THE BOOK OF HUMANITY
We have seen that the understanding of the Scriptures presupposes at
least a sympathy with the rule of life contained in the Scriptures, and
implies for its largest results a practical surrender to that rule of
life. He that doeth the will revealed in the Scriptures cometh to a
knowledge of the truth revealed in the Scriptures. We must next note
that an understanding of the Bible cannot advance far until it realizes
the emphasis on the human values set before us in the scriptural books.
We are to approach the distinctively religious teachings of the Bible
somewhat later. It is now in order to call attention to the truth that
the biblical movement is throughout the ages in the direction of
increasing regard for the distinctively human. The human ideal is not
so much absolutely stated as imposed in laws, in prophecies, in the
policies of statesmen, in the types of ideal erected on high before the
chosen people as worthy of supreme regard. And the place of the human
ideal in the Bible helps determine the place of the Bible in human
life. Mankind makes much of the Book because the Book makes much of
mankind.
There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the
Hebrews. One characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a
very early date--the regard for human life as such and the aim to make
human existence increasingly worth while. It is a common quality of
primitive religions that they are apt to lay stress on merely
ceremonial cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone through for
the sake of pleasing a deity. There are abundant indications of this
same purpose in the ceremonies of the early Hebrews, but there is even
more abundant indication that the ceremonies were aimed at a good
result for the worshiper himself. It is impossible to read through the
Mosaic requirements concerning bodily cleanliness, the sanitary
arrangements of the camps, the regulations for cooking the food, and
the instructions for dealing with disease without feeling that there is
a wide difference between such requirements and merely formal
ceremonials. The Mosaic sanitary law aimed at the good of the people.
It sought to make men clean and decent and human. So it was also in
many of the rules governing the daily work, the regulations as to the
use of land, the prohibitions of usury, the relations of servants and
masters--all these had back of them the driving force of an enlarging
human ideal. The trend was away from everything unhuman and inhuman. It
is not necessary for us to remark upon the outbursts of the prophets
against those who would put property interests above human interests.
It is a matter of commonplace that the call of the prophets was for
larger devotion to a genuinely human ideal: that the fires of their
wrath burned most fiercely against old-time monopolists who joined land
to land till there was "no place," and against old-time corrupters of
the law who sold the needy for a pair of shoes.
Not only did the emphasis on the human ideal show in laws, but in the
training up of types of life which should in themselves embody and
illustrate the conceptions of the biblical leaders. At the heart of the
Christian religion is incarnation, or divine revelation through the
human organism. We are told that this incarnation came in the fullness
of time. The passage seems to refer not merely to the rounding out of
historic periods, but also to the fashioning of an ideal of human
character, and at least a partial realization of that ideal in Hebrew
heroes. If the final ideal was to stand incarnate before men, there
must be approximations to that ideal before the crowning incarnation
could be appreciated. We look upon the character of Jesus as the
complete embodiment of human excellencies. Such a revelation, however,
would have been futile if there had not previously been glimpses of and
anticipations of the ideal in the lives of those who were forerunners
of Jesus. The Scriptures teach, or at least imply, that the life of a
good man is in itself a transcendent value.
And yet it is perfectly clear that while the Scriptures exalt the
individual, they do not mean to wall individuals off in impenetrable
circles by themselves. It is true that the individual is the end toward
which the scriptural redemption and glorification aims, but individuals
find their own best selves not in isolation but in union with their
fellows--a union of mutual cooperation and service, a union so close
that the persons thus related come to be looked upon as a veritable
Body of Christ, making together by their impact upon the world the same
sort of revelation that the living Christ made in the days of his early
life. The ideals as to the supremacy of human values are realized,
according to the Scriptures, not in any separateness of individual
existence, but in a closeness of social interdependence. So true is
this that it is hardly possible to see how one can make much of the
scriptural movement without immersing himself in the stream of human
life with highest regard for the values of that life.
