Transcriber's note:
Notes and quotations in smaller font have been indented two spaces.
Apparent typographical errors have been corrected; inconsistent hyphens
have been retained; essay headings have been simplified.
Oxford
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
LUX MUNDI
_A SERIES OF STUDIES_
IN THE
RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION
EDITED
BY CHARLES GORE, M.A.
PRINCIPAL OF PUSEY HOUSE
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
_TENTH EDITION_
A quella Luce cotal si diventa,
Che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
È impossibil che mai si consenta.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1890
[_All rights reserved_]
ESSAYS AND CONTRIBUTORS.
1. _Faith._
Rev. H. S. HOLLAND, M.A., Canon of St. Paul's, sometime
Senior Student of Christ Church.
2. _The Christian Doctrine of God._
Rev. AUBREY MOORE, M.A., Hon. Canon of Christ Church, Tutor
of Magdalen and Keble Colleges.
3. _The Problem of Pain: its bearing on faith in God._
Rev. J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A., Rector of Longworth, sometime
Fellow of Jesus and Tutor of Keble Colleges.
4. _The Preparation in History for Christ._
Rev. E. S. TALBOT, D.D., Vicar of Leeds, sometime Warden of
Keble College.
5. _The Incarnation in relation to Development._
Rev. J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
6. _The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma._
Rev. R. C. MOBERLY, M.A., Vicar of Great Budworth, sometime
Senior Student of Christ Church.
7. _The Atonement._
Rev. and Hon. ARTHUR LYTTELTON, M.A., Master of Selwyn
College, Cambridge, sometime Tutor of Keble College.
8. _The Holy Spirit and Inspiration._
Rev. C. GORE, M.A., Principal of Pusey House, Fellow of
Trinity College.
9. _The Church._
Rev. W. LOCK, M.A., Sub-Warden of Keble and Fellow of
Magdalen Colleges.
10. _Sacraments._
Rev. F. PAGET, D.D., Canon of Christ Church, and Regius
Professor of Pastoral Theology.
11. _Christianity and Politics._
Rev. W. J. H. CAMPION, M.A., Tutor of Keble College.
12. _Christian Ethics._
Rev. R. L. OTTLEY, M.A., Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon, late
Senior Student of Christ Church.
PREFACE.
1. This volume is primarily due to a set of circumstances which exists
no longer. The writers found themselves at Oxford together between the
years 1875-1885, engaged in the common work of University education;
and compelled for their own sake, no less than that of others, to
attempt to put the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern
intellectual and moral problems. Such common necessity and effort led
to not infrequent meetings, in which a common body of thought and
sentiment, and a common method of commending the faith to the
acceptance of others, tended to form itself. We, who once enjoyed this
happy companionship, are now for the most part separated. But at least
some result of our temporary association remains, which it is hoped
may justify and explain the present volume.
2. For this collection of essays represents an attempt on behalf of
the Christian Creed in the way of explanation. We are sure that Jesus
Christ is still and will continue to be the 'Light of the world.' We
are sure that if men can rid themselves of prejudices and mistakes
(for which, it must be said, the Church is often as responsible as
they), and will look afresh at what the Christian faith really means,
they will find that it is as adequate as ever to interpret life and
knowledge in its several departments, and to impart not less
intellectual than moral freedom. But we are conscious also that if the
true meaning of the faith is to be made sufficiently conspicuous it
needs disencumbering, reinterpreting, explaining. We can but quote in
this sense a distinguished French writer who has often acted as an
inspiration to many of us. Père Gratry felt painfully that the dogmas
of the Church were but as an 'unknown tongue' to many of the best of
his compatriots. 'It is not enough,' he said, 'to utter the mysteries
of the Spirit, the great mysteries of Christianity, in formulas, true
before God, but not understood of the people. The apostle and the
prophet are precisely those who have the gift of interpreting these
obscure and profound formulas for each man and each age. To translate
into the common tongue the mysterious and sacred language ... to speak
the word of God afresh in each age, in accordance with both the
novelty of the age and the eternal antiquity of the truth, this is
what S. Paul means by interpreting the unknown tongue. But to do this,
the first condition is that a man should appreciate the times he lives
in. "Hoc autem tempus quare non probatis[1]?"'
3. We have written then in this volume not as 'guessers at truth,' but
as servants of the Catholic Creed and Church, aiming only at
interpreting the faith we have received. On the other hand, we have
written with the conviction that the epoch in which we live is one of
profound transformation, intellectual and social, abounding in new
needs, new points of view, new questions; and certain therefore to
involve great changes in the outlying departments of theology, where
it is linked on to other sciences, and to necessitate some general
restatement of its claim and meaning.
