1.002 Introduction

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE.

INTRODUCTION. The secret of success with any study lies in the discovery and faithful pursuit of a right method. Where this first essential is neglected plodding industry and brilliant genius are equally doomed to failure. Though it may be the case that “ there is no royal road to learning/’ it does not follow that we have no better course than to plunge into a trackless wilderness and wander aimlessly in the vast forest of truth. Some clearly marked path we must take if we are to make any sure progress. And’ yet it would be better to be hindered by any amount of impediments than to be bluntly and obstinately adhering to a totally wrong method, since in that case the more progress we made the farther we should be from the goal.

There is no study with regard to which attention to this question of method is more imperatively called for than that which has the Bible for its subject-matter. In the first place, it must be obvious to all of us that the supreme importance of the facts and ideas that here come under our notice makes it exceptionally deplorable for the student to go astray. Then, the peculiar difficulties that beset this subject call for especial care m the handling of it. Not only are the truths of religion which we seek in the Bible revelations from a realm of mystery y the very form in which they are presented to us demands close consideration. No doubt the Bible is an open book for the people, not a cipher message of which only the learned possess the key. It is written in the language of popular literature, not that of technical theology. Its most essential truths are within the reach of the most simple reader. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that its origin in antiquity amid Oriental surroundings renders a book that teems with contemporary and local allusions liable to be often misapprehended by modern Western minds, unless care is taken to give due weight to these circumstances.

Unhappily, this is not all. It must be added that the natural difficulties of Bible study have been aggravated immeasurably by the employment of the most eccentric devices in interpretation. Processes which nobody in his senses would dream of using in any other branch of study have been applied to Biblical investigation with a serene confidence that admits of no questioning. The originators of these peculiar ways of confounding Scripture, and the greatest offenders in the use of them, were the Jewish rabbis, scholars who worked on the assumption that, since the law was inspired by God, every word, and, as some taught, even every obscure mark that was slavishly copied from manuscript to manuscript, must be stored with profound, recondite meanings— as though God could never speak simply to His children! Thus, in the mystical system of interpretation known as the Cabbala, the letters of a word were read as initials of other words, which were made to spell out a sentence of hidden meaning; or the numerical value of the letters was summed up and taken to be of sacred significance; or the order of the letters was changed so as to form quite another word.

Such absurdities are almost inconceivable to us in the present day, and yet the influence of them lingers in various unnatural ways of reading the Bible, especially whenever there is read into the text anything that was not really contained in it originally. A more philosophic kind of secondary interpretation was developed at Alexandria about the time of Christ— conspicuously by the great scholar Philo, who allegorized the law so as to bring it into harmony with Greek thought, the primary historical meaning, though not denied, being regarded as quite subordinate in importance to the secondary symbolical meaning. For example, in commenting on the migration of Abraham, Philo says that Moses “means by Abraham’s country the body, and by his kindred the outward senses, and by his father’s house uttered speech’’— so that the lesson of the story points to a renunciation of the life of the senses, and so on. This method was copied by the Christian fathers of Alexandria, notably Origen, that prince of allegorists. In the West, Augustine was more moderate in his treatment of Scripture, and yet every reader of The City of God will see that he too was to some extent entangled in the meshes of allegory. A specimen of the old use of allegory may be seen in St. Paul’s adaptation of the narrative of Hagar (Gal 4:21-30). This method was doubly attractive. On the one hand, it afforded a means of getting over Old Testament difficulties, anything thought to be unworthy of God in particular being thus explained away 5 on the other hand, by the use of this expedient it was possible to make the text appear to render up the interpreter’s favorite ideas. The opposite extreme is that of the bare literalist. In early times this was seen especially among the millenarians, people who took the predictions of the second advent in a material way by adhering to the exact letter of prophecy; it is not without its representatives among some schools of modern millenarians. But figurative expressions are used in all languages, and they flourish with great luxuriance in the East. It is necessary, therefore, to determine what expressions are to be taken literally and what metaphorically. In the present day there are two erroneous styles of interpretation, that have grown up in course of time till they have acquired the force of habit:

(1) The theological method. The Bible has reached us only after passing down through nearly two thousand years of Christian experience and scholarly thought.

It cannot be denied that each of these media has contributed to the deeper and more thorough understanding of Scripture, but neither can it be denied that the stream has been considerably colored by the soil through which it has flowed. Scripture being read by minds saturated with the ideas of later ages, its language is nterpreted according to the later senses in which the words have come to be understood. Thus the word “ damnation “ calls up before our mind’s eye pictures of Dantesque horror, although in the Bible it simply means “ condemnation,” the particular doom of the condemned being left unnamed unless it is described in the context.

(2) The textual method. A sentence, or even a mere fragment of a sentence, picked out of some book of Scripture with a total disregard of its setting and the circumstances under which it was written, is, so to speak, framed as an absolute oracle, holding good for all time and applicable under all circumstances. This is a method that seems to be consecrated by the custom of preachers in discoursing on what are called “texts”; and it has this measure of excuse, that the Bible abounds in aphorisms— in compact, self-contained statements of truth. But the Bible does not consist of nothing but strings of aphorisms. To treat it as though that were the case is as unreasonable as it would be to take a cathedral to pieces and set out in a row the separate stones with which it had been built, supposing that thus we would best interpret the architect’s design.

What, then, is the true method for the interpretation of Scripture? In a word, it is the historical. The Bible is a book for all time; it contains the revelation of eternal truth; it is most profitably employed when it is applied to the immediate needs and duties of the age, and therefore to turn it into nothing better than a mine for archaeological research would be a piece of disastrous pedantry. Nevertheless, this very modern application of the Bible, if it is to be true and just; that is to say, if it is to be a genuine resorting to the sacred book as a light and a guide, not a degradation of it into a mere tool of our own purposes, must presuppose an honest attempt to discover its genuine meaning; and such an attempt can only be successful when we put ourselves in the circumstances of the authors, so as to read the book as much as possible with the eyes of the men who were inspired to write it. This historical method is no novelty in itself. It was developed by the celebrated Biblical school at Antioch, in opposition to the allegorical method of the Alexandrian theologians; and it found its most brilliant representative in Chrysostom, whose homilies are a perfect storehouse of reasonable interpretation. It would have been well if more recent commentators had kept closer to Chrysostom’s wholesome style of handling Scripture. In our own day, however, the historical method is being worked out with all the rigor of scientific accuracy. This, then, will be the method that we will endeavor to understand as we go over the ground that will be indicated in the following pages. For the sake of clearness, it will be well to deal with the subject in two ways: first elucidating general principles, and then applying those principles to the several departments of the Bible.