It has been insisted from the beginning that the Christian
consciousness is the only adequate interpretation of the Scriptures. By
Christian consciousness is meant not the consciousness of the body of
believers who are together trying to serve Christ. The interpretation
of the individual becomes final only as it is accepted by the mass of
the believers. Something of worth-while thought is conceived of as
going out from the life of every believer. The utterance of the seer is
not conceived of as complete until even he who sits in the seat of the
unlearned has said "Amen." The pronouncements which do not evoke this
wide human response fall by the wayside. For example, how was the canon
of the New Testament shaped? Was there a determination on the part of
individual leaders that such and such books should be included in the
volume of Scriptures? Very likely there was at the last such deliberate
selection, but before the final decision there must have been the
practice of the congregations which amounted in the end to the choice
or rejection of sacred books. Very likely the New Testament Scriptures
were collected by a process of trying out the reading of Epistles and
Gospels and exhortations before the congregations. As passages met or
failed to meet the human needs, there was call for the repeated reading
of some works and no call for the rereading of others. In use some
documents proved their sacredness and other documents fell aside into
disuse. Before the concluding deliberate choice was this selection in
use by the believers themselves; and the selection turned round the
question as to whether or not the documents helped people. If each
member of the body of believers is entitled to interpret biblical
literature, interpretation becomes a composite and diversified
activity. There is little warrant in the Scriptures for the notion that
the biblical revelation is to level men to any sort of sameness. There
are diversities of endowments and varieties of expression; but the
united judgment of the body of believers is the supreme authority in
interpreting the scriptural revelation. This is what we mean by saying
that the church is to interpret the Scriptures. We mean that no matter
how brilliant or interesting the utterances of any individual may be,
they are not of great value until they have received in some fashion
the sanction of the main mass of believers. It is the function of the
spokesmen of the church to gather up into distinct expression what may
have been vaguely, but nevertheless really, in the thought or
half-thought of the people. Gladstone once said that it is the business
of the orator to send back upon his audience in showers what comes up
to him from the audience in mist or clouds; so it is with the voice of
a biblical truth through any medium of interpretation. The spokesman
compresses or condenses into speech what has been dimly in the
consciousness of the people. Even in days less democratic than ours
this was abundantly true. It is the fashion to denounce some of the
councils of the old church which shaped the creeds. It is often said
that these creedal councils were moved by considerations of low-grade
expediency. The councils, however, knew what the people were thinking
of, and managed to get the popular thought into expression measurably
satisfactory to the people themselves.
In this doctrine of the church as interpreter of scriptural truth we
can be sure that the emphasis will remain on the elements which make
for enlarging human life if the church keeps true to the spirit of the
Bible itself. The aspirations of humanity, the longings of masses of
men, find utterance in the great popular spiritual demands all the more
effectively because such demands override and nullify the insistence of
an individualistic point of view which might easily become selfish. We
have said that this democratic interpretation is final so long as it
keeps itself in line with the biblical purpose. There are some dangers,
however, against which we must be on our guard. First is the danger of
identifying the church with those who actually belong to an
organization. When we think of the church we have in mind not merely
formal organizations, but all men who are really working in the spirit
of the biblical ideals. There are many persons who really act according
to the biblical revelation without technically uniting with a church.
It may be that such persons do not accept the intellectual puttings of
biblical doctrine, but that they nevertheless live in the spirit of
that doctrine. It might be conceivably possible that a church
organization would stand for an interpretation of truth which would be
rejected by the general good sense of a larger community. In such a
case the larger community would be the interpreter. Another danger in
an interpreting body is that of traditionalism. The native conservatism
of many minds stands against innovation. If, however, the innovation is
in the direction of enlarging human life, it will in the end win its
way. A third danger is that of institutionalism, where the organization
as such becomes an end in itself without regard to the human interests
involved. The Master's fiercest condemnations were for those who put
any institution before the fulfillment of the human ideals. In the
parable of the good Samaritan it is noteworthy that it was the priest
and the Levite who passed by on the other side. It is hard to resist
the feeling that the Master implied that the priest and Levite had been
institutionalized into a lack of humanity. Making allowance now for all
these dangers against which believers must guard, the chances are that
interpretation of a book so human as the Scriptures is not final until
it has received the real, though not necessarily formal, sanction of
the body of believers.
So thoroughly does the biblical revelation turn around the supremacy of
the distinctively human values that we must insist that anything which
would run counter to these values is alien to the spirit of the
revelation, and, therefore, to comprehension of that revelation. We do
not wish to be extreme, but it is hard to see how, in our day, for
example, any who fail to put human rights in the first place can really
master the scriptural revelation. We have spoken of the Master's
rebukes of any form of institutionalism which stands in the way of
human rights. Institutions at best are instruments; they exist merely
for the purpose of bringing men to larger life; but these institutions
sometimes get petrified into custom and become glorified by long
practice, and even made sacred by adherents who look upon them as ends
in themselves. Then there is no recourse except to break the
institutions in the name of larger human life. If we could put
ourselves back in the times of Jesus and feel something of the
sacredness with which the Jews regarded the Sabbath, we would know the
tremendous force of the Master's daring when he declared that the
Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Master was
also insistent upon the priority of human rights as over against
property rights. It is perfectly true that Jesus did not encourage any
propaganda for social reform. It is a mistake to try to read any form
of modern Socialism into his teaching. Socialism is the theory of a
particular time. Many of its outstanding features will no doubt one day
be adopted; and the world will then move forward toward something else.