This is to say that theology must take a new development. We grudge
the name development, on the one hand, to anything which fails to
preserve the type of the Christian Creed and the Christian Church; for
development is not innovation, it is not heresy: on the other hand, we
cannot recognise as the true 'development of Christian doctrine,' a
movement which means merely an intensification of a current tendency
from within, a narrowing and hardening of theology by simply giving it
greater definiteness or multiplying its dogmas.
The real development of theology is rather the process in which the
Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension
of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because
'the truth makes her free' is able to assimilate all new material, to
welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into
the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her
treasures things new and old, and shewing again and again her power of
witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her
faith and life.
4. To such a development these studies attempt to be a contribution.
They will be seen to cover, more or less, the area of the Christian
faith in its natural order and sequence of parts, but the intention is
not to offer complete theological treatises, or controversial defences
of religious truths: it is rather to present positively the central
ideas and principles of religion, in the light of contemporary thought
and current problems. The only one of the essays in fact which has any
degree of formal completeness, is that on Christian Ethics, a subject
on which the absence of systematic books of a genuine English growth
seems to justify a more detailed treatment.
5. The main omissions of which we are conscious are due to want of
space. For instance, we should have been very glad to attempt a
separate treatment of the subject of sin; though we hope the line that
would be taken about it has been sufficiently indicated by more than
one writer[2]. Again, we have left aside any detailed discussion of
historical evidences; but it will be seen that our attempt has been so
to present the principles of the Christian faith as to suggest the
point of view from which evidences are intelligible, and from which
they will, it is firmly believed, be found satisfactory. Once more, if
we have not found room for a treatment of miracles, at least we hope
that the Church's conception of God, as He manifests Himself in nature
and in grace, which we have endeavoured to express, will at once
acquit us of any belief in capricious 'violations of law;' and will
also suggest a view of the world as disordered by sin and crying out
for redemption, which will make it intelligible that 'miracles' should
appear, not as violating law, but as a necessary element in its
restoration as well as its completer exhibition; contrary, not to the
fundamental order of the Divine working, but only to a superficial or
mechanical view of it, or to a view which sin has distorted or
preoccupation with physical science has unduly narrowed.
6. It only remains to explain that we have written not as mere
individuals, but as ministers, under common conditions, of a common
faith. This unity of conviction has enabled us freely to offer and
accept mutual criticism and suggestion; so that without each of us
professing such responsibility for work other than his own, as would
have involved undue interference with individual method, we do desire
this volume to be the expression of a common mind and a common hope.
C. G.
PUSEY HOUSE,
_Michaelmas, 1889_.
[1] Gratry, _Henri Perreyve_, Paris 1880, p. 162.
[2] See pp. 208-211, 292-3, 318-20, 475-6.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.
The author of the Essay _The Holy Spirit and Inspiration_ has
endeavoured to obviate further misunderstanding of his meaning on one
important point by rewriting some sentences on pp. 359-60, in
accordance with the _Corrigenda_ inserted in the Fourth Edition.
PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION.
I.
There are two things which may fairly be regretted in regard to the
criticisms--often the very kind and encouraging criticisms--which,
this book has received. There is, first, the disproportionate
attention which has been given to some twenty pages on the subject of
the inspiration of Holy Scripture, an attention so disproportionate as
to defeat the object which the writers had in view in assigning to
that subject its place in the general treatment of the work of the
Holy Spirit--the object, namely, of giving it its proper context in
the whole body of Christian truth: and there is, secondly, the fact
that we have not generally succeeded in gaining the attention of our
critics to the point of view from which these 'studies' were written,
and the purpose they were intended to serve.
Our purpose was 'to succour a distressed faith' by endeavouring to
bring the Christian Creed into its right relation to the modern growth
of knowledge, scientific, historical, critical; and to the modern
problems of politics and ethics[3]. We were writing as for Christians,
but as for Christians perplexed by new knowledge which they are
required to assimilate and new problems with which they are required
to deal. What is needed to help men in such perplexity is not
compromise, for compromise generally means tampering with principle,
but readjustment, or fresh correlation, of the things of faith and the
things of knowledge. In detail this will, no doubt, involve
concessions, and that on both sides, because both sides have been
liable to make mistakes[4]; but in the main what is to be looked for
is a reconciliation which shall at once set the scientific and
critical movement, so far as it is simply scientific and critical,
free from the peril of irreligion, and the religious movement free
from the imputation of hostility to new knowledge--as free as any
movement can be, which is intensely concerned to nourish and develop
what is permanent and unchanging in human life. Such a reconciliation
has more than once been effected in the past, though never without a
preliminary period of antagonism[5]; our confidence that it will be
effected anew in the future lies partly in the fact that we see it
already taking place in some minds which seem to us to represent the
best life and thought of our time both scientific and religious. One
such at least[6] we knew and have lost, though only from present
intercourse, in Aubrey Moore. Nobody could know him and think of him
as 'compromising' either his faith or his science. He lived primarily
and with deepest interest in his religious life and theological study,
but he lived also with intense reality in the life of science. And the
debt we owe to him, over and above the debt under which his personal
character lays us for ever, is that of having let us see how the two
lives of faith and of science can melt into one. He felt indeed and
wrestled with the difficulties of adjustment. He had not, as it seemed
to us, nearly finished his work in this respect. But he had done
enough for our encouragement: enough to help us to believe that the
best minds of the future are to be neither religious minds defying
scientific advance, nor scientific minds denying religion, but minds
in which religion interprets and is interpreted by science, in which
faith and enquiry subsist together and reinforce one another. The
reason why he should have been so soon taken from us and from the
Church on earth--taken when 'our need was the sorest'--lies in the
impenetrable mysteries of God. 'Si dolemus ablatum, non tamen
obliviscimur quod datus fuit, et gratias agimus quod habere illum
meruimus.... Pusillus corde eram et confortabat me; piger et
negligens, et excitabat me[7].'
