Chapter 1

The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible

By

R. Heber Newton.

"In it _is contained_ God's true Word."--_Homily on the Holy Scriptures._

New York: John W. Lovell Company, 14 & 16 Vesey Street.

Works by the Same Author.

The Morals. 1. Vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, $1.00 Studies of Jesus. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, 1.00 Womanhood. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, 1.25

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Copyright, 1883

Contents.

I. The Unreal Bible. II. The Real Bible. III. The Wrong Uses of the Bible. IV. The Wrong Uses of the Bible. V. The Right Critical Use of the Bible. VI. The Right Historical Use of the Bible. VII. The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.

"The Gospel doth not so much consist _in verbis_ as _in virtute_."

_John Smith_.

"Liberty in prophesying, without prescribing authoritatively to other men's consciences, and becoming lords and masters of their faith--a necessity derived from the consideration of the difficulty of Scripture in questions controverted, and the uncertainty of any internal medium of interpretation."

_Jeremy Taylor_.

"To those who follow their reason in the interpretation of the Scriptures, God will either give his grace for assistance to find the truth, or His pardon if they miss it."

_Lord Falkland_.

[Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century; John Tulloch, D.D., II: 181, I:398, I:160]

Preface.

It has been my custom for several years to give occasionally a series of sermons, having in view some systematic instruction of the people committed to my care. Such a series of sermons on the Bible had been for some time in my mind. With the recurrence of Bible-Sunday in our Church year, this thought crystallized in the outline of a course that should present the nature and uses of the Bible, both negatively and positively, in a manner that should be at once reverent and rational. In the course of this parochial ministration public attention was called to it in a way that has rendered a complete report of my words desirable.

The views set forth in these sermons were not hastily reached or lightly accepted. They represent a growth of years. Their essential thought was stated in a sermon that was preached and published eight years ago. My positions concerning certain books, etc., have been taken in deference to what seems to me the weight of judgment among the master critics. They are open to correction, as the young science of Biblical criticism gains new light. The general view of the Bible herein set forth rests upon the conclusions of no new criticism. In varying forms, it has been that of an historical school of thought in the English Church and in its American daughter. It is a view that has been recognized as a legitimate child of the mother Church; and that has been given the freedom of our own homestead, in the undogmatic language of the sixth of the Articles of Religion of the Protestant Episcopal Church. It is distinctly enunciated in the first sentence of the first sermon in the Book of Homilies, set forth officially for the instruction of the people in both of these Churches.

"Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more necessary or profitable than the knowledge of holy scripture, forasmuch as _in it is contained God's true word_, setting forth his glory, and also man's duty."

The whole controversy in Protestantism over the Bible may be summed into the question whether the Bible _is_ God's word or _contains_ God's word. On this question I stand with the Book of Homilies.

These sermons were meant for that large and rapidly growing body of men who can no longer hold the traditional view of the Bible, but who yet realize that within this view there is a real and profound truth; a truth which we all need, if haply we can get it out from its archaic form without destroying its life, and can clothe it anew in a shape that we can intelligently grasp and sincerely hold. To such alone would I speak in these pages, to help them hold the substance of their fathers' faith.

R. Heber Newton.

All Souls' Church, _March_ 1, 1883.

I.

The Unreal Bible.

"The Bible, and the reading of the Bible as an instrument of instruction, may be said to have been begun on the sunrise of that day when Ezra unrolled the parchment scroll of the Law. It was a new thought that the Divine Will could be communicated by a dead literature as well as by a living voice. In the impassioned welcome with which this thought was received lay the germs of all the good and evil which were afterwards to be developed out of it: on the one side, the possibility of appeal in each successive age to the primitive, undying document that should rectify the fluctuations of false tradition and fleeting opinion; on the other hand, the temptation to pay to the letter of the sacred book a worship as idolatrous and as profoundly opposed to its spirit as once had been the veneration paid to the sacred trees or the sacred stones of the consecrated groves or hills."

Dean Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," iii. 158.

I.

The Unreal Bible

"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things which thou wast taught by word of mouth."--Luke i. 1-4.

