CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library BT201 .S44 To Christ through criticism, by Richard III I i l - olin 3 1924 029 375 239 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029375239 TO CHRIST THROUGH CRITICISM TO THE VERY REV. J. H. BERNARD, D.D. DEAN OF ST PATRICK'S ARCHBISHOP KING'S LECTURER ON DIVINITY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN PIGNUS OBSERVANTIM TO CHRIST THROUGH CRITICISM II Y RICHARD W. SEAVER, M.A., B.D. SCHOLAR, AND SENIOR MODERATOR IN MENTAL AND MORAL SCIENCE : DONNELLAN LECTURER, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN I RECTOR OF ST JOHN'S, MALONE, BELFAST Containing the substance of the Donnellan Lectures delivered before the University of Dublin, 1905-6 EDINBURGH T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1906 PREFACE It has been my endeavour throughout these pages to indicate rather the trend than the re- sult of modern religious thinking. There is an increasing number of Christian people whom the traditional presentation of Christianity— Anglican or Genevan — has ceased to influence. The imminent danger is that they, identifying Theo- logy with Religion, Scholasticism with the Faith of Christ, may tacitly consider themselves out- side the Christian Fellowship. This class I mainly had in mind as I wrote, with whose mental attitude I largely sympathise, the loss of whose virile qualities to the Church must prove an incalculable disaster. Such — reversing the orthodox procedure, but " accord- ing to Christ Jesus " — I would urge to take Him, in the first instance, as Spiritual Teacher, Guide, Master, till perchance, from their experience of " following Jesus in the way," He may at length approve Himself as indeed the Saviour Christ. I have no fear lest he, who can now in heart and conscience call himself a disciple of Jesus, 6 PREFACE may find some other test confronting him in God's Judgment Day. There are passages here, I am aware, which to some may appear inconclusive, unsatisfactory, incapable of being labelled in any systematic category. God's many-sided truth, as it seems to me, refuses at times to be exactly compre- hended in our formal schemes of theology. The honest leaving of a question unsolved is better and more reverent than a vain assumption of infallibility, in the endeavour to be consistent with the requirements of a cast-iron theory. The date on which I pen these prefatory lines reminds me, were I at all likely to forget, of the indebtedness which I most gratefully acknow- ledge to that Catholic Brotherhood whose writings have so often proved themselves mental stimulus and spiritual enlightenment. Richard W. Seaver. All Saints' Day, 1906. CONTENTS LECTURE PAGE I. The New Theology 9 II. Results of Criticism 29 III. Authority in Religion S3 IV. The Christ of History 73 V. The Miraculous Element 97 VI. The Resurrection Fact . 119 VII. The Resurrection Form . • 137 VIII. The Meaning of the Death • 157 IX. The Christian Character 183 Bibliography . 208 Index . 209 1 THE NEW THEOLOGY " When Roland, being made a minister, presented himself before Louis XVI. in a simple dress-coat and shoes without buckles, the master of the ceremonies raised his hands to heaven, thinking that all was lost. In fact, all was changed." Taine. The title given to these pages indicates a con- viction as to the general issue of modern Biblical Criticism, more especially of the New Testament. The result manifests itself rather in a changed attitude than a decisive pronouncement. We have learned to distinguish between spiritual value, and words and ideas which are its vehicle. No longer do we confound the sacredness of the vessel with that of its contents. Probably never again shall we read the books of the Bible exactly as our forefathers read them. Theories and interpretations, now seen to be temporary and partial, have yielded to the solvent of a reverent yet scientific criticism, of which the motto is, " Not to destroy but to fulfil." The study of Comparative Religion has shown us affinities no less than distinctions between Christianity and the other world-faiths, and has helped towards a coherent and reasonable account of its origin and development. From behind the mists of metaphysics and the subtleties of dogma, the great Central Figure has emerged. To-day it may be sincerely affirmed that we know Jesus of Nazareth as none have 12 THE NEW THEOLOGY known Him since the passing of the first Christian century. At times indeed there has come a loss of the sense of proportion to students engrossed amid details of New Testament history, busied with minute investigations as to date and genuineness and authorship. The archaeologist concerned with the foundations, absorbed with curious minutiae of material and method, is often blind to the subtle beauty of the perfect structure, to the inspiration of the old-world builders wrought out through the whole, uttering itself in mullioned window and fretted roof and soaring pinnacle. Questions of literary analysis and historical dependence seem to admit such a variety of answers as to preclude all certainty of the reality of Jesus. Just here it is reassuring to remember that, from the very nature of the case, this temptation to despair besets all who seek to revivify the great figures of the past. We are dependent upon human testimony, and here there is no infallibility. In the domain of history we must content ourselves with relative and not absolute truth. Since, despite this, we do not feel compelled to close our Thucydides or Caesar, but are satisfied as to the general validity of their narratives, so neither shall we put away our New Testament in the endeavour to return to Christ. Criticism, as Bishop Gore remarks, loves to THE NEW THEOLOGY 18 dwell on differences ; but the real unity is un- mistakable. The modern student, in his desire to dive below the surface, or in his passion for original work, may bury himself prematurely in some forgotten corner of Church History, some study of Apocryphal Acts, or anonymous and unpublished documents. Let him first tread the broad highway. Let him read the main texts, as they can be read in mass and with rapidity, first of all, that the great general impression may be made upon him. When one withdraws a space from these minutiae of critical investigation and is enabled to comprehend all that has been accomplished by the labours of devout scholars in these countries, on the Continent, and in America, the result is definite and invigorating. The outlines of Jesus given to us in the Gospels take on a greater distinctness, as we are brought more and more under the spell of His simplicity, His great- ness, His originality. The Christ of metaphysics yields to the Christ of history. No longer are we content to assert the Incarnation as a doctrine ; we wish to realise it as a fact. We enter the world of thought and of action in which He and His contemporaries lived, and reconstruct the conditions of that far-off time, social, political, ecclesiastical. 