of redemption in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. When redemption was completed, written revelation was finished.

The maledictions pronounced upon anyone who should presume to add anything to what had been written in the time of the apostles seems also to confirm this 31 view of the interdependence of written revelation and developing redemption. The book is the herald and the witness of the Son, the God-man.

Chapter III Necessary Limitations To A Revelation

So long as it was possible for man to dig out the truth as it lay buried in the facts of nature and of his own being, or to find it by lifting up his soul to God, it was better for him that he should be left without a written revelation. Nothing contributes more to man's development than searching for the truth, keeping himself in the love of the truth that he may find it, and holding himself en rapport with his environment and with God, that he may discover and know the truth. The search for it in an educational and disciplinary way is almost of equal value to its possession. The fact that God did not give man a written revelation till so many centuries after his appearance on the earth is the most conclusive evidence that it was not best for him to have it. We cannot sound the depths of the divine plans, yet there are apparent many rea- 33 sons why it was better for man to be led into the temple of truth by the diligence of his own effort and the fidelity of his spirit in the search for it.