This day, in our Church year, calls us to think upon the influence of the Bible on the advance of man into the Kingdom of God.[1]

Since the growth of written language great books have been the well-springs of thought and feeling for mankind, from which successive generations have drawn the water of life. Since the introduction of the printing-press books have been, beyond all other agencies, the educators of men. And of all books of which we have any knowledge, those together constituting the Bible form incomparably the most potent factors in the moral and religious progress of the western world; and as all other progress is fed from moral and religious forces, I may add, in the general advance of Christian civilization.

From these books the lisping lips of children have learned the tales of beautiful goodness which have nourished all noble aspirations. Over these charming stories of Hebrew heroism and holiness the imagination has caught sight of the infinite mysteries amid which we walk on earth. Their touch has quickened conscience into life. Through their voices the whispers of the Eternal Power have thrilled the soul of youth, and men have learned to worship, trust, and love the Father-God. These books have preserved for us the story of the Life which earth could least afford to lose, the image of the Man who, were his memory dropped from out our lives--our religion, morals, philanthropy, laws and institutions would lose their highest force. These books have taught statesmen the principles of government, and students of social science the cardinal laws of civilization. The fairest essays for a true social order which Europe and America have known have laid their foundations on these books. They have fed art with its highest visions, and have touched the lips of poesy that they have opened into song. They have voiced the worship of Christendom for centuries, and have cleared above progressive civilization the commanding ideals of Liberty, Justice, Brotherhood. Men and women during fifty generations have heard through these books the words proceeding from out the mouth of God, on which they have lived. Amid the darkness of earth, the light which has enabled our fathers to walk upright, strong for duty, panoplied against temptation, patient in suffering, resigned in affliction, meeting even death with no treacherous tremors, has shone from these pages. In their words young men and maidens have plighted troth each to the other, fathers and mothers have named their little ones, and by those children have been laid away in the earth in hope of eternal life. All that is sweetest, purest, finest, noblest in personal, domestic, social and civic life, has been fed perennially from these books. The Bible is woven into our very being. To tear it from our lives would be to unravel the fair tapestry of civilization--to run out its golden threads and crumble its beautiful pictures into chaos.

* * * * *

Yet we are threatened to-day with no less a loss than this. The Bible is certainly not read as of old. It is not merely the distraction of our busier lives, or the multiplicity of books upon our shelves, that turns men and women away from these classics of our fathers. Men and women no longer regard these books as did their fathers. They can no longer use them as their parents did; they see no other way to use them, and so they leave them unopened on their tables.

An intelligent lady said to me some time since: "My children don't know anything about the Bible. I cannot read it to them, for I do not know what to say when they ask me questions. I no longer believe as I was taught about it: what, then, can I teach them?"

A confession which, if all parents were as frank, would have to be made in many other households. Where it is still used in home readings, it is, in hosts of houses, with the pain which mothers know when their children's honest questions cannot be as honestly answered.

Such a state of things is sad and dangerous. Unless some way be found to read these books without equivocation, they will gradually cease to be used in home instruction, and the coming generations will grow up without their holy influence. This state of things ought not to have been brought upon us. The reverent reading of the Bible alone would never have led us into such straits. It is the old story of all human reverence. That which we revere, we exaggerate. Glamor gathers around it. The symbol is identified with the spiritual reality. The image becomes an idol. The wonderful thing becomes a fetish. So we end in an irrational reverence of that which is worthy of a real and rational reverence. Then we have a superstition. Superstition always results in destroying the rightful belief of which it is the exaggeration and distortion.

This is the common story of superstition, from the totemism of savage tribes and the image-worship of semi-civilized peoples on to the heathenism of the Mass. Men who felt the reality of a mystic communion with Christ, of which the Supper of the Lord was the symbol,--who felt the strengthening of their characters as their thoughts fed upon the words and life of Jesus,--naturally came to speak of the sacrament in terms of awe, which magnified the mystery, until at last they bowed down before the veritable body and blood of Christ, and trembled with fear as the tinkling of the silver bell announced that the priest was bringing God down into a wafer! They had really heard God speaking to them through the sacrament; and this never could have done them harm. But when they tried to express what they felt, they exaggerated and distorted the simple symbol of the Infinite Presence, identified it with the spiritual reality, and set up a Christian idol, a civilized fetish, which has done incalculable harm to men. The spiritual truth became an intellectual lie, and in every Catholic country superstition has eaten out faith, and reason refuses to reverence the sacrament.

