"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.