06 - Chapter 06

THE ENHANCED VALUE OF THE BIBLE THROUGH HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION.

IT is no doubt true that the criticism of the Bible has caused pain and distress to many good people. So did the Protestant Reformation. Many pious souls trembled as for the very ark of God, and were quite sincerely afraid that the foundations of religion would be destroyed. So did even Christianity itself. Jesus Christ was not crucified by bad men; He was crucified by the good men, who believed that all religious authority was going to pieces in His hands. In their view He came to destroy; the Law and the Temple were being undermined; the very guides of their life and the fountains of their inspiration were threatened; they drove Him to the Cross in order to save religion. How appropriate the prayer, ’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do ’! The Jews who persecuted Paul were not bad men. They had a great care for things which had grown sacred. No doubt they sometimes did very wicked things because they were so religious told the lie often to serve the truth; but undoubtedly it was a deep and profound concern for venerable religion that lay at the bottom of the persecution of Paul, and his pain at having the cause of progress thwarted was, perhaps, no keener than theirs at having the religion of centuries transcended. Great movements are never brought to birth without soul-travail; the age of expansion is the age of much distress; progress is always bought at the cost of suffering. The man who is on the onward march should neither delight in the pain it inflicts, nor, on the other hand, should he stop the march to relieve the pain. Enlargement is imperious, progress divine; knowledge has an irresistible movement which can never be finally stopped for the most sacred attachments. What we may do is to pause now and then to show to those who are distressed, if they will listen, the real gain of the onward movement. The historical interpretation of the Bible often alarms good people who do not understand its principles and the immense service it is doing. And I know nothing much more despicable in reference to this subject than for a man to undertake to discuss it, and, instead of really going into it and dealing with it in a manly way, try to work upon the fears of the ignorant, create new prejudices, and inflame old ones. Biblical criticism was not an arbitrary choice. It was undertaken under compulsion the compulsion of the law of development. For a thousand years the Roman Church had claimed the right to interpret the Bible. The Protestant Reformation broke with that authority. And once liberty was claimed for the private interpreters, then the so-called higher criticism was inevitable as soon as the machinery arrived that made it possible. The Protestant Reformer is indeed the proper father of the higher critic. Once the Reformers called in private judgment, Biblical criticism was only waiting for its apparatus of scholarship. For if we are to judge by the Bible, we must know the Bible; and that is the one aim of the Historical Interpreter to know what the Bible says, how it came to say it, and what it means. In order to understand it, we must know how it grew. And the critic’s great inquiry is, How did the Bible grow? The story which the critics have told us has certainly transformed our idea of the Bible, and changed our intellectual attitude towards it. My contention is that this change is an immense gain, and fruitful of excellent results to those who will take the trouble to understand it.

1. It has brought us to see that the Bible is a living Book. For a time criticism spent itself upon the text of Scripture, as if the only thing necessary to understand the Bible was to find the proper text. There were various readings; the original reading must be followed if possible; anyway, that reading must be found which had most ancient authorities in its favour. This was the ’ Lower Criticism,’ and a very necessary piece of work it was. But it was borne in upon the mind of the student that, though the right text might be settled, the meaning of the passage might still be unsettled. And what was necessary to find the meaning? If an Englishman to-day wants even to understand Shakespeare he must not always attach the meaning to words which he would give to those same words in his own speech. Every school-child knows that there are words there which have a different meaning from what they have now. In order to find that meaning a great deal must be known about the period in which those pieces were written. Language is always related to the general life, and cannot be understood apart from it. In the same way the life of the time not only moulds the language, but also moulds the ideas and the sentiments of the time. So the student of the Bible found that to settle the text, though a necessary thing, was, after all, only a small fragment of what was necessary. He must also go outside the Bible for light on the Bible; he must gather all possible information concerning the national life and read every writing in the light of the period which produced it. This was called the Higher Criticism. It is simply a wider effort to understand. Its pre-supposition is that, like all literature, the Bible is the outcome of life, and life is therefore the commentary on the Bible. God did not write the Bible, but He was present in that life which the Bible records, and the Bible therefore is a revelation of God at work in humanity. There were blunders and mistakes in that life, and there are inevitably blunders and mistakes in the Bible. But there was a guiding and correcting Spirit at work among that ancient people; that guidance and correction may be plainly traced in the Bible, and so these Scriptures become profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. This does not mean that the teachers of Israel were not inspired from above. Most assuredly they were. I can never understand development without Divine action. Every man who seeks to draw people forward and upward must be inspired from some source above their level; and the best men are quite aware of the Spirit greater than theirs which is in them. But this does not make their speech and action unrelated to the general life of the people, for, indeed, their only chance of success lies in the fact that the people also know something of the striving of that same Spirit! The teachers of Israel were real living men, steeped in the life of their time; their thoughts and ideas and sentiments were in vital relation to those of their time, even when ahead of them and differing from them. Inspired many of them undoubtedly were, but superhuman they were not. Now, when the Bible is thus discovered to be a vital part of human life, it becomes a living Book. It ceases to be mechanical, it is not a supernatural machine produced in some laboratory in the sky; it is a natural flower grown on earth, but only possible because the sun was shining in the sky. If upon that nation of old the Sun of Righteousness had not arisen, and if the human spirit had not drunk the Divine influences, then this Bible garden could not have been. All the same, it is a natural garden, with weeds as well as precious flowers and fruit. Now, the full appreciation of the Bible, as a part of human growth under Divine cultivation, is one of the beneficent results of Historical Criticism. Again I say the Reformers prepared the way for it. For what does the right of private interpretation mean? The man who claims it may not take the full scope of his principle the Reformer certainly did not but the real meaning of it is that the Bible must be the outcome of a life like unto my life. It is this likeness that makes interpretation possible. It is only when we find ourselves in the Bible that the Bible properly finds us. If it had dropped from the sky no man could interpret it. To-day, thanks to the critics, this feeling is in full consciousness. We feel that the Bible is ours. Isolated it can no longer be. Set aside as an ornament, or fixed on a pedestal to be bowed to, or retained as an oracle for emergencies it shall not be; it is daily food; it is literature; it is a companion; it is alive with human interest. The Bible now can take its place in that larger revelation of God which is as wide as the world. The idea of the thirteenth century that God had given two books Nature and the Bible; that Nature was to be studied independently, and the Bible left to be interpreted by the Church would not work. Truth is one, and must be sought in the whole, and all must have access to the whole. The greater Bible is the whole world in all its history, and the Hebrew Scriptures are part of it. In the whole evolution of life is to be found the mind of God. The most important chapters of that wonderful story are written in the Bible, and their value is not diminished but increased, when their relation to the whole is recognised.