II.
It seems to us that a due regard to the point of view from which these
studies were written would have obviated some of the criticisms upon
them. For instance, it would have explained why we forbore to enter
upon the questions which may be raised as to the seat and methods of
Church authority. It was because these questions do not arise
practically till the work has been done to which we were attempting to
minister. When a man is once reassured that his faith in Christ is
capable of rational justification, he begins naturally to enquire what
exactly the Christian religion involves in this or that detail, and
how its manifestly authoritative character, as a Divine Revelation, is
to find expression: but these enquiries hardly begin till the
preliminary reassurance has been gained.
The _moral_ authority of Christianity, of Christian lives and
characters, does indeed exercise a determining influence on the
promotion and recovery of faith; but men do not often either win a
hold on the creed for the first time, or recover it where it has been
lost or impaired, because the theological authority of the Church
enables them to take it on trust. The very grounds of that authority
are for the moment too much in question to admit of the proper amount
of deference being given to it. Thus it seemed to us better in this
volume to be content with general statements as to the principle of
Church authority[8], leaving out its detailed discussion as unsuitable
to our present purpose.
Of course, however, we were conscious all the time that we were
ourselves amenable to the bar of authority and were bound to feel sure
that nothing we were saying was transgressing the laws which the
Catholic Church has laid down. We should indeed be unanimous in
disclaiming any desire to have 'license to say what we please' in our
position as Church teachers. All meaning would be taken out of the
effort and hope this book represents if we could not believe that we
were speaking as the Church would have us speak. As the essay on
Inspiration has been chiefly called in question on the ground of
authority, the author of it must be allowed to plead that he did
assure himself he was saying nothing which the Church in her past
action had not left him free to say, while for the future he does
earnestly desire in due course, and after due enquiry, an action of
Church authority on the relation of modern critical methods to the
doctrine of Inspiration; and further he believes that the Anglican
churches, holding as they do so conspicuous a place in traditional
reverence for the Scriptures, while they are so free on the other hand
from the obscurantist fear of historical enquiry, are more likely than
any other part of the Church to arrive at determinations on the
subject such as will be of material service to the whole of
Christendom. But for the present there can be no doubt the subject is
not ripe for any official or formal determinations.
III.
It seems to us also that some of the criticisms on the treatment of
Inspiration in Essay VIII, which shall be presently dealt with, have
been due to the same forgetfulness of the writer's aim, and of the
general aim of the whole book. Our traditional belief in the Bible is
at the present time confronted with a body of critical literature
which claims to overthrow a great many of the accepted opinions about
the Old Testament Scriptures. The criticism is at least grave and
important enough to claim attention, to necessitate that we should
come to a more or less clear understanding of the relation in which
our faith stands towards it. The writer of the essay did not write as
a biblical critic but as a theological student and teacher, bound to
give a candid consideration to a criticism which bears directly upon
the sacred books of our religion. His object was not to discuss and
determine questions of biblical criticism, but to explain, as it
appears to him, the relation which theology is to take up towards
them. And he wrote 'in the mind of those who have felt the trouble in
the air:' he wrote to succour a faith distressed by the problems
criticism is raising. That faith is very widely distressed by them,
and that not merely in academic circles, does not admit of question.
