The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible by R. Heber Newton
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R. Heber Newton >> The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible
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Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings,
and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.
II.
The Bible lays a yet deeper claim upon our reverence These books
constitute the literature of a people whose genius was religion, whose
mission was its evolution into universal forms, whose writings express the
moods and tenses of that development; whose history is the organic growth
which flowered in the life of Him who freed religion from every swathing
band, and gave the world its pure essential spirit; after Whom all races
are being drawn as one flock under one Shepherd.
1. _Israel's specialty in history was religion._
Every people finds laid upon it certain necessary activities, in most of
which all peoples find their common tasks. Every nation must cultivate
agriculture handicrafts, trade and commerce; must develop social,
political and religious institutions. Each people will, however, do some
one thing better than the rest of its tasks, better than it is done by
other peoples. Each great race has some commanding inspiration; some
ideal which masters every other aspiration and ambition, energizes its
efforts and shapes its destiny. It creates a specialty among the nations.
The real legacy of each great race lies in the works wrought in the line
of its highest aptitudes. Thus Rome developed a genius for civil
organization. She conquered the whole western world, united isolated
nations under one empire, cleared the Mediterranean for safe and free
communication, opened roads as arteries through the vast body politic,
established post communications for travellers and the mails, carried law
and order into every obscure hamlet, consolidated a polity which, by sheer
massiveness, lasted for generations after the soul of Rome had fled, and
left to posterity, in her institutes the basis for modern jurisprudence.
Thus Greece evolved a genius for art, developed architecture and sculpture
to the highest perfection the world has seen, made statues thicker than
men in Athens, made men more beautiful than statues, sighed even after
Virtue as the Becoming, the Perfect Beauty, left the world temples whose
ruins are inspirations, and marbles whose discovery dates the epochs of
culture. Israel essayed to do many things that other peoples achieved, and
promised success in more than one direction. At a certain period she bade
fair to develop into a martial empire, and to become a lesser Assyria or
Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in
commerce. About the same time she
"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
independent science or philosophy."[19]
But she found herself content with none of these _roles_. She had a higher
part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts
resistlessly drew her. Her predominant characteristic was an intense
religiousness. Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and
devout tone. Patriotism was identified with piety. Her statesmen were
reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of
Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light
of eternal principles. Legislation was developed through the "judgments"
of priestly oracles. Poetry lighted her flames at the altar. Philosophy
busied itself with ethics. The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness.
The nation's ambitions were aspirations. Her heroes grew to be saints. The
divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good. She
evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, "a genius for
godliness."
2. _Israel's literature became thus a religious literature._
Her histories were written for edification. They present the past of the
people in such light as to inculcate virtue and inspire piety. Her poems
are songs of pure love, like Canticles; or dramas whose plot lies in the
problem of evil, like Job; or hymns in which the soul seeks communion with
God. The Psalter is the hymnal of the temple choir at Jerusalem. The
prophets are preachers of righteousness, personal, social, political. Even
the writings of her sages or philosophers are almost wholly ethical and
religious. No other people's literature is so intensely and pervasively
religious. Other nations have religious writings as a part of their
general literature. Israel's whole literary life was sacred. There is
scarcely a book left by her to which we may not go to feed religion.[20]
3. _Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of
her life, with the various phases of religion._
The glory of a truly National Church is that it takes up into itself every
form of spiritual and ethical consciousness within the nation, and
exhibits in each successive school of thought, in each movement for a
nobler social life, a phase of true religion. This is the glory of Israel.
Religion never separated itself into an institution apart from the State.
There was no Jewish Church, of which Dean Stanley wrote the history.
Church and State were one. Sacred and secular history flowed in one common
stream. The history of Israel was the history of Judaism. Its choicest
literature formed its sacred writings. Religion was never narrowed to a
theory, an institution, an "ism," a sect, a school. It was as generous and
as rich as the broad, free life of the nation. Every factor essential to a
noble religion was thus supplied from the sound and healthy life of the
people.
The inner life of the soul was voiced in the hymns of Israel, to which we
still turn for the inspiration of personal piety in our private devotions;
and which lift the public worship of the moderns as they swelled the souls
of the hosts who waited in the temple courts at Jerusalem, two thousand
years ago.