One of the results of this is that it was never so much studied. Our generation has seen an output of books on the Bible of which no other generation could have had the slightest conception. Think of the enormous expense of producing the ’ Encyclopaedia Biblica,’ Hastings’ ’ Bible Dictionary,’ and the Polychrome Bible; and yet these are deemed safe ventures for the book markets. You know what that means. It means that publishers can calculate on a sufficient public interest. Those are but a fraction of the output. Think, too, of the number of scholars who are giving all their time to Bible work. Do you suppose they are working as machines without vital interests? The fact is that the criticism, much abused by the ignorant, and sometimes made the subject of poor jokes by men who have only touched its fringes with incompetent fingers, has effected the resurrection of the Bible into modern life. With the old theory, in the face of rising modern science, nothing could have saved the Bible from falling into disuse. It would have been put on the shelf as a discredited book. But criticism has shown it to be a well of living water, teeming with points of vital interest for man.

2. It has enabled the Bible to speak for itself. The Protestant Reformation said to the Catholic hierarchy: ’ I claim the right to go to the Bible for myself.’ That was a step forward. But another was needed. The Protestant often took his own system of theology to the Bible, and so the Bible’s own voice was still stifled. The critic must come along and say: ’ I claim the right of the Bible to speak for itself.’ And never did sectarianism receive such a blow. Protestantism had divided hopelessly, and every sect claimed the Bible for itself. When the Bible is freed from dogmatic interpretation it is seen to belong to no sect; the variety of a nation’s life for fifteen hundred years is in it; and in its best teachers it reaches a universalism too great for any system or sect. Upon the old theory, the Bible, being the word of God throughout, was all of equal value. Any sect could run off with a set of texts and build its own fort, from which it felt at liberty to shoot at every other sect, while every sect made the same claim to have built upon words of Scripture. When historical interpretation sets the Bible free to speak for itself it is found that one of its main features is the constant displacement of standards by higher standards in the march of progress. We are to find the will of God, not in isolated texts, but in the drift of the development portrayed; and nothing is plainer from the Bible than that God wishes us to be always growing in knowledge, in purity, and in love, and that there is no final system of doctrine nor final form of worship. Again and again the Bible shows you standards, taken as Divine, giving way, ethical and theological ideas transcended by better ones, until when you reach the highest revelation in the Bible it contains no formulated creed and no moral code; it is just simply the religion of love to God and man, the vision of the pure in heart, and an exhaustless impulse to go for ever into more of these, ’ Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ So Paul understood it. His religion should not be a religion of the letter, but a spiritual principle; no bondage from the outside, but a living, working spirit within, which would never be tied to the past, but, forgetting the things behind, press forward. When the sects will come to read their Bible in the light of criticism we shall have done with the wars of creeds, done with sectarian bigotry, done with the odium theologicum, done with the popes of all denominations; our artificial barriers will be broken; a text here and there will be no foundation for building separating walls; everyone will see that the New Testament was never meant to settle the pattern of the Church nor even the ordinances; the Baptist will not think that a commandment of Jesus makes immersion necessary; the Congregationalist will see that the Friend who does not take the Lord’s Supper may be as near the Lord as he; all will know that the one great commandment is, Love God and one another. Thus the Bible, instead of being taken in fragments and dividing men, will be taken as a whole and unite them. What a tremendous gain this would be to Christendom! The Federation of the Free Churches which has already taken place would have been impossible but for the relaxation of the old view of the Bible, though that relaxation is often unacknowledged and even unconscious. Thousands who still think they hold the old views have ceased to emphasize them. The good Spirit of the age extracts this practical concession from them; and but for this, union would have been as impossible as in the old time.