Nor did it seem to him to admit of question that the best way to deal
with this distress was not to attempt to solve problems, which,
because of the immense area over which discussion ranges, do not admit
of ready solutions; but to attempt to state the main conclusions
criticism is claiming to have arrived at, as the critics themselves
would have us state them; to show that our Christian faith is not
vitally affected by them; and so to divert an anxious mind from
problems which it cannot solve, at least at present, and fix it on the
central truths of our religion, helping it to feel how, if it be once
grounded on these central truths, the issue of the critical discussion
can be awaited, with keen interest indeed, but without alarm. But this
assurance of mind in face of the critical controversy is only possible
if we see that the critical positions are in fact compatible with the
real _inspiration_ of Holy Scripture. Now the best way to give
reassurance on this point seemed to be for the writer to make it plain
that he himself felt the great force and appeal of the critical case,
and that his conviction that the real Inspiration of the Old Testament
was unaffected by it, did not depend upon its being underrated. Had
the main purpose of the writer been to help to determine critical
positions, he would have been bound to write both at greater length
and also with more exactness and discrimination. But on the other
hand, the purpose of reassurance would have had less chance of being
successfully accomplished--as in some cases we have reason to believe
with thankfulness that it has been accomplished or assisted--if the
writer had been more reluctant to accept, at least hypothetically,
what are claimed as critical results. We all know by experience that
freedom and happiness in our attitude as Christians towards problems
not easily solved, or even easily brought to crucial tests, are most
readily secured if we can feel that our faith is, at the last resort,
independent of the exact solution arrived at. Thus our object was to
give to anxious enquirers, of whom there are surely an immense number
most deserving of any help which can be given them, a freedom in
regard to Old Testament problems as wide as the Catholic faith seemed
to warrant.
IV.
We cannot but accept the very general suggestion of our critics that
we ought to have attempted a separate treatment of the problem of sin.
Some such treatment is now offered in the second appendix, and offered
in the form of a republication of what has previously seen the light,
so that it may be plain that the absence of it from earlier editions
was not due to lack of conviction or unwillingness to deal with the
subject. The appendix is not in fact more than a drawing out of what
is involved in some passages of the essays taken together[9]. Thus the
fifth essay takes up a very clear position as to the practical aspect
which sin bears in human life. The fact is emphasized that sin, as our
moral consciousness knows it and Christianity has successfully dealt
with it, is a phenomenon unique in the world:--it is what nothing else
is, violation of law. Now this is the essence of the Christian
doctrine of sin, as S. John states it: 'Sin is lawlessness[10].' Sin
and lawlessness are coincident terms. This view of sin is primarily
_practical_; it may be represented in fact as a postulate required for
successfully dealing with sin, a postulate justified and verified by
its results. But because it is thus verified and justified, it passes
like any other hypothesis which explains facts, in proportion to the
range and thoroughness of the experience which tests it, out of the
region of mere working hypotheses into that of accepted truths. Thus
it is to the Christian consciousness an accepted truth, that sin, all
down the long history of humanity, has been a violation of the divine
order, a refusal of obedience, a corruption of man's true nature. Sin,
as such, has always been a source of confusion, not of progress. We
can indeed recognise how the movement and development in humanity has
frequently[11] been in fact conditioned by sin; but we should still
contend that it has never been the sin in itself which has been the
spring of force and progress, but the faculties of will and intellect
which sin was using. Always the will and intellect would have worked
better and more fruitfully in the result if they had been free from
the taint of selfishness and rebellion against God. Always sin, as
such, has been a lowering and not a raising of human life: a fall and
not a rise. Thus sin at the beginning of human life must have been not
merely the awakening of moral consciousness, but the obscuring and
tainting of it by lawlessness and disobedience. Sin, as all down its
history, so in its origin, is a fall; a fall, moreover, entailing
consequences on those who come after, in virtue of the inviolable
solidarity of the human race. To this view of sin original and actual,
Christianity appears to be bound; and it is a view that, as we have
now endeavoured to show[12], brings us into no conflict with
scientific discovery. For science never attempts to prove that man
might not have developed otherwise than as in fact he has, or that the
actual development has been the best possible: nor has Christianity
ever in its best representatives, certainly not in its patristic
representatives, been identified with a denial that human history as a
whole has been a development upwards from below[13]. The Old Testament
is in fact among ancient literatures, the literature of development,
of progress[14].
V.
The criticisms on our treatment of Inspiration have been so abundant,
and have gone into such detail, that it will be obvious that any
attempt to reply to them must be a more individual effort than the
attempt to reply to the criticisms on the general aim and spirit of
the book. For while the writers in this volume are at one as to the
general attitude which they would wish the Church to assume towards
the critical treatment of the Old Testament, as they are at one in the
general line of treatment adopted throughout this volume, they cannot
pretend to be at one on all the details of a complicated subject. The
writer of the particular essay alone can be responsible for these: and
with reference to them he must be understood to speak simply in his
own person.