A cultus of character through ritual and discipline was elaborated by the
priesthood in that wonderful system which, rebaptized, does duty still in
the Catholic Church. The true outer sphere for personal religion, trained,
if need be, by an ecclesiastical cultus, was fashioned by the great
prophets, the men of the people; who poured their passion for
righteousness into aspirations for a true commonwealth, in which Justice
should be throned on law, and international relations be ruled, not by
Policy, but by Principle. Natural religion was nobly set forth by the
sages in Proverbs, The Wisdom of Jesus, and the other "Writings;" all of
which were characterized by a calm and rational philosophy, that
recognized the laws of life and fed the wisdom which obeys them. Even
Agnosticism, in so far as it is the confession of the inadequacy of every
interpretation of the universe, finds despondent yet still earnest
expression in Ecclesiastes, and humble, hopeful expression in Job; and the
silence of many of the noblest natures of our age, which the churches
brand as irreligious, finds place among the phases of religion in their
Sacred Book.[21]
Almost every form of strenuous ethical life, almost every answer that
earnest souls have found to the problem of life, is to be drawn from the
writings of this many-sided people. Thus their literature feeds a rich,
and rounded life of religion.
4. _Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth
of religion upward through its normal stages._
Religion grows like every form of human life with the growth of man
himself. It is coarse, crude and cruel while man is a savage, and as he
becomes civilized--by which I mean something more than wealthy--it becomes
intelligent, reasonable ethical and spiritual. The growth of Israel from
barbarism carried with this progress the growth of Israel's religion. In
the earliest times which we can historically reach the Israelites were
semi-nomadic tribes, slightly distinguishable from their kindred Semites.
The religion of the people appears to have been then a commingling of
fetichism, the worship of things that impressed the imagination, great
trees and huge boulders, with the worship of the various powers of nature,
the orbs of heaven, the reproductive force of the earth, etc., under the
usual savage and sensual symbolisms.
From such unpromising beginnings, through the successive stages of
polytheistic idolatries, religion was gradually led up, in the advance of
the general life of the people and through the inspirations of a series of
great men, to the recognition of One Eternal and infinite Being; the Lord
of nature and of man, the Father of all mankind, Holy, Just and Gracious;
whose truest worship is the aspirations of his children after goodness.
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord," writes the
Deuteronomist; "and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might."
Malachi, looking round upon the manifold forms of worship of the various
nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling
after one and the same Divine Being, makes God say:
"From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my
name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered
unto me and a pure offering; for my name is great among the heathen,
saith the Lord of Hosts."
Micah asks,
"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.
5. _Israel's literature records the forcing forward of this growth of
religion, as by some Power back of man, shaping its ends, rough-hew them
as it might._
The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in
the introduction to his great work.
"The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which
manifest themselves in the long course of the threads of its history,
ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem."--Ewald: Intro.
A singular succession of great men arise to save and revive and reform
religion in every critical epoch. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Ezra, Judas Maccabeus come upon the stage, one after the other,
perform their several parts with singular aptitude, and prepare the way
for the next movement when it comes due. The history of the people rightly
read becomes a mighty drama, in which the right man is never wanting at
the right time, and the action moves on steadily toward a climax.
The experiences of the people, even those most perplexing to the faith of
the nation at the time, fit singularly into this organic evolution of
religion. The rending of the Kingdom of David, that blighted the fair
prospect of a martial empire, turned the nation aside from the false
career on which it was entering. The overthrow of the Northern and then of
the Southern Kingdom, and the deportation of the people to Babylonia,
seemingly the ruin of the sister countries, threw them in upon their inner
life; and in the exile their religion found its highest reach of thought.
Even that hierarchical movement which so quickly followed upon this bloom
of prophetism, and which to the superficial look seems only the arrest of
life and the beginning of death, reveals a legitimate function in the
organic processes of the national religion. In this priestly organization
of institutional religion, all free prophetic inspiration did indeed die
out for over four centuries. But even this was a necessity for the right
flowering of religion. The age was not ready, politically or
intellectually, for the ripening of the thoughts of the prophets. Had they
ripened then, they would have fallen to the ground, as the untimely fruit
of a too-early spring. Four centuries were to be tided over before the
political and intellectual conditions were found for the blossoming of
this flower. This holding back of the normal evolution of Hebraism was the
function of the Priestly Reaction--a curious parallel to the function of
Catholicism in Mediaeval Christianity.
Like the Catholic Church, the Jewish priesthood held society together
when, in the destruction of the political power, there was no other bond
of unity. As in the Catholic Church, the High Priest became a temporal
ruler, the Prince of Israel, as he was called; and kept the sacred city
still the seat of government. As in Catholicism the institutionalizing of
religion that followed the period of free prophetic life was an effort to
embody that life, to incrust and thus preserve it; and, in the one case as
in the other, though the crust of institutions choked the further growth
of spiritual religion, it yet did keep it sluggishly alive within this
hard bark, through times that else would have proved fatal to it. As in
Catholicism, this priestly cultus really drilled deep into the natures of
men the principles and laws and habitudes of ethical and spiritual
religion; and stored the force which, when its rigid routine and fettering
formalism became unbearable, burst through this crust and opened a new
world of fresh, free life.