The Bible has repeated this common story. The spiritual influence felt forth-flowing from it, the voice of God heard speaking through it, drew man's natural reverence to it. In trying to express the reasons for this reverence he has over-stated and mis-stated the nature of these books. The symbol has been identified with the reality. The Bible has become an idol, a fetish.

Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible, is responsible for the lack of the reasonable reverence these sacred writings merit. This reasonable reverence can be recovered only by frankly putting away the unreasonable reverence. We must exorcise a superstition to save a faith. We must part with the unreal Bible if we would hold the real Bible. Iconoclasm is not pleasant to any but the callow youth. It may be none the less needful; and then the sober man must not shrink from shivering the most sacred shrine.

As runs the Hindu thought, the Destroyer is one of the forms of the Divine Power. God is continually destroying worlds and creeds alike; but in order to rebuild.

"Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain."

According to its root-meaning, "learning" is a "shaking." Every new learning shakes society, now as in the days past. As the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews saw, it is God who is shaking society in every such new learning, to the end that "those things which cannot be shaken may remain." Man need not fear to follow in the steps of God.

There is danger now in shaking men's faiths. There is danger, too, in leaving men's faith unshaken--unless the Divine process of progress is wrong. In the stress and storm of the tossing sea, Faith may go down in the waters. It may also die of dry rot by the old wharves. There is danger in rash utterance, but there is at least equal danger in timid silence. The time never comes when a reconstruction does not imperil some great interest. None the less the reconstruction must go on. Delay in pulling down may make building up of the old structure impossible.

As the story of past civilizations sadly shows, the gulf between the popular superstitions and the thoughts of scholars may widen until no bridge can span it, and religion perishes in it. It seems to me that the time has come when the pulpit must keep no longer silence. Its silence will not seal the lips of other teachers. Books and papers are everywhere forcing the issue upon our generation. Men's minds are torn asunder, their souls are in the strife. It behoves the Churches to remember that great word of Luther:

"It is never safe to do anything against the truth!"

When the venerable cathedral, in which our forefathers sought God and found Him, grows dangerously unsound; when its columns have crumbled and its arches have sprung, and its stout oaken timbers have dried into dust; the guardians of the sacred pile must plan its restoration as best they can. They must shore up its treacherous walls, take out its dead materials, carve new heads for the saints in the niches of the doors, build up the edifice anew, following faithfully as may be the old lines, and striving for the old spirit. When the scaffolding comes down, we may feel a shock of pain at the strange raw look of that which Time had stained with sacredness. But the minster has been saved for our children; and, when they shall gather within its historic walls, those walls will have grown venerable again with age, and they will not feel the loss which we have suffered, while as of old, they, too, shall hear the voice of God and find His Holy Presence.

I propose to consider with you, carefully but frankly, the real nature and the true uses of the Bible.

* * * * *

Let us examine to-day the traditional view of the Bible.

It is not easy to define the popular theory of the Bible. Like its kindred theory of Papal Infallibility, it is a true chameleon, changing constantly in different minds, always denying the absurdity of which it is made the synonym, ever qualifying itself safely, yet never ceasing to take on a vaguely miraculous character. Various theories are given in the books in which theological students are mis-educated, all of which unite in claiming that which they cannot agree in defining. The Westminster Confession of Faith may be taken as the dogmatic petrifaction of the notion which lies, more or less undeveloped and still living, in the other Protestant Confessions.

This Confession opens with a chapter "Of the Holy Scriptures," which affirms in this wise:

"The light of nature and the works of creation and Providence .... are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of His will, which is necessary to salvation.... The authority of the Holy Scripture.... dependeth.... wholly upon God, the Author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God....

"....and the entire perfection thereof are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God, and establish our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof.

"The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added by new revelations of the Spirit.

"Being immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages.... in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them."