1. The passage about Inspiration was written under the conviction that
recent criticism of the Old Testament represents a real advance in
analytical method as applied to literature, and thus a most serious
movement of thought. As such it has been estimated by the Bishop of
Oxford in his recent Charge. He says, 'The Holy Scriptures of the Old
Testament are now going through a process of analytical criticism
which has, as we believe, had no parallel, for acuteness of
investigation, carefulness of method, and completeness of apparatus,
since the days in which they began to be regarded as a code of
inspired literature, and certainly not since the days of our blessed
Lord's life on earth; at which period we understand that to all
intents and purposes the books which we receive, as the Canonical Old
Testament Scriptures, had taken their existing form[15].' But like the
scientific movement of our time, the critical movement has been
accompanied by all the arbitrariness and tendency to push things to
extremes which appears to be an almost inseparable attendant upon
living and vigorous movements, ecclesiastical and secular. Further
than this, its representatives have been--and here again the
conditions of the scientific movement are reproduced--very frequently
men personally opposed to the Christian faith, and even thoroughly
rationalistic in temper and tone. But it does not follow in the case
of criticism, any more than in the case of science, that we are not to
learn a great deal from a movement characterized even predominantly by
'extremeness' and unbelief. And in fact, in the past fifty years there
appears to have been a solid critical advance, underneath a great deal
of controversial arbitrariness and irreligious insolence. Now I
thought that I should best serve the purpose with which I was writing,
if I went as far as I could in ungrudging recognition of the claims of
criticism, and involved myself as little as possible in doubtful
discussions; but I did also intend to express, and believed myself to
have expressed with sufficient clearness[16], my own conviction that
it was with the more conservative among the recent critics, and not
with the more extreme, that the victory would lie. Thus when I said,
in a sentence which has been specially criticized (partly because its
wording was somewhat ambiguous), that criticism is reaching 'results
as sure as scientific enquiry,' what I intended so to characterize was
not the extreme conclusions of Wellhausen, but substantially the
conclusions shared in common by Wellhausen and Dillmann, by critics
theologically more conservative, like König and Riehm, by Delitzsch in
his last position, by the French Catholic orientalist, F. Lenormant,
as well as by an increasing body of English scholars[17]. Nor is there
a single line of what I wrote which would be affected, so far as I
see, even if Professor Margoliouth were satisfactorily to make out his
case for throwing back the period of the 'Middle Hebrew[18].' As to
the grounds on which we have been asked to date the bulk of the Psalms
below the Captivity, and even in the Maccabean period, they may appear
indeed quite unconvincing; but it would have been utterly beside my
purpose, as it would also have been out of my power, to give them
adequate discussion[19], nor would it seem as if even so improbably
late a date as that suggested would really affect their Messianic or
spiritual character. Let us affirm then without any hesitation that
there is a good deal of arbitrariness and extremeness in current
criticism as applied to the Old Testament. But surely we should be the
victims of a dangerous delusion if we were to imagine that because
there is a good deal that is unsubstantial in recent criticism,
therefore there is no substantial force in what really represents the
successive labours of many generations of students. I do not think
that we can conceal from ourselves that if we are to defend a purely
conservative attitude in regard to Old Testament literature, we shall
require quite different canons of evidence from those which we are
able so successfully to use in vindicating the historical character of
the New Testament: or again, in vindicating the claims of the
apostolic ministry and the sacramental system to be part of the
original fabric of the Christian Church. In other words, the critical
principles of historical enquiry which _do_ so amply justify us in
retaining substantially the traditional position in regard as well to
the New Testament documents as to our Church principles, _do not_
carry us to the same point in the field of the Old Testament. No doubt
there the vastness of the field is a permanent obstacle to uniformly
certain results. A great deal must remain, and probably for ever, more
or less an open question. But this necessary uncertainty, if it
imposes on critics an obligation of caution, imposes also on us
churchmen an obligation of reserve in dogmatic requirement. We do not
wish to run the risk of making a claim on men's minds for the
acceptance of positions for which we have only this to urge, that they
cannot be absolutely disproved.
2. The changed view of the development of Old Testament literature,
such as can be truly said to be proposed for our acceptance by modern
critics with a great deal of unanimity, _if it be granted for the
moment that it is compatible with the real inspiration of the books_,
involves no important change in our spiritual use of the Old
Testament; in the use of it for the purposes of 'faith and morals.'
This latter use of Scripture depends simply on our rightly
interpreting the meaning of the books as they exist.