14 THE NEW THEOLOGY More important even than the actual critical results achieved by the application to the Bible of the methods of historical science is the con- temporary philosophical movement which in- fluences all study of religion. Those who devote their energies to the pathetic yet impossible task of proving the inerrancy and infallibility of the Scriptures — as though to maintain this were to hold the impregnable key of the Christian position — fail to mark that the issue is no longer here. Elsewhere has shifted the centre of the conflict. Within rather than without henceforth must be sought the true and satisfying Christian " Apologia." Together with the fresh accentuation of the fact that history affords relative, not absolute, certainty, has come the reassuring conviction that the proof of the absoluteness of Christianity is not to be looked for in supernatural credentials of the past, save as coupled with and issuing forth in supernatural results in the present. The present alone is verifiable, the past is not. Indeed, in the light of the Incarnation, as we are being enabled more freely to enter into its meaning, the old rigorous distinction between natural and supernatural tends to disappear. It was foreign to the thought of Jesus, for whom the fall of a sparrow and the redemption of a THE NEW THEOLOGY 15 soul took place in the one universe of the one God. The sphere of the supernatural includes the whole life of the Spirit in man, in so far as it is higher than the life of nature. Christianity, as a revelation or in history, belongs wholly to the region of the supernatural, as do also all God's relations with the human conscience. But the supernatural as well as the natural falls within the realm of eternal, immutable law. While therefore Christianity and the result it produces are supernatural in the truest sense, as belonging to a higher sphere than the natural life of man, yet from another point of view the supernatural is also most truly natural, for " it represents the eternal nature of things in the kingdom of the Spirit — it follows a law which is the expression of the inmost mind of God." 1 So long as man believed that God had set the machinery of this universe — organic and in- organic — in motion, and withdrawing, left it to itself, then if miracles never happened, this verily was a God-forsaken world. Thus it was that a false philosophic theory compelled orthodox defenders of Christianity to attach to the question of miracles an altogether mis- placed importance. With them, belief in miracle had come to be almost essential to belief in God. 1 Allen, p. 391. 16 THE NEW THEOLOGY We to whom He has revealed the uniformity of His working alike in nature's heights as in her depths, are aware of difficulties unfelt by earlier generations, as we are brought face to face in the Scriptures with alleged and apparent breaches of His law. Ere we dare accept miracle in our scheme of things, we must find other reasons to convince us, as indeed we do, of a different order, and infinitely more persuasive than those which hitherto have seemed sufficient. Taught by the Incarnation itself, whilst behind all of necessity we postulate the Absolute, the Transcendental, it is in the normal and not in the abnormal we seek that which is for us the knowable, the manifested God. It is not " the fire and the earthquake " of omnipotence, but " the still small voice " of goodness, which appeals to and wins the allegiance of that within us which is akin to God Himself. To man, made in the image of God, the natural is the good, the unnatural the evil. To Hegel, Christianity is the outcome and consummation of the entire process through which, from the beginning, the whole creation with groanings unutterable has been blindly labouring. The Incarnation is the ultimate truth which underlies all life ; the supreme insight, to give expression to which all the THE NEW THEOLOGY 17 earlier religions were striving. His method is deductive. Christianity is simply the ex- pression in time of a truth already clearly apprehended by philosophy apart from all history, wherein indeed it finds its verification. The undoubted truth here, that Christianity is the realisation through the slow processes of time of a universal ideal, needs to be sup- plemented by its complementary, that in the Christian faith is something unique and tran- scendent ; not merely a more fruitful growth from the common human soil. Any exaggera- tion of one to the exclusion of the other is untrue to the totality of religious history. What is wanted is a conception, at once supernatural and natural, which shall exhibit the distinctive features of Christianity in their universal relations and significance. Our faith, it is widely felt to-day, if it is to prove its right to universal authority, must take up into itself the elements of truth in all the historic faiths, while at the same time it supplies something peculiar to itself which they lack. This element is the Christ. Christian theology is based funda- mentally, " not so much upon a gradual edifice of religious ideas, a process of tentative con- jectures more or less satisfactorily verified in experience, but rather upon the