Lest any Christian should say that the deductive method is impracticable to him, for the reason that he has had no such revelation of Christ to start from as that which was given to Paul, Scripture reports to us the very different experience of another apostle. I refer to Peter. Peter shows us how, by this same deductive method, an experience which at its beginning is very small, may in the end become very great. Peter goes to the banks of Jordan, a sinner, seeking pardon for his sin. John the Baptist points him to Jesus, "Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world." Peter knows nothing of Jesus' deity, nor of his atonement. But, by an instinct which is the best of logic, he is drawn to Jesus, as the one who can satisfy his needs. He becomes a Christian, that is, a follower of Jesus. His experience is a sort of caterpillar; it can creep, but it cannot soar. Yet all the elements of growth are in it. Peter begins to analyze it. What right has he to surrender himself, body and soul, to a man like himself? The answer is: Jesus is more than man. At Cæsarea Philippi, Peter cries, "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." On the day of Pentecost, he preaches Christ as the Saviour exalted to God's right hand. And finally, in his Epistles, he declares the preexistence of Christ, and the fact of Christ's utterances through the prophets as far back in time as the days of Noah. If our higher critics only adopted Peter's method, analyzed their own experience, following on to know their Lord and meantime willing to do his will, they too, like Peter, in spite of small beginnings, would learn of Jesus' doctrine, would emerge from the caterpillar state, would be soaring instead of creeping, and would end by gladly confessing that he who met them on the way in their first experience was none other than the omnipresent Christ, whom Paul describes as God manifest in the flesh, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. They would also learn, with Peter, that Scripture is the work and word of the preexistent Christ.
Because this experience of sin and of Christ is knowledge, it is material for science, for science is only unified knowledge. I do not deny that it is knowledge peculiar to the Christian. The princes of physics and literature and government have not known it. It is not the wisdom of this world, but it is better, even the very wisdom of God. I glory in Christian theology, as the science that will last, when all systems of merely physical science have passed away. For the man who has been saved by Christ has knowledge of him who is Creator, Upholder, and Life of all. I do not hesitate to say that the only safe interpreter of physical nature is the true Christian, for it is Christ "in whom all things consist." The true Christian is the only safe interpreter of history, for it is Christ who "upholds all things by the word of his power." And so, the true Christian is the only safe interpreter of Scripture, for it is Christ whose Spirit in the prophets "testified beforehand of his sufferings, and of the glories that should follow them." In him who is the Lord of all "are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden." Only when one is joined to Christ, can he understand the evolutionary process through which Christ has led the human race, or understand the Bible which constitutes the historical record of that process. With the Psalmist we may say, "In thy light shall we see light."
As Christ is the central object of knowledge in Christian experience, it follows that Christians recognize him as the primary author of Scripture. They find him speaking to them in the Bible, as in no other book. It becomes to them the word of God, given by divine inspiration, and able to make them wise unto salvation. From the deity and supremacy of Christ they proceed to faith in the unity, the sufficiency, and the authority of Scripture, and this determines their method of investigation. From the person of Christ to the word of Christ is a process often unconscious, but one better than any process of formal logic. Knowing their divine Saviour, they know the divinity of his word. His presence in human history and in the hearts of the righteous has given unity to his continuous revelation. The Scripture "cannot be broken," or interpreted as a promiscuous congeries of separate bits; for a divine intelligence and life throb through the whole collection. Like railway coupons, its texts are "not good if detached." We must interpret each text by its context, each part by the whole, the preparation of salvation by the fulfilment, and all the diverse contents by him who weaves all together, even Christ, the end of the law, to whom all the preliminaries point. This method gives room for the most thorough investigation of the times and ways of revelation, for recognizing the imperfection of beginnings and the variety of the product. The Bible is a gradually accumulated literature, Hebraic in form, but universal in spirit. The preexistent Christ has made all this literature one, by the influence in the sacred writers of his omnipresent Spirit. If the "historical method" would begin with this postulate of a unifying Christ, its method would be more safe and its results more sure.
Faith in an eternal and omnipresent Christ guarantees also the sufficiency of Scripture. Here, however, there is an obvious limitation. Scripture is not sufficient for all the kinds and purposes of human science. It will not tell us the configuration of the hinder side of the moon, nor reveal the future uses of electricity. It is not with such things that Scripture deals. But in religious matters, such as our relation to God and salvation, it is sufficient as a rule of faith and practice. We may find in it all needful models and helps in the divine life, as well as all needful directions about the way to begin it. The church of Christ has always found in the Bible a safe guide for her polity and conduct, and civil government has prospered when the principles of Scripture were followed by the powers that ruled the State. Because the Christian believes the Bible to be the product of men inspired by Christ, he can send it out by the million copies as equal to the moral and spiritual needs of the world.