There is a great principle enunciated by S. Augustine in regard to the
Old Testament which requires to be kept constantly in view. It is that
as the Old Testament is manifested in the New, so the New Testament is
latent in the Old[20]. In order to recognize this there is no
discussion necessary of the method by which our 'Old Testament'
received its present shape. The evidence of it lies in the Old
Testament considered as a finished product. As such, we cannot study
that 'divine library' without being struck both by its unity, so far
greater than belongs to any other literature[21], and by the fact that
like no other literature it looks forward to an end not yet attained,
a divine event in which is to be its justification and its
interpretation. The Old Testament demands the New to bring out its
true meaning: the New appeals back to the Old to bear witness to the
continuity of the divine purpose of which it is the outcome. It is
from this point of view that we understand the appeal which, in the
New Testament, is so constantly made to the older Scriptures. Whether
they are appealed to, as in the Sermon on the Mount, as containing the
record of a moral education, divine though imperfect, which the Christ
was to complete[22]; or as by St. Paul, as the record of a preparatory
and temporary discipline by means of external enactments of God,
calculated to awaken the dull conscience of men to the reality and
holiness of the divine will, and so to make men conscious of sin
against God, and ready to welcome the dispensation of pardon and
grace[23]; or, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a system of ritual
and ceremonial observances, in which were shadowed forth by the
inspiring Spirit[24] the deep truths of the still-needed sacrifice,
and the access to God not yet won for man; or finally, as by almost
all the New Testament writers, as a prophetic dispensation in which
the Messianic hope found gradual expression in fuller and exacter
lineaments, and produced an anticipation which Christ only could
satisfy[25]:--from any of these points of view, or from all taken
together, we are concerned only with the Old Testament as it finally
appears, not with the method by which it came into being. It cannot be
too strongly emphasized that when we seek reassurance in regard to the
inspiration of those books of the Old Testament, to which our Lord and
His Church refer us, we find it primarily in the substance of the
books as they are given to us, not in any considerations of the manner
in which they came into existence[26].
And if this is so, it needs to be borne in mind that the
responsibility for bringing it home to the consciences of men, the
responsibility for thus preventing that breach in religious continuity
which the change in critical and literary conceptions of the Old
Testament might otherwise occasion, lies in a preeminent degree upon
those of us who are most impressed with the valid elements of the
recent criticism. It belongs to us to see to it that, so far as lies
with us, the Bible shall not be less prized by the generations that
are coming, as the divine, the inspired volume, than it has been by
the generations that are gone. It belongs to us to attend to the
double admonition of the _De Imitatione_: 'Every scripture must be
read in the same spirit in which it was written:' and 'Do not enquire
who said this, but pay heed to what is said.'
3. There is one appeal which the New Testament makes to the Old which
was not alluded to above, as it does not in fact fall naturally under
S. Augustine's principle of the New Testament lying hid in the
Old--namely the appeal to it as to a historical record of God's actual
dealings with His people: a record of things which actually 'happened
unto them for ensamples, and are written for our admonition.' But this
appeal again would not be invalidated unless it were shown--not merely
that there is an ideal element mixed with the history in the Old
Testament record, but--that the element which is not mere narrative of
events as they happened, the element of idealism, reaches to the point
of obscuring the real significance of the facts and distorting their
divine meaning. Whereas the truth is that the ideal element in the
narrative comes from the real divine meaning in the facts being
brought into emphatic prominence rather than overlooked; and we may
depend upon it that no results of criticism have tended to weaken our
belief that the chroniclers of Israel's history, whether prophetic or
priestly, were inspired to see its true meaning and tendency, and from
their different points of view to bring it out in its completeness.
And it is important to remember in this connection that the Jewish
idea of 'history' was never our modern critical idea of a mere record.
They ranked their history from Joshua to the books of Kings under the
head of 'prophecy,' and intimate to us by this very classification
that they see in the historian one who not only records but interprets
facts[27].
4. The changed view of the Old Testament books which modern criticism
asks of us, concerns, then, not so much their contents, as the
circumstances of their composition and the method by which they
reached their present form. When we pass to this latter class of
considerations we are prepared for any information which criticism or
tradition can give us, while at the same time our indestructible
conviction, fortified by the strongest internal testimony of the
books, that here is the Holy Spirit's work, gives us an antecedent
expectation that the mode of composition in the case of each book will
be such as God in His condescension can have sanctioned and used. God,
I say, in His condescension--because undoubtedly the whole Old
Testament does represent a condescension of God to a low stage of
human development. Here then we need the recognition of a second great
principle which S. Augustine lays down, viz. that 'as wrong is done to
the Old Testament if it be denied to come from the just and good God,
so wrong is done to the New if it be put on a level with the Old[28].'
For all the reality of its inspiration the Old Testament is on a lower
level than the New. Thus it is now almost universally recognised that
God in the Old Testament is seen appealing to the human conscience at
a low stage of its development, tolerating what was not according to
His original will or His ultimate purpose[29], as in the case of
divorce, and even, as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice, appealing to
men to do things which in a more fully developed state of the
conscience could not be even conceived of as commanded by God, in
order that through their very obedience to the appeal they might be
led higher into the knowledge of what God could, and could not,
enjoin. How fully this principle in God's dealings was recognised and
justified by the early Christian authorities has been already brought
out in this volume[30].