actual B 18 THE NEW THEOLOGY manifestation of a historic life accepted as Divine." * With Christ's supremacy in the religious life of humanity, the claim of Christi- anity to be the final religion stands or falls. To the philosophy of Ritschl is largely due the attempt to purge theology from meta- physical and scholastic conceptions foreign to its essence. The questions so long and so pro- foundly discussed, as to the nature of the divine consciousness, are not for us of primary import- ance. Our main necessity, to know God's will, must be met in the region of ethics, not in that of metaphysics. What concerns us chiefly has to do with the religious and not the intellectual order — the meaning of the world to-day as it affects our religious life, the significance of the sufferings and sins with which it afflicts us, and how we may find deliverance. ■ Metaphysically we speak of God as the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, but this is an abstraction on which the religious nature tries to feed in vain. Ethically the Christian sees God in Jesus Christ, and his conception is warm, definite, personal. " God as Saviour is a reality for which more experimental evi- dence can be brought than for the Absolute of philosophy." 2 1 Moberly, p. 32. 3 Brown, p. 257. THE NEW THEOLOGY 19 Religion and metaphysics, it is true, cannot be entirely divorced, for the human mind will question and ceaselessly endeavour to give intellectual expression, as in theology, to its conceptions of the divine. " The individual, consciously or unconsciously, will formulate the Christian experience, and left to himself will formulate it inadequately. Released from the dogma of the Church, he will make a dogma of his own, which will react upon and limit the experience " (Green, vol. iii. p. 182). Even with this dominant philosophic school, the moment its members attempt to explain Christ to their own minds, they are either driven back upon transcendentalism, or the whole question is kept, as by Harnack, in convenient vague- ness. The simple fact is, that we cannot, as with Ritschl, rest content with merely formulat- ing the ' ' value ' ' of Christ to us ; we are forced to go in and ask what He is in Himself. The mind cannot satisfy itself with such indefinite- ness as appears in Harnack's application of the term " unique " to Jesus. The question still presses — Can we stop here ? Will His own utterances and claims — if the Gospels are of any historic worth — permit us to stop here ? Ritschl indeed speaks of Christ's Godhead, but warns against the putting on this epithet 20 THE NEW THEOLOGY any " metaphysical " interpretation. But dare we apply this word in a metaphorical sense to one who is not essentially God ? Ought such a being to have the religious " value " of God ? The whole doctrine of a real incarnation is here involved. The God of nature is impersonal, and the voice of God within cannot always be distinguished from our own thoughts. The " Human Voice through the thunder " has never sounded except from the lips of Jesus Christ. Why must the thinking mind postulate God for the explanation of the world, and be debarred from postulating something tran- scendental in explanation of the Person of Jesus Christ ? Most fully do we grant that the Christ of past history and of present experience is of vastly greater religious value to us than the Christ of metaphysics, yet we go on to re-echo Her- mann's words, himself a disciple of Ritschl, that, if we seek to follow out this union of the divine and human nature in Christ, " the Christo- logical decrees of the old Church still mark out the limits within which such attempts must move." As to-day the metaphysical Christ gives place in religious value to the Christ of history, so the Christ of history lives on and verifies Himself as Saviour, and has His perfect worth confirmed in THE NEW THEOLOGY 21 the Christ of experience. No age can pass upon Him a final verdict. It but makes its greater or less contribution to the understanding of His mission. One of the greatest problems is to dis- entangle the everlasting truth in His message from its accidental embodiment in the oriental forms of thought of an age long past. Not even spiritual insight of itself avails for complete interpretation, most authoritative guide though it be for direction of the individual life. " Each age has its own vision of the Incarnate Son, and hears His word in its own language." As of old, the eternal message is both manifold and one — one in its origin and content, manifold in that the Eternal speaks to us through the ever- changing forms of the " Time-spirit." Chris- tianity has been aptly described as " the pro- gressive realisation of the supremacy of Christ." In its possession of Him with His supreme revelation of God's love and power, it most securely bases its claim to be the absolute religion. So it must show itself supreme in life, giving to the problems of existence their most satisfactory answer ; appealing to the conscience, kindling enthusiasm, laying hold upon the will. Not upon its monotheistic teaching, nor its doctrine of redemption, nor its high ethical standard, does this supreme claim rest. These 22 THE NEW THEOLOGY divine qualities Christianity shares with the great faiths of the world ; whereas in Jesus Christ, in His life, character, authority, Gospel, we find the distinctive mark — the essence — of that religion which bears His Name. It was a luminous saying of Maurice, that toleration is founded not upon the uncertainty but upon the certainty of truth. The conviction that God reveals Himself more fully to the Christian than to the Buddhist is strengthened, not weakened, by the accompanying belief that the Christian is not the miraculous exception in a godless world of darkness. I am assuredly helped to my certainty of the perfect revelation in Christ when I find that not to me alone, not solely in Old Testament or in New Testament, has the Divine Voice spoken. Else, were my position solitary and unique, my perplexity would be increased a hundredfold. That re- ligion is a true and universal