And because Christ is, through his imperfect agents, the real author of Scripture, we believe in its absolute authority. When rightly interpreted, however. It will never do to treat poetry as if it were prose, or drama as if it were history, or allegory as if it were fact. Christ can use, and he has used, all the common methods of literary composition, and he expects us to use common sense in dealing with them. But out of the whole can be evolved a consistent doctrine and an authoritative law. The one and only way of salvation is plainly that of faith in God's provision of pardon and life in Christ. In spite of many divergences, the great body of Christians throughout the ages have agreed in their recognition of the personality and the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; of the incarnation and the atonement of Christ; of his resurrection and his lordship; of his omnipresence with his people even to the end of the world. They have expressed this agreement in the Apostles' Creed and in the hymnology of the church. But the great body of instructed Christians also believe in Christ as the Revealer of God in nature and in history; as "the Light that lighteth every man" in conscience and tradition; and as the righteous Judge who accepts in every nation those who fear God and work righteousness, casting themselves as sinners upon the divine mercy even though they do not yet know that this divine mercy is only another name for Christ. The Bible, as a whole and when rightly interpreted, is absolute authority, because it is the word of Christ; and Christ holds each of us, as individuals, to the duty and the privilege of interpreting the Bible for himself.
It seems to me plain that this method of interpreting Scripture in the light of the Christian's experience of Christ, is not "the historical method," as it is usually employed. This latter method seems to ignore the relation of Scripture to Christ, and to proceed in its investigations as if there were no preexistent Christ to furnish its principle. It insists upon treating Scripture as it would treat any unreligious or heathen literature, and with no relation to its divine authorship. It sees in Scripture only a promiscuous collection of disjointed documents, with no living tie to bind them together, and no significance beyond that of the time in which they were written. It would treat the Bible as a man-made book, or rather, as a man-made series of books, regardless of the fact that the plural "biblia," which once represented the thought of the church, has, under the influence of the divine Spirit, become "biblion" or Bible, a singular, and a proof that Christian consciousness has not been satisfied with rationalistic explanations, but has followed its natural impulses by attributing unity to the word of Christ its Saviour. The separate "words" have been felt to constitute the one "word of God," an organic whole, which fitly represents the eternal "Word," of whom it is the voice and expression. Scripture is not a congeries of earth-born fragments, but an organism, pulsating with divine life. The "historical method" of which I speak can never find that life, because it works only on the physical and horizontal plane, ignoring the light which comes deductively from above, and also the darkening and blinding influences which often operate unconsciously from below.
XVI
SCRIPTURE AND MISSIONS
The "historical method" of Scripture interpretation, as it is often employed, ends without Christ, because it begins without him. One of its fundamental principles is that each passage of Scripture is to be interpreted solely in the light of the knowledge and intent of the person who wrote it. The One Hundred and Tenth Psalm, for example, can have no reference to Christ, because the writer knew no other than the Jewish king whose accession and whose power he anticipates. The Psalm reads, "Jehovah said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool." The so-called historical critics would make any interpretation of this passage as a designed prophecy of Christ to be an unwarranted accommodation of it to a meaning which it did not originally bear, and the conclusion is that we are wrong in citing these words as an Old Testament assertion of Christ's deity. But, unfortunately for this method of interpretation, we have, in the Gospels of Matthew and of Mark, our Lord's own reference of this passage, not simply to some Jewish ruler of olden time, but to the coming Messiah, and since he was himself the Messiah, he refers it by implication to himself. He does not deny, but rather grants, a primary reference of the psalm to a son of David, for David was a king, and his son would be a king. But he also sees in the psalm a prophecy that this son of David would be a king whom David would call Lord. His searching examination propounds to the unbelieving Jews the question, "What think ye of the Christ? whose son is he?" And they say, "The Son of David." He answers them by asking, "How then doth David, in the Spirit, call him Lord?" In other words, inspiration declares Messiah to be a King of kings, and a Lord of lords. Since the whole discussion is one with regard to the nature and claims of the Messiah, and since the Messiah is not a mere man like David, but is seated on the throne with Jehovah and is David's Lord, Christ's answer is an assertion of his own deity. His answer antedates, even if it did not suggest, Paul's later description of Christ, as "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." But the higher critics differ in opinion from the Lord Jesus. They extricate themselves from their difficulty by suggesting that Jesus, like other men, was subject to the errors of his time. And so, not only Christ's knowledge of Scripture and his authority as its interpreter are denied, but also his knowledge of his own nature and place in the universe. If his knowledge of things so essential be denied, what trust can we place in any other of his utterances? To those who reason in this way, Christ cannot possibly be divine—he is only a fallible man, self-deceived, and so, deceiving others. The fault of the critics lies in their presupposition. They have begun wrongly, by leaving out the primary fact in the subject they investigate, namely, that the preincarnate