Of this singular shaping of the nation's experiences to further the growth
of true religion, the Old Testament is the impressive record.
6. _Israel's literature thus presents the picture of a nation's patient,
insistent pressing forward, through long centuries, toward the fruition of
its ideal, the realization of true religion._
So continuous is Israel's movement toward the ideal of religion, so
straight the line of her advance that it seems as though the nation had a
conscious aim, seen afar and steadfastly pursued by generation after
generation, unwilling to stop short of attainment. It is the founder of
scientific Biblical criticism who thus expresses his sense of the
wonderfulness of this historic movement:
"This aim is Perfect Religion; a good which all aspiring nations of
antiquity made an attempt to attain; which some, the Indians and
Persians, for example, really labored to achieve with admirable
devotion of noble energies, but which this people alone clearly
discerned from the beginning, and then pursued for centuries through
all difficulties, and with the utmost firmness and consistency, until
they attained it, so far as among men and in ancient times attainment
was possible."[22]
7. _The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this
long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth._
The nation found the times ripe at last for the final process of this
historic evolution; the dead cerements of Judaism fell apart, and thereout
bloomed that perfect flower of religion, the religion of the Christ,
simple, free, ethical, spiritual. The extant literature of this last
creative effort of Israel constitutes the New Testament. The Gospels tell
the story of the life of the Founder of Christianity, clearly enough in
the main outlines, and embalm many of the words and deeds of the Son of
Man. The other writings of the New Testament illustrate the working of the
thought and spirit of the Christ in the Church bodying around Him through
the growth of a century. In them we see that the long cherished ideal of
Israel, an Ethical and Universal Religion, had at last incarnated itself
in The Master whose plans laid the foundation of this new Order; into
which men were coming from the east and from the west, and from the north
and from the south, and were sitting down in the Kingdom of God.
The high-water mark of religion in human history is recorded in these
writings. To enter into the spirit of these writings is to feel the force
of the free, full tides of ethical and spiritual life which rose, as never
before nor since, in the dawning day of Christianity. The flow of such a
force within the individual soul and through society has been the power
of the New Testament in Christendom.
8. _This organic growth of a national religion into a catholic ideal, not
without parallels elsewhere, is, however unique in respect to the
conditions for a truly Universal Religion._
The scene of this evolution is not the heart of the East, as in Buddhism,
but the meeting point of East and West. Palestine is the race centre of
the earth. Camels unload in Jerusalem the goods laden upon them in the
seats of the most ancient empires; and on her pebbly beaches the
Mediterranean rolls, bearing the commerce of Europe. Behind Judea lies the
past, before it opens the future. Its Race-Man came at the epoch when,
first in history, the East and West were brought together under one empire
and opened to the free interchange of thought. And when we analyze the
religion of the Christ, grown in this central land and coming to the birth
in this central period, we find that it holds, alone on earth, the
elements of each race-religion in well proportioned combination.
No eastern religion, Buddhism not excepted, appears to contain conceptions
that satisfy the western mind. The religion of the Christ, however can be
shown to hold whatever ideas and ideals make vital the great
race-religions of the East. It is as many sided as humanity, and presents
a family face to every people. It takes up the ideas and ideals of other
religions, disengages and deposits whatever in them is temporal and
circumstantial, preserves whatever is essential and eternal in them,
combines these vital elements with the polar truths needful to their
wholesomeness, and crystallizes ethical and spiritual religion into
perfect forms, forms capable of translation into the idioms of every race
of earth. This religion of the Christ is the one religion which to-day
holds the promise and potency of further evolution, in the progressive
civilization of mankind on which it is enthroned.
9. _Of the literature of the people through whom came this organic
evolution of the keystoning religion of earth what can we say but that it
records a real revelation coming through genuine personal inspirations
from on high!_
Revelation is the opposite aspect of the mystery which we call discovery;
the uncovering of that which was hidden; the unveiling of that which was
not known; the coming on of truth into the light wherein man can see it.
"Discovery" expresses the human effort by which truth is thus uncovered
and found out. "Revelation" expresses the divine effort which lies back of
all human aspirations and endeavors; as the Spirit within man stirs him up
to seek for Truth, flashes in upon his mind strange hints of where and
how she is to be found, allures him onward with the mystic whispers of her
voice, until at length he stands upon the mount of vision whence her holy
form is seen, and cries--"I have found her!"
To him who believes in a Spirit of Truth, guiding men into all truth, the
growth of ethical and spiritual religion into perfect form in Jesus Christ
is a real revelation. It is the oncoming of the Light which lighteth every
man that is in the world; the dawning of the day of earth on the hills of
Judea, over which has risen the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His
wings.