Again, the same method of condescending to what was not in itself
perfect, but was susceptible of a gradual education, appears in the
institutions of the Old Testament law of worship. Modern enquirers are
pressing upon us the fact that the ritual law of Israel is closely
akin to the common ritual customs of Semite races. 'What I may call
the natural basis of Israel's worship,' says Prof. Robertson Smith,
'was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults[31].' The
peculiarity of Israel's religion lay in fact not in the ritual itself,
but in the moral and theological turn given to the ritual. According
to this view God in the law appears as diverting to good uses, by an
act of condescension, ritual customs which it would have been
premature to abolish. Such a view of the ritual is somewhat strange to
the ears of modern Churchmen, but it was undoubtedly the prevalent
view of the law among the great writers of Christian antiquity.
References to illustrate this have been given in the eighth essay[32].
But I may add to the passages there referred to another of very
striking force. S. Chrysostom is explaining why God should have
appealed to the astrological notions of the wise men and led them by
no other leading than that of a star. It is because 'in exceeding
condescension He calls them through what is familiar.... In imitation
of this Paul too reasons with the Greeks from an altar, and adduces
testimony from the poets, while he harangues the Jews with
circumcision, and makes from the sacrifices a beginning of instruction
for those who are living under the law. For since to every one
familiar things are dear, therefore both God Himself and the men who
were sent from God, with a view to the salvation of the world, manage
things on this principle. Think it not then unworthy of Him to have
called them by a star; for by the same rule thou wilt find fault with
all the Jewish rites also--both the sacrifices and the purifications
and the new moons, and the ark, and the temple itself. For all these
things had their origin from Gentile grossness. Yet God, on account of
the salvation of those in error, endured to be worshipped by means of
the very things through which those outside were worshipping demons,
only giving them a slight alteration, that little by little he might
draw them away from their customs and lead them up to the high
philosophy.'
Now if we recognize that God in the Old Testament can condescend for
the purposes of His revelation to a low stage of conscience, and a low
stage of worship, what possible ground have we for denying that He can
use for purposes of His inspiration literary methods also which belong
to a rude and undeveloped state of intelligence? If He can 'inspire'
with true teaching the native Semite customs of ritual, why can He not
do the same with their traditions of old time? How can we reasonably
deny that the earlier portions of Genesis _may_ contain the simple
record of primitive prehistoric tradition of the Semites[33], moulded
and used by the Holy Spirit, as on all showing the record manifestly
has been moulded and used, to convey the fundamental principles of all
true religion? Or again, granted that, on the 'dramatic' hypothesis,
Deuteronomy written not by Moses, but in Moses' name, to incorporate
the Mosaic tradition, represents a literary method greatly inferior,
in sense of exactitude, to the method of personal testimony as we have
it in S. John[34], or of careful investigation and use of original
testimony, as we have it in S. Luke[35]; granted this--how can we, in
view of the manifest facts of God's condescension, find ourselves in a
position to deny that He can have used such a method as a vehicle of
His inspiration[36]? There is, it must be emphasized, no critical
reason why we should assign the composition of any book of the Old
Testament to the motive of fraud. No doubt hostile critics have
sometimes suggested, for example, that the 'discovery' of the book of
the law in the Temple in the days of Josiah was a 'got up' proceeding,
the book having really been written and hidden at the very time in
order to be 'discovered'; but there is no positive evidence at all to
support such a view, while all the evidence is satisfied by the
hypothesis that an earlier prophet, some hundred years previously[37],
working upon an actual and possibly written tradition of Moses' last
speech, had cast this tradition into the dramatic form and
promulgated, as from Moses' lips, the law which he knew to represent
ultimately Moses' authority or the authority of God in Moses. That
such a method should have been adopted surprises us surely no more
than that Hosea should have been led to use such extraordinary means,
as he seems in fact to have been enjoined to use, of revealing God's
mind of love towards His people. It involves no intention to deceive,
and the discovery of this 'book of the law,' lost in the careless
period which intervened, was a genuine discovery unattended by any
element of fraud.
Once again, if the book of Chronicles contains not pure history but
the priestly view of the history, granted that this priestly point of
view was _morally_ part of the divinely intended education of the
chosen people, even though its intellectual method was as imperfect as
ordinarily is the case with the treatment of traditions in 'schools'
or religious orders, in nations or churches or families, is there any
_à priori_ reason why God, who used so much that was imperfect, should
not have inspired the record of this tradition? Here again we must
emphasize that all that _criticism_ requires of us is to recognise in
the book of Chronicles the record of the history as it became coloured
in the priestly schools; there is nothing here of a morally unworthy
sort from the point of view of the contemporary conscience, but only
the same features as are noticeable in the record of tradition all the
world over[38]. Fraudulent dealing, forgery in literature, always
involves the conscious and deliberate use of methods calculated to
impose on others, _methods other than those sanctioned by the literary
conscience of the time_[39].
