Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, / 10th Edition, 1890

by Unknown

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].'

Once more: if the Holy Spirit could use the tradition of the flood to teach men about divine judgments, then our Lord in the same Spirit can refer to the flood, for the same purpose. It has however been recently denied that this can be so, unless the tradition accurately represents history. 'I venture to ask,' Professor Huxley writes[47], 'what sort of value as an illustration of God's method of dealing with sin has an account of an event that never happened?' I should like to meet this question by asking another. Has the story of the rich man and Lazarus any value as an illustration of God's method of dealing with men? Undoubtedly it has. Now what sort of narrative is this? Not a narrative of events that actually happened, in the sense that there was a particular beggar to whom our Lord was referring. The narrative is a representative narrative[48], a narrative of what is constantly occurring under the form of a particular typical incident. Now the narrative of the flood belongs to a quite different class of literature, inasmuch as it is not due to any deliberate action of imagination; but it resembles our Lord's story at least in being representative. It is no doubt based on fact. The traditions of the flood in all races must run back to a real occurrence. But the actual occurrence cannot be exactly estimated. What we have in Genesis is a tradition used as a vehicle for spiritual teaching. As the story is told it becomes, like that of Dives and Lazarus, a typical narrative of what is again and again happening. Again and again, as in the destruction of Jerusalem, or in the French Revolution, God's judgments come on men for their sin: again and again teachers of righteousness are sent to warn of coming judgment and are ridiculed by a world which goes on buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, till the flood of God's judgment breaks out and overwhelms them. Again and again, through these great judgments there emerges a remnant, a faithful stock, to be the fountain head of a new and fresh development. The narrative of the flood is a representative narrative, and our Lord, who used the story of Dives and Lazarus, can use this too[49].