Very likely three centuries from the present date the well-advanced
communities of the world will be living under systems which will make
Socialism itself look like the most hopeless and reactionary
conservatism. The scriptural revelation, however, has not to do with
the details of any particular scheme. It aims, rather, at the setting
on high of the human ideal, an ideal which will, if given a chance,
work itself out into the concrete forms best suited to each age, and
which will not have exhausted its vitality when all that is good in the
programs of our particular day shall have been incorporated into social
practice.
But let us linger for a moment around the blighting effect of placing
property rights in front of human rights. If anyone at this juncture
becomes nervous and insists that we are likely to introduce the
new-fangled notions of the present day into a discussion where they are
out of place, let us remind such a one that the danger of putting the
material before the spiritual has always been the chief stumbling stone
in the path of the biblical revelation. It may be too much to say with
the old version that the love of money is the root of all evil, but the
Scriptures place the sin of greed in the forefront among the evils that
block the revealing process. Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to
go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of God." With God a morally miraculous redemption is entirely
possible; but Jesus declares that there is no need of our trying to
minimize the power of the present world to blind us to visions of the
spiritual world. For many forms of wrongdoing the Master had a
willingness to make allowances; for the sin of placing material desires
above human welfare he had unsparing condemnation. In the day of Jesus
the world had an opportunity such as it never had before confronted to
learn spiritual truth. What manner of opposition was it which prevented
that truth from running its full course? Largely the opposition of
money interests. The Pharisees had need to keep alliance with the
temporal powers. It is not without significance that Jesus was betrayed
for money. It is not without significance too that Jesus's picture of
the Judgment Scene concerns itself largely with the rewards for those
who discharge the tasks of simple human kindness. It means much to find
Jesus hinting at an unpardonable sin on the part of those who call
deeds of human relief works of Beelzebub. It is certainly food for
reflection that the fiercest condemnations in his parables are for
those who miss the human duties in their regard for the possessions of
this world. We repeat that we would not be extreme, but when we see the
disregard of human life in modern industrialism; when we behold the
attempts of property interests to get control of all channels for the
shaping of public opinion; when we see rent, interest, and dividends
more highly rated than men, women, and children, we cannot help feeling
that the deeper penetration into the Scriptures cannot arrive except
through an emphasis upon fundamental human rights so mighty that all
institutional creations of industrialism or ecclesiasticism shall be
put into the secondary place and strictly kept there. This is not
railing against wealth. It is simply calling attention to the fact that
the man who possesses the wealth-tool cannot be allowed to use it or
even to brandish it in such fashion as to endanger the unfolding of
human ideals. It is only through the enforcing of these ideals that the
Scriptures can be adequately apprehended. Until a social kingdom of God
comes on earth the light of revelation cannot shine in its full
brightness. Any social preacher of larger human rights is working for
the dawn of a new day of biblical understanding.
Some one will ask, however, why we single out one type of evil as
especially thwarting the understanding of a biblical revelation. Why
not speak of the evils of appetite and of envy and jealousy? The answer
is that such evils, devastating as they are toward the spiritual
faculties, are so definitely personalized in individuals that their
nature is quickly recognized. The difference is that under present
organization the evils of materialism are preeminently social. There is
everywhere the heartiest condemnation for the man who personally is
conspicuously greedy. A social evil can manifest itself in outstanding
startlingness in a single person, but the plain fact is that under
modern industrial organization we are all caught in the same snare. We
are all tarred with the same stick. Great as is the improvement of our
present system over anything that has preceded it, nevertheless the
distribution of this world's goods is so unequal that we walk in the
presence of injustice on every hand. The poor man often does not
receive the product of his own work. Large material prizes go to men
who toil not. Now no one in particular is to blame for this social
plight. Nobody has yet arisen to show us the way out. We cannot act
except as we all act together; and it is doubtful even if one nation
could act alone. If, however, we should all recognize the evils of the
present system, if we should condemn the wrongs of that system instead
of trying to justify them, we would be on much better spiritual ground,
for the attempts to justify the system lead to uneasy consciences, and
to the searing of those consciences, and to the softening down of harsh
truths, and finally to an inability to see things as they are. Though
we have come far along the path toward industrial justice, there is
still very much in the system under which we live that makes for an
inability to understand some of the most elementary phrasings of
Christian truth. The only way out is to see the system as it is and to
take such steps forward as can be taken now. Only thus can we keep our
souls saved, and only thus also can we follow the flashes from above.