experience of the race I welcome as additional confirmation of the fact that in Christ is fulfilment of all that has gone before. To-day we are true to the essential spirit of Christianity, as we seek a more ethical, a more personal expression of it than is to be found in the abstract terms of the older theology. We shall think of the Bible as the record of God's THE NEW THEOLOGY 23 progressive revelation of Himself, fulfilled in Jesus Christ, explicated by apostolic but not infallible men, finding yet further explication in the history of the Christian Church. As sin shall be no longer for us a vague theological abstraction divorced from daily life, but con- scious lack of conformity to the Spirit of Christ, so the great word Salvation, degraded by the terms of penal law, shall again grow luminous and real — the establishment of right relations with God our Father, and the creation of Christ- like character. However through historic and ecclesiastical reasons we may feel compelled to provisionally define Christ's Church for purposes of religious discipline and edification, we shall shun the folly of imagining our limitations to be final, in whose ears His own judgment keeps ever sounding, " Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them." Christ's Gospel has always had to clothe itself in such forms as were given by the thought of the time. Changing with the changing centuries, it is not to be absolutely identified with any of its passing forms. Where men have been touched by the Spirit of Jesus and live for the ends for which He gave Himself, there it is to be found. It is itself His Spirit become incarnate in human lives. 24 THE NEW THEOLOGY Vitality is the test of truth, not in Newman's sense of the phrase— not as though mere per- sistence and survival were enough, but in the sense that " a belief which universally and per- sistently fosters growth in the Spirit of Christ, is not only pragmatically true, but is proved to be, in some symbolic way, representative of that world of ultra-reality in accommodation to which our spiritual life consists." * By such touchstone the highest religious thought to-day is testing inherited doctrines, is striving to concentrate itself upon what is essential in contradistinction to all that is temporary and adventitious in current Christianity. If there is a vital truth underlying a dogmatic formulary or mode of expression, it needs to be recast in a form that will emphasise, instead of obscuring its vital life- forming power. If, on the other hand, the dogmatic formulary expresses a conception which the growing experience of mankind shows to be false, it needs to be contradicted and refuted by a clear expression of the contemporary Christian conscience. Acts are the results of thoughts, and men will not act consistently and thoroughly unless they are inspired by deep conviction. Religious thought has in great measure become crystallised in the form of 1 Tyrrell, p. I. THE NEW THEOLOGY 25 dogmas, and in this way many of the main motives for earnest action have been rendered useless, because they have been taken out of the sphere of consideration of the great mass of the people. Let us take two concrete illustrations, from the modern attitude towards the public worship of God, and the support of hospitals. In the past, the necessity of the former was founded chiefly upon the appeal to authority ; of the latter, chiefly upon philanthropic motives and sentiments. At present we witness an un- paralleled activity in the alleviation of undeserved suffering in the same Christian society wherein the attendance at public worship is rapidly diminishing. In the former case we have the recognition by the conscience that this hospital work is an essential part of our duty ; that it rests on eternal laws of universal obligation ; that it is also in reality the bringing to good effect of the words and teaching of Jesus Christ. Can it be pretended that this, or anything of this nature, is the popular view of the worship of God ? Here to a fatal extent in Christian teaching religion has been divorced from life, and its sanctions found solely in a supra-mundane sphere, far withdrawn, as to its appeal, from the " daily round and common task." One of the besetting sins of religious thinkers 26 THE NEW THEOLOGY is to be content with nominalisms in theology. Often it is easier to rest satisfied with some scientific definition of the truth than it is for us to seek humbly and patiently for the real, and perhaps larger fact of revelation. The history of Christ's Church in this world, as Newman Smyth points out, has been one repeated process of partial understandings of Christ, with mis- understandings, and then new and larger under- standings of His words. So it was with the first disciples ; and as with them so with ourselves ; the trials and the tasks of faith have been ever God's providential method for guiding us into fuller truth. A true but partial lesson learned of Jesus Christ ; the Church's contentment with that lesson and teaching the people to repeat it by rote ; a discovery of some new meaning or fresh interpretation of the old truths, and then a Renaissance, a Reformation, another of the Days of the Son of man. At first the new flood seems a destructive torrent, but at length the purified stream, the more fruitful fields, have proved that it was indeed a fresh inflowing of power from on high. As we look abroad over Christendom to-day, each great division, whatever its ecclesiastical name, manifests the same great struggle between the radical and the conservative ; the tradition- THE NEW THEOLOGY 27 alist and him of present prophetic insight. " Historic Protestantism has its Catholics, and the Church Catholic its Protestants." Each element is necessary to the stability of human progress. It is untrue to assert that history repeats itself. It does indeed repeat itself, with a difference. There is always something added, and that added something is the new-born con- tribution of each succeeding generation till " God shall make the pile complete." II RESULTS OF CRITICISM ' I have a life