No doubt a particular writer, like Wellhausen, may make a bias hostile
to the supernatural apparent in his use of the critical method, and
may give in consequence an antitheological turn to his reconstruction
of history; just as many a scientific writer has done with scientific
facts and scientific method. In view of this we must 'try the spirits'
and not attribute too much force to the point of view of a particular
individual. But this will not be at all the same thing as rejecting
the modern method of criticism or repudiating those results which are
certainly accepted by many critics who are as far as possible from
rejecting the supernatural[40].
5. No serious attempt has, I think, been made to show that the view of
the development of the Old Testament literature which the modern
critical schools, with great unanimity, demand of us, is contrary to
any determination of Church authority. By this it is not meant that
the theology of the Church suggests this view: it is not the function
of the Church to advance literary knowledge, except indirectly; and
thus the Church has not had the power to anticipate the critical, any
more than it had to anticipate the scientific movement. The advance of
knowledge comes in all departments through the natural processes of
intellectual enquiry. It is only now, in fact, that the critical
problem is before the Church; but now that it is before the Church it
does not seem that the Church ought to have any _more_ difficulty in
welcoming it and assimilating it, than it has had in welcoming and
assimilating the legitimate claims of science.
With reference to the bearing of Church authority on the present
discussion, there are three points which I should wish to urge. First,
that the undivided Church never took action on the matter, in spite of
an extravagant tendency to allegorism in Origen and those who were
influenced by him.
Secondly, that as a result of this the patristic theology leaves a
wide opening at least for what we may call the modern way of regarding
the opening chapters of Genesis. Thus a Latin writer, of the fifth or
sixth century, who gives an interesting summary of the Catholic faith,
and is clearly nothing else but a recorder of accepted beliefs, after
speaking of the origin and fall of man and woman, continues thus:
'These things are known through God's revelation to His servant Moses,
whom He willed to be aware of the state and origin of man, as the
books which he produced testify. For all the divine authority (i.e.
the scriptural revelation) appears to exist under such a mode as is
either the mode of history which narrates only what happened, or the
mode of allegory in such sense that it cannot represent the course of
history, or a mode made up of these two so as to remain both
historical and allegorical[41].' A great deal more in the same sense
as this might be produced.
Thirdly, it must be urged that since the division of Christendom no
part of the Church appears really to have tightened the bond of
dogmatic obligation. Our own formularies are of course markedly free
from definition on the subject, and the refusal of the Roman Church to
define the scope of inspiration, beyond the region of faith and
morals, has been remarkable[42].
6. But does the authority of our Lord bind us to repudiate, in loyalty
to Him, the modern views of the origin of the Old Testament books? On
this subject I wish to express my sincere regret that I should have
written so briefly in my essay as to lay myself open to be
misunderstood to suggest our Lord's fallibility as a teacher. I trust
that the passage, as it has stood since the fourth edition[43], will
be at least recognised as plain in its meaning and theologically
innocent. I must ask leave to defer to another occasion the fuller
discussion of this important subject in connection with the doctrine
of the Person of Christ. Meanwhile I would suggest that the longer one
thinks of it the more apparent it will become that _any hypothesis as
to the origin of any one book of the Old Testament, which is
consistent with a belief in its inspiration, must be consistent also
with our Lord having given it His authorisation_. If His Spirit could
inspire it, He, in that Spirit, could give it His recognition--His
recognition, that is to say, in regard to its spiritual function and
character. Thus as we scan carefully our Lord's use of the Old
Testament books, we are surely struck with the fact that nothing[44]
in His use of them depends on questions of authorship or date; He
appeals to them in that spiritual aspect which abides through all
changes of literary theory--their testimony to the Christ: 'Search the
Scriptures ... they are they which testify of Me.' He would thus lead
men to ask about each book of the Old Testament simply the
question,--What is the element of teaching preparatory to the
Incarnation, what is the testimony to Christ, which it supplies? I do
not see how with due regard to the self-limitation which all use of
human forms of thought and speech must on all showing have involved to
the Eternal Son, it can be a difficulty in the way of accepting the
modern hypothesis, that our Lord referred to the inspired books under
the only name by which His reference would have been intelligible to
His hearers. Unless He had violated the whole principle of the
Incarnation, by anticipating the slow development of natural
knowledge, He must have spoken of the Deuteronomist as 'Moses[45],' as
naturally as He spoke of the sun 'rising.' Nor does there seem in fact
any greater difficulty in His speaking of one who wrote 'in the spirit
and power' of Moses as Moses, than in His speaking of one who,
according to the prophecy, came 'in the spirit and power of Elias' as
himself, Elias. 'If ye will receive it, this is Elias.' 'Elias is
already come[46].'