Jesus preached the highest ideal for individual righteousness. Men are
to strive to be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. But
the perfection is to show itself in social impartiality in the use of
material opportunities. God sendeth the rain to fall and the sun to
shine on the evil and the good. How many Christians of the present day
could be safely intrusted with the distribution of rainfall and
sunshine? Those of us who dwell in lands that must be irrigated know
that the type of Christianity that can be trusted to deal fairly with
our irrigation system is somewhat unusual.
We take the injustices of the present social order too much as a matter
of course. We ought to see them as making against humanity, and
therefore against the scriptural revelation. When these injustices
culminate in a war like the present, the only safety is thought that
deals honestly with the inhumanity of the war. Granted that war in
self-defense is justifiable, we keep ourselves open to divine
revelations only as we refuse to glorify the inhuman. Only that nation
can succeed in war and remain open to revelation from above which
recognizes the inhumanity of war and refuses to glorify it.
Closely related to the blight of the spirit of this present world is
the failure to perceive the need of missionary spirit for a full grasp
of scriptural truth. Though the Bible was given to a peculiar people,
self-centered and exclusive, it nevertheless abounds in suggestions
that its content can be appreciated the full only by those whose
sympathies run out to men at the very ends of the earth. In the eyes of
the Scriptures a human being is a human being anywhere. The differences
between men are as nothing compared to the likenesses. Every revelation
must begin somewhere and must attack its problems in proper sequence,
one after the other; but mere priority of approach does not mean that
one problem is inherently more important than another. Leaders among
the Jews early tried to impress this upon the Jewish mind. Considered
in its historical setting, the book of Jonah is one of the most
spiritually daring books ever written. Jonah stands as a type of Jew
who would not admit anything of worth in human beings outside of
Judaism. Rather than carry the word of the Lord to Nineveh he would
leave his country and go to Tarshish; rather than turn back and resume
the journey to Nineveh, he would consent to be cast overboard in a
storm. Forced at last to deliver his message, he announced it with the
grim satisfaction of expecting to see Nineveh destroyed. And the final
text of the book is that Jonah must learn not merely to proclaim his
message to the Ninevites, but to proclaim his message with sympathy and
genuine human interest. The Jews were a long time learning the lesson,
but not longer than other peoples have been. Just because of the human
interest involved, the missionary impulse is necessary to a spiritual
seizure of the biblical revelation.
It is important that we keep the missionary motive on the right basis.
It is true that the Scriptures will never be adequately appropriated
until all kindreds and peoples and tongues bring their contributions.
Some phases of the truth the Oriental mind must seize before the
Occidental mind can be brought to appreciate them. When the final
revelation comes it will be adapted to the understanding of any kindred
under heaven. It is worth while to spread the Christian revelation for
the sake of the return which the Christianized peoples will one day
bring to our studies of the truth. But the better motive is deeper than
this--the passion for human beings as human beings. Any human being is
entitled to any truth which another human being can reveal to him.
The approach must be the human approach. We must speedily get away from
the Jonah-like conceptions of the biblical revelation as intended
particularly for any one nation. One great danger from the present war
is the loss by the religious nations involved of the ordinary New
Testament point of view. Many of the fighting nations have lapsed back
into the pre-Jonah era. But the present war aside, the thought of
supreme truth as intended chiefly for a particular race or nation,
leads to a patronizing, condescending bearing toward other peoples
which thwarts the finer spiritual achievements. The contacts between
the so-called higher and so-called lower nations in military,
diplomatic, and commercial relations have thus far for the most part
been abominable. Too often missionary effort itself has based itself on
these same assumptions of racial superiority. A people may indeed
receive blessings from the Scriptures in whatever spirit they are
bestowed, but damage is wrought in the souls of the bestowers by the
attitude of superiority. The only genuinely biblical approach is one of
respect--respect for the peoples as peoples, respect which will have
regard for their growing independence in spiritual development, respect
which will not force upon them particularistic interpretations of the
universal Scriptures.
Now, all of this may seem like a long distance from a treatment of
understanding of the Scriptures in the ordinary sense. It would not
have been worth while, however, to discuss this problem merely from the
point of view of exegesis or professional commentary. The essentials
about the Scriptures are their relations to life, their views of human
beings and teachings concerning the forces of the spiritual kingdom. We
shall proceed in the other chapters to speak of God, of the revelation
of God in Christ, and of the spirit of Christ as revealed in his cross.
Before we enter upon that study we must again remind ourselves that
only life in harmony with the point of view of the Scriptures and only
an interest in the same human problems that engross the attention of
spiritual writers can avail us for vital interpretation of the
teachings concerning the Divine, or make intelligible to us the hold of
the Scriptures on the life of the world. The Bible is conceived in a
spirit of respect for men. Only those who enter into that same spirit
can hope to make much of the biblical revelation.