The notion which the learned divines set forth so elaborately at Westminster, art has expressed in forms much better "understanded of the people." Mediæval illuminations picture the evangelists copying their gospels from heavenly books which angels hold open above them.

A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, oracular--this is the traditional view of the Bible.

Let me lay before you some of the many reasons why this theory of the Bible is not to be received by us.

I.

_This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church._

The Catholic or OEcumenical Creeds make no affirmation whatever concerning the Bible. This theory is found alone, in formal official statement, in the creeds of minor authority, the utterances of councils of particular churches; as, for example, in the Tridentine Decrees and the Protestant Confessions of Faith. There is no unanimity of statement among these several Confessions. Some of the Protestant Confessions of the Reformation era state this theory moderately. Some of them hold it implicitly, without exact definition. One at least is wholly silent upon the subject. The later creeds of Protestantism vary even more than the Reformation symbols. Such important Churches as the Church of England, our own Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Methodist Church have nothing whatever of this theory in their official utterances. These three Churches unite in this simple, practical, undogmatic statement (the sixth of the thirty-nine articles):

"Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."

II.

_The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself._

The prophets did indeed use the habitual formula, "Thus saith the Lord." So did the false prophets, as well as the true. It was the common formula of prophetism, indeed, of the Easterns generally when delivering themselves of messages that burned in their souls. The eastern mind assigns directly to God actions and influences which we Westerns assign to secondary causes. We are scientific, they are poetic. We reach truth by reasonings, they by intuitions. No one can follow the processes of the intuitions. To the mystic mind they are immediate illuminations from on high, inspirations of the Spirit of God. In the realm of law we trace the action of natural forces, and are apt to think there is nothing more. In the realm of the unknown we feel the supernatural, and are apt to think it all in all.

The great prophets themselves did not accept this language of other prophets unquestioningly. They denied the claim unhesitatingly when satisfied that the messages were not from on high. They distinguished between those who came in the name of the Lord; and so must we. They tried the spirits whether they were of God; bidding us therefore do the same.

Tried by the severest scrutiny of successive centuries, of different races, the great prophets prove to have spoken truly when they declared, of their ethical and spiritual messages, "Thus saith the Lord." If ever messages from on high have come to men, if ever the Spirit of God has spoken in the spirit of man, it was in the minds of these "men of the spirit." But they made no claim to infallibility, or if they did, took pains to disprove it. Every prophet who goes beyond ethical and religious instruction, and ventures into predictions, makes mistakes, and leaves his errors recorded for our warning. We must try even the inspired men, and when, overstepping their limitations, they err, we must say, Thus saith Isaiah, Thus saith Jeremiah.

No biblical writer shows any consciousness of such supernatural influences upon him in his work as insured its infallibility. Nearly all these authors begin and end their books without any reference to themselves or their work. The writer of the Gospel according to Luke thus prefaces his book:

"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things which thou wast taught by word of mouth."

This is the only personal preface to any of the Gospels, and it is thoroughly human. There is not even such an invocation as introduces Milton's great poem.

These writers at times, after the fashion of the older prophets, affirm that they speak with divine authority; but they also as expressly disclaim such authority in other places. St. Paul is sure, in one matter referred to him, of the mind of God, and writes:

"Unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord," etc.[2]

Immediately after he writes, as having no such assurance:

"To the rest speak I, not the Lord."[3]

Later on in the same letter he is so uncertain as to add to his judgment:

"And I think also that I have the spirit of God."[4]

Again, in the same connection, being conscious of no divine authorization, he gives his own opinion as such:

"Now, concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord, but I give my judgment."[5]

Eighteen hundred years after he wrote, men insist that they know more about St. Paul's inspirations than he did himself. Against his modest, cautious discriminations, our doctors set up their theory of the Bible, clothe all his utterances with the divine authority, and honor him with an infallibility which he explicitly disclaims.

The New Testament writers use language which seems, to our theory-spectacled eyes, to ascribe an infallible inspiration to the Old Testament books. But the words have no such weight. The Epistle to the Hebrews opens with the words:

"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets," etc.[6]

The author of the Second Epistle of Peter writes:

"For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."[7]