This revelation came not to the mystic "man writ large" we call society,
direct from heaven in abstract form. It came to individual men, struggling
for larger light and nobler life, and breathing their higher spirit on
their fellows. Religion is always _life_, the experience of _souls_. We
can name the individuals through whom each important advance was made. The
greater souls who led the worship of the host welcoming the rising Light,
thrilled with the vibrations of a voice deeper and holier than the voice
of man. The lesser souls who formed the chorus of this anthem of The Dawn
thrilled each alike with this mystic sense of God. That which we must aver
of every truth discovered or revealed, of every knowledge needful to man
and won by man; that which we must affirm as the only rational
interpretation of the mysterious suggestions rising below the conscious
thoughts of man, and prompting to noblest benedictions on the race; that
we must, with deepened awe, say of the holiest truths shown to the human
soul,--Inspired!
With sincere and reverent confession we must say then in the words of Holy
Writ:
"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." "Every
Scripture profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness is God-inspired."[23]
The consciousness and experience of Israel could not have found fitter
expression than in the words of our great seer:
"I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn
his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the
voice, none ever saw the face. That well-known voice speaks in all
languages, governs all men; and none ever caught a glimpse of its form.
If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall
not any longer separate it from himself in his thought; he shall seem
to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and
greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he
is borne away as with a flood, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a
heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not
on the truth that is still-taught, and for the sake of which the things
are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a
humming in his ears."[24]
We have thus seen in the Bible an ancient and noble literature, the
literature of a noble race, the literature supremely influencing and
enriching Christian civilization; demanding, therefore, our rational
reverence, as constituting a truly Sacred Book.
We have seen in the Old Testament the literature of the people of
religion, commissioned with its normal evolution; writings charged with
deep religiousness; the records of the various moods and tenses through
which religion grew continuously and insistently toward perfection, in an
organic process watched and directed by a Higher Power than man. We have
seen in the New Testament the record of the realization of this
long-sought aim of the people of religion; the story of the Divine Man,
who breathed religion out into perfection, and the writings that depict
the bodying around Him of the Universal Church, the Church in whose truth
and life is growing the religion of the future, "the Christ that is to
be."
The fuller knowledge of our age, in evanishing the unreal Bible restores
the real Bible. It is the record of the visioning and embodiment of the
Human Ideal, the Divine Image--The Christ. It is the Providentially
prepared Hand Book of religion in whose rich and varied phases of ethical
and spiritual thought all men may find the nourishment they need. It is
the spiritual reality our fathers rightly felt, but wrongly expressed,
when they called it as a whole The Word of God. It holds the words
proceeding from out of the mouth of God on which man liveth. It bodies in
"letters" The Word of God, embodied in the flesh in Jesus Christ the Lord.
It records a real revelation. This revelation, however, denies no other
revelation. It affirms the fact of the withdrawal of a veil in each new
knowledge won; the fact that man has felt in calling the new knowledge a
discovery; and it interprets this unveiling as Tennyson has learned of it
to do:
"And out of darkness come the hands
That reach through nature, moulding man."
These books are the products of a real inspiration. This inspiration,
however, denies no other inspiration. It interprets the sense of a higher
than human influence in the noblest searchers after truth, throughout the
world, in every action of the intellect. It affirms the validity of that
consciousness.[25]
The revelation in the Bible is the Light of God which streams through it,
making it a "lamp unto our feet." The inspiration in the Bible is the life
of God breathing through it into man, "and he becomes a living soul." The
book which, above all others, reveals God to man, he must call the supreme
revelation of God. The book which, above all others, inspires the life of
God in man, he must call the most inspired of God.
If, then, any one asks me how he may know that there is a revelation in
the Bible, I tell him to walk in its light, and see what it reveals. If
any one asks me how I know that the Bible is inspired I answer him in Mr.
Moody's words:
"I know that the Bible is inspired, because it 'inspires me.'"
III.
The wrong use of the Bible.
"God, then, is quite simple and true, both in word and deed; neither is
He changed Himself, nor does He deceive others--neither by visions, nor
discourses, nor the pomp of signs. * * * * When any one alleges such
things as these about the gods, we must show disapproval, and not grant
them the privilege of a chorus; neither should we suffer teachers to
employ them in the training of youth--if, at least, our guardians are
to be pious and divine men."
Plato: The Republic; Book II.
"This, it seems, is the modern method of coming to inquire of the
oracles of God; by this process they become a light to our feet, a lamp
to our path! Accept the book as a whole, and then treat all the
portions of it just as you like. Confess all its words to be the words
of the Lord, and then you may yourself be lords over them, and may
perform moral miracles by turning the bread of life into stones for
casting at your enemies."
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