in Christ to live, But ere I live it must I wait Till learning can clear answer give Of this and that book's date ? Nay, rather, while the sea of doubt Is raging wildly round about, Questioning of life and death and sin, Let me but creep within Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet Take but the lowest seat." Shairp. To beings such as we are, all revelation comes through human media of thought and speech, whose very imperfectness of necessity mars the divine vision, dulls the divine voice. Moreover, we are but too sadly aware that a great idea, a fine commemorative custom, a clear ethical doctrine, may be degraded into empty formula, superstitious ceremony, dry, profitless notion. As Mr Edward Caird points out, the teaching of history conveys this clear lesson, that while the tendency of the idea is to create for itself an organism, in social life, in politics, in religion, through which it may become effective, this very organism, in the course of time, itself tends to vitiate and destroy the idea of which it was the product. We cannot reasonably deny, says Bishop Gore, that permanent religion at every period is associ- ated with impermanent elements, the gold with the dross ; and we must have the intellectual courage to seek to dissociate the two, and to draw distinctions between essential and unessential, and to make concessions and to seek readjust- ments. It is ours through the experience of life 32 RESULTS OF CRITICISM — the varying material which Providence affords us — to explicate and develop all that already exists by implication in the revelation of Jesus Christ, who has yet " many things to say unto us." The principles by which He lived are of eternal worth ; the method of His action varies according to the necessity of its environ- ment. It is no new task this to which we are called. By the men of the fourth and of the sixteenth centuries, the faith had to be restated amid the enlarging thought of the Christian world. " Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be ; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 1 ' This is the Return to Christ. He is the norm by which we shall regulate the contents of our faith. With His person are directly connected those elements of original Christianity which have held their ground through all the changing centuries. To them He has imparted something of His own immortality. In them rather than in the doctrines of Apostles, however inspired, the decrees of Councils, however orthodox, we most clearly discern His purpose, testing each successive theology by the mind of Christ. " I could wish," wrote Erasmus, " that those frigid RESULTS OF CRITICISM 33 subtleties either were completely cut off, or were not the only things that the theologians held as certain, and that the Christ pure and simple might be implanted deep within the minds of men." It is indeed most true, that Chris- tianity now means to us much besides the ipsissima verba of Christ Himself or of His immediate Apostles. It has taken up into itself, under the guidance of His spirit, much that is good and true from other sources, but " All that is most essential in it has grown out of what was said and done by the historic Christ." 1 While Harnack finds the essence of Chris- tianity solely in faith in God the Father as revealed in Jesus Christ, there is much in the criticism of Loisy that a religion which has filled such a place in history and renewed so to speak the conscience of humanity, cannot take its origin and derive its sole value from one single thought. Yet Loisy himself, though he main- tains that the nature of the rose is better seen in the fully developed flower than in the unfolded bud, still finds the permanent in the Christian faith amid all that is temporal and relative, by applying to it the touchstone of the mind of Christ. " That which has been essential in the Gospel of Jesus, is all that holds the first and most 1 Rashdall, p. 243. C 34 RESULTS OF CRITICISM considerable place in His authentic teaching and the ideas for which He strove and for which He died." l The science of Historical Criticism compels us to revise many judgments long current in matters secular as well as religious. It would be indeed strange if this were not so. " Before the begin- ning of the nineteenth century," writes Prof. Bury in his Inaugural Address at Cambridge, " the study of history was not scientific." Our knowledge of the past was seldom the ordered knowledge of evidence and observation. Too frequently it was based upon the insecure foundation of authority and tradition. The new feeling after Christ which is astir to-day in all the Churches, reformed and unreformed alike, born through dissatisfaction with institu- tional and dogmatic religion, has been shaped by the historical spirit. The distinction between the old theology and the new, as Fairbairn points out, is that the former was primarily doctrinal and secondarily historical, while the latter is primarily historical and secondarily doctrinal. An Augustine largely shapes the theology of the western world. The study of history enables us to recreate that most striking figure of the fifth century, to know something 1 Loisy, p. 8. RESULTS OF CRITICISM 35 of the environment in which he lived and thought, and the forces of which he was largely the re- sultant. As we study him in proper perspective, against the background which history has pro- vided, we come to understand the origin and the meaning of the Imperial Roman type so dominant in Protestantism no less than Romanism. Doubtless in the Providence of God, not other- wise than in the cast-iron framework of institu- tion and of dogma, could the Church have sur- vived the stormy passage of the re-making of Europe after the fall of the Western Empire. May not, however, that which once was a necessity now linger on as an anachronism, from the fancied shelter of which God is driving us forth for fuller purposes of growth and education ? A change fraught with momentous consequences took place, when the methods pursued in the physical sciences were brought to bear upon those which deal with human affairs, even with religion where the interest for us is paramount. By many devout Christians this region is, with good reason, regarded as holy ground, and their Bible as sacrosanct. Here, at least, the writers are possessed of an exempt jurisdiction ! Here the writ of science does not run ! Such views, so frequently the fruit of a genuine reverence, can no longer be maintained. Our faith cannot be 36 RESULTS OF CRITICISM preserved by any protective policy of ignorance. The Word of God is able to stand in its own commanding truth, nor does it need to be propped up by theories of human invention. " As for this newer study of the Bible," to quote the Bishop of Hereford, " it deserves to be heartily welcomed both for its truth-seeking aim, and because it brings new interest and reality into the religion of the more educated classes. Our only hope of keeping Christianity really influential in the life of a scientifically educated people lies this way." The argument, " Critic- ism has disproved the traditional view of the Scriptures, therefore they have ceased to be an authority in religion," is met by the conservative theologian with his most lame and impotent rejoinder : " The traditional view must then be retained, or indeed the authority will go." Thus he seeks to preserve tradition at the expense of faith. Verily there is a better way. The Scriptures either are, or are not fit subjects for scholarship, for historical criticism. If they are not, then all sacred scholarship is a mistake, and they are a body of literature possessed of the inglorious distinction of being incapable of being understood. If they are, then the more scientific the scholarship, the greater its use in the sacred field of Scripture. What it does and decides RESULTS OF CRITICISM 37 may be wrong, but the wrong must be proved by other and better scholarship. The authority of Scripture in religion, it needs to be asserted, does not depend on questions that critical scholarship alone can decide. " Authority belongs to the Bible, not as a book but as a revelation ; and it is a revelation, not because it has been canonised, but because it contains the history of the Re- deemer and our redemption." 1 Most surely do we follow Christ, when, in our search for truth, we resolutely decline to allow theories however venerable to stand in the way of ascertained fact. Called upon by what we believe to be a clear voice of God, we abandon, not indeed light-heartedly, the old anchorage, committing the preservation of our faith to Him who is ever faithful, for " The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways." Half a century ago, men received and taught the Bible as it stands in the Authorised Version. Doctrines were proved, duties en- forced, ritual or the want of it justified by sentences and words deemed irrefutable, because in the Bible. In our schools the Bible stories were taught, Bible characters eulogised, without much discrimination, in unquestioning faith. ' Fairbairn, p. 508. 38 RESULTS OF CRITICISM Criticism was practically unknown. The Bible was treated as one solid consistent whole, and its words as final and infallible authority. If all this be no longer possible, does there not go with this confession a sense of loss ? The teacher's work is now vastly more complicated. Im- measurably greater is the demand upon him and those to whom he speaks. How much easier to say, " The Church has spoken," " These are the words of the Bible," and to have the matter thus finally settled ! Instinctively we crave for an infallible, unerring guide, and if such fail us, we feel that we are indeed undone. Yet, as the late Provost Salmon pointed out, in his discus- sion of Papal Infallibility, escape from all possi- bility of error and from the responsibility of determining our own future is impossible, whether we choose the Church as our infallible guide, or Scripture or Christ Himself. It must originally be our own choice that is exercised, our own judgment that determines. We cannot get behind ourselves and find some other spring of action than our own determination. Just as the world of the Renaissance, in its deeper spirits, mourned the loss of the old idea of an infallible Catholic Church, bulwark through the dark ages of a Christendom sorely beset, so this century is destined to feel the loss of the venerable RESULTS OF CRITICISM 39 idea of an infallible book, hallowed by the reverence paid to every syllable, enshrined in the light of benediction which it has been to our forefathers through so many generations. Nevertheless, if loss there be, is there no com- pensating gain ? What is for us, through the teachings of Providence, the true attitude towards the Bible ? Shall we not believe that the Bible contains the record of the progressive revelation of God in the spirit of man ? It is an advance which, in the Old Testament especially, is not always regular, but marked by periods of retrogression as well as progress ; a feature stamped clear upon the whole human story. Believing it to be progressive, we are set free from all doubtful evasion and crooked inter- pretation in morals, general knowledge, scientific description. We shall read its widely varying literature naturally and so most profitably. Nor shall we burden ourselves with any a -priori theory of inspiration, but testing this sacred volume by human experience, we shall find no words too strong to express the difference in degree between the spiritual, enlightening, search- ing power of the Bible and that of all other religious books. Its influence confessedly stands unique as an inspiration to holiness and righteous- ness ; unique in its quality of invoking in human 40 RESULTS OF CRITICISM hearts the consciousness of the Divine, the call to the higher life of the Spirit. Religion must suffer, the Bible itself must suffer if we ob- stinately insist upon the maintenance of views which earlier generations held alike with rever- ence and honesty. They were true to their intellectual environment, so different from ours, but the divine provision for them. Unfortunately the manifest spiritual unique- ness of the Bible has been confused with a theory which seeks to make it infallible in matters of scientific statement and history. To this disas- trous claim neither Church nor Bible gives sanction. The doctrine of verbal infallibility served as the hard crust to protect the tender life of the seed. Now that the seed has grown to a fuller strength, it no longer needs such pro- tection and its continuance can only prove injurious. Our difficulty and our duty is to assist this partial and imperfect view of Inspira- tion to unfold and complete itself in fuller truth. As Prof. Marcus Dods points out, the publica- tion of the sacred books of other religions has had its effect, for in them we find stronger claims to inspiration and infallibility than we find in our own Scriptures. " How, it may be fairly asked, can such claims be disproved by arguments which are not equally applicable if RESULTS OF CRITICISM 41 urged by a Hindu against similar pretensions which may be raised on behalf of the Bible >" 1 It is only by examining the Bible itself that we can find out how far it is trustworthy. To attempt to bar out criticism by affirming inspira- tion is a futile enterprise. Biblical Criticism is twofold — textual and historical (including literary) or, as it is styled, Higher Criticism. The aim of the textual critic is to ascertain, so far as possible, the original writing. He sets himself to answer the question : — What was the oldest and most genuine MSS. free from later omissions or additions ? Thus he brings us face to face with a fact, e.g. here so far as we can attain is the true text of Thucydides or of St Mark. But at once arises the further question : — Assuming that this is what our author did actually write, are we justified also in regard- ing it as a transcript from reality ? Were these words actually spoken, these deeds actually performed ? At this point historical criticism takes up its task, and from consideration of the writer's character, means of knowledge, mental and literary atmosphere, works towards the most probable conclusion. Thus, as Prof. Gardner points out, in place of simple external fact of history, ultimately we are 1 Prof. Dods, p. 172. 42 RESULTS OF CRITICISM brought face to face with psychological fact, with what was believed to have taken place, or even what the author wishes us to believe took place. It is this psychological element in secular and religious history which is rapidly growing in importance, causing us very largely to modify traditionally accepted views. For loss or gain, it is now at work upon the Old and New Testa- ments. It is science, ordered knowledge. While indeed we should be slow to accept merely tenta- tive conclusions, it is obscurantism not orthodoxy which fatuously invokes popular prejudice or ecclesiastical censure against its method. The purpose of the Scriptures as a whole is the edification of men in faith and righteousness, and this undoubtedly has been and may be realised amid much uncertainty as to particular books. Who can measure the amount of harm inflicted upon sensitive souls by the alternative which has been offered them ! All or nothing ; the whole Bible as it stands as an infallible revelation from God, or no revelation at all ? A true interpretation of the Old or New Testa- ment must be based upon the recognition that Oriental habits of thought and of expression, natural to the writers, were not obliterated by their becoming channels of divine teaching. It is necessary therefore that these characteristics RESULTS OF CRITICISM 43 in an Isaiah or St Paul, be carefully studied by us, to whom they are so alien, before we can fully grasp their spiritual content. Further, the scientific lines of demarcation between fact and allegory or poetry were not in literature defined for these writers, as they are for us ; and, as we need to bear in mind, even the closest union of the soul with God is no protection from errors of fact. Another result of the application of scientific historical knowledge will be that we shall now regard as narratives of process, what we formerly read as narratives of transaction. We have learned e.g. that this earth is not the centre of the universe, and that the six days' drama of Genesis is poetry not science, the representation of a process of evolution not of an instantaneous transaction. With Prof. Hort we accept the story of the early chapters of that book as a divinely appointed parable. Whether or not the corrupt state of human nature was preceded in temporal sequence by an incorrupt state, this is the most vivid, the most natural way of ex- hibiting the truth, that in God's primary purpose man was incorrupt, so that the evil in him should be regarded as having a temporary or adventi- tious character. It is even of greater importance to remember in 44 RESULTS OF CRITICISM our study of the Old Testament that primitive conceptions of morality and of God there por- trayed, are defective, incomplete. " We can no longer say," wrote the late brilliant scholar Aubrey Moore, " It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God ; therefore it is right. We are studying imperfect records of a progressive revela- tion, and we can never spare ourselves the effort of a moral judgment." In estimating the religious value of the Old Testament, the teaching of Christ must be our guide. Hitherto, as Professor Bruce remarks, the Church has been much more alive to Christ's presence in the Old Testament than to His absence. It has so read Him into its pages, that the " caterpillar becomes a butterfly " before the time, and all sense of development, progress, growth, in revelation is destroyed. Prophecy, which, historically interpreted, is as a beautiful moonlight in the dark, becomes like the moon in the daytime, pale, dim, useless, in the hands of interpreters who are too anxious to read a Christian meaning into all its oracles. No defect of moral sentiment or religious temper is allowed to appear, no pagan survival, as in Abram's sacrifice of his son. All is apologised for, justified, transfigured, under the impression that so best is reverence shown towards the Word RESULTS OF CRITICISM 45 of God. Not after this fashion, but " according to Christ Jesus " shall we read the Old Testament, recognising it to be our right and our duty to carry the ideas of God and man and their mutual relations, as taught by Him, back to these Scriptures, and to regard in them all not in con- formity therewith, as pertaining to that defective element naturally belonging to the earlier stages of a progressive revelation. " When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." We value the Old Testament because it contains the record of the origin and growth of the first great monotheistic religion ; though we know now better than before, how slowly and gradually this supreme truth was reached. Still more highly do we estimate its worth, because it stands in closer and more intimate relation than any other section of religious history, with the career of Him in whom the self-revelation of God has reached its central point. We especially associate this idea of revelation with exceptional men, the men of spiritual insight, religious genius, those who have taken the great forward steps in religious develop- ment, the heroes, the leaders of the race. Yet we do not forget that such men have not all been of the Jewish stock. The Light which 46 RESULTS OF CRITICISM lighteth every man shone, though with less illuminative radiance, outside the range of the writers of their sacred literature. The Catechism of the modern Greek Church contains a truth liable to be overlooked by Western Christendom : " Jesus Christ came into the world after many ages of preparation. The Jews were prepared by God for His coming through the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets, but the Gentiles were prepared through men of great reasoning power and wisdom, Socrates, Plato and others, who perceived the wrongness of worshipping many gods, and whose minds were lifted up to the idea of one God." As compared with the Old Testament we hold of quite paramount authority the New Testa- ment, because it contains the record of the life and character and teaching of Jesus Christ in whom the enlightened conscience of humanity recognises the highest and the fullest revelation of God's nature that man is capable of receiving. Yet here also we are conscious of varying degrees of inspiration. It is not all for us of equal worth. The words of Christ stand first and are more authoritative for us than comments or epistles of disciple or apostle. It is the practi- cally unanimous verdict of criticism that we have in the Gospels a substantially trustworthy RESULTS OF CRITICISM 47 account of the life of Jesus. Dr Martineau, a Unitarian, writes — " No one can affect ignor- ance of what He was : enough is saved to plant His personality in a clear space distinct from all that history or even fiction presents." This is the witness of an expert who is certainly swayed by no bias of orthodoxy. Yet holding this view as absolute truth it is perfectly con- sistent to admit the possibility that this or that incident may be unhistorical or exaggerated ; that this version is more accurate than that ; that the pages of St Mark are more trustworthy for the doings, and those of St Matthew for the sayings, of the Saviour of mankind. "If we are faithful to the principle that the unique authority of the Gospels is due only to what they tell us of Christ, we shall be thankful for any criticism which helps us to get closer to the very words of the Master than those do, who treat the gospels — all of them equally and equally in every part — as verbatim reports of His utterances." The objection urged that such criticism is subjective, is merely the statement of a truism which is applicable to all literary and historic judgments. From the critic of the New Testa- ment is demanded possession of the highest 1 Rashdall, p. 265. 48 RESULTS OF CRITICISM qualities ; a spiritual insight corresponding to the intuitive perception, the almost additional sense, with which the true critic in art or litera- ture becomes endowed. " It should be possible for one fully possessed by the spirit of Christ to divine, by a sort of tact or instinct, how He spoke and acted, or would have spoken and acted, under given circumstances. And such a portrayal might be a far truer revelation of His mind and personality than the shreds and scraps of biographical evidence that have come down to us." 1 We may take it as a well-established result, that the books of the New Testament, as historical documents, are authoritative records of Christian faith and thought, as they existed at a very early date. History and criticism make it certain that there was an historical foundation for that faith and those opinions in the historic personality of Jesus. It is also beyond the range of doubt that those who came under His personal influence were unable to think of Him as an ordinary man. Historical students therefore, as the first Christians, are compelled by criticism itself to speak of Jesus as unique. Prof. Gardner refuses to go beyond this. Harnack says, " In Jesus the divine ap- 1 Tyrrell, p. 1 3. RESULTS OF CRITICISM 49 peared in as pure a form as it can appear on earth." But demi-divinity is simply a relapse into heathenism. The Arian or quasi-Arian view of Jesus has absolutely nothing to say for itself historically, and has everything against it philosophically. It is a Christ in whom, as Prof. J. H. Green says, no philosopher who had outgrown the demonism of ancient systems, could for a moment acquiesce. More consistent, more complete, more satisfying is the Confession of the Church, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." The spiritual claims of Christ are seen to be most securely founded, not ultimately upon prophecy or miracle, nor upon literal exactness of Scripture, but upon what He Himself was and is, upon the witness which our spirits bear to His spirit, " deep answering to deep." " Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter, Churches change, forms perish, systems go, But our human needs they will n