Again, we gain immensely in the ethical sphere, through the breakdown of the old theory, by letting the Bible speak for itself. By giving authority equally to all parts, the old theory made the Bible a very dangerous book.

I have no time to illustrate, but one illustration is unavoidable. Have we not heard of Christian pulpits justifying the war in South Africa from the wars of the Old Testament? This is the sort of atrocity which the old view of the Bible made possible. The old theory allowed you to take a verse from the Old Testament, and go out and shoot your enemy on the strength of it; the new theory asks you to find the will of God, not in the hewing of Agag, but in that ascent of life from the barbarism of Samuel to the prayer of Jesus on the Cross. Watch that line rising, ever rising, leaving the ape and the tiger behind, until the man stands on the heights of manhood in love and compassion and prayer, and then say: ’ That is God’s will; that is God’s will in the Bible; that is the way He wants the world to go; that is the way I must help it to go.’ As a moral guide, the Bible on the old theory was most dangerous. It proved a source of cruelty again and again; it burned thousands of witches upon Divine authority; it has given nations a pretext for barbarity; it has made many a wicked King think he had a Divine right to his throne; it inflicted indescribable suffering on poor lunatics through giving authority for the belief that they were possessed by demons. The Bible is not responsible for these horrors, but the old view of the Bible is. Upon the new interpretation, the Bible, instead of being dangerous, becomes the most fruitful source of moral inspiration. The highest morality the world has seen is found in the Bible, and the Bible itself, on its highest levels, is the severest condemnation of all that is lower, in its own pages. Nothing can be more inspiring than the vision of triumphant morality in Jesus. Let the Bible speak for itself, and it will tell you that life must for ever be an up-line from bad to good, from good to better, ever on towards the best.

3. Again, by letting the Bible speak for itself, it gains immensely as a comforter. One of the chief values of the Bible has always been its power to comfort, and here many people are afraid lest criticism should destroy it. I think it greatly increases its use. I see no element of real comfort lost, but much gained. Take a verse where the word itself occurs: ’ Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people, saith your God.’ If the old theory is right, that was spoken by Isaiah a hundred and fifty years before it was wanted. Just think of a man writing down by miraculous foreknowledge a prescription for comfort a hundred and fifty years before the need for it arose. How much comfort do we ever get from men who have known nothing of our sorrows? How mechanical all that is, even if you could believe it to begin with! It makes it almost worthless, even if it were true. But take the other theory. Historical criticism tells you that Isaiah did not write those words. They were written by some prophet who was himself in captivity. In the very heart of the trouble here is a man who found the comfort of God, and is able, therefore, to comfort his fellows; it is a declaration to all the world for ever that God may be found in the fire, that the allegory of Daniel and the three youths is true. Instead of being words from the outside of trouble, given by some miracle to the writer, and of no use for a hundred and fifty years," they come from the inside, spring from the human heart that has found God, and are therefore an assurance that every stricken child may find the Father near. When the best things in the Bible are thought of as written things let down from heaven, or dictated from the sky, they are not in touch with life; but when we realize that these things were the outcome of actual human experience, then a thousand hopes light up all around us, for we, too, are men, and may experience the same things. If I thought that some supernatural aid was given to Paul to write his letters, which cannot be given to me, then I could only say that he was too far away from me to be any real help; he is in the clouds and I am on the earth. But if I find that Paul struggled with passions and prejudices and weakness and opposition and imperfect knowledge just as we do, and yet rose to such heights of victory, I see up along the mountain of moral obligation a shining track of possibility for me; and, though the rocks are there and the precipices; though there will be storms and mountain torrents; still, since Paul said, ’ In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us,’ I may, too. The Power which availed for him will avail for me, and I can link my feebleness to it as he did. The heroes of the Bible had no help either to live or to write, except by natural endowments, which you may not have. And so, what they were, and what they said, is a source of constant inspiration to deeper and diviner life. Let us see to it that we are never content with any mere historical knowledge of the Bible. The Lower Criticism concerned the text; the Higher Criticism found the historic interpretation; but there is a highest, and that is the meaning which a kindred experience finds. Knowledge of facts is never all we need; experience of forces and powers we must also have. We must know the Bible in the sense of finding for ourselves the Power it reveals for lifting life, and cleansing from sin, and opening for us the gates of God’s eternal day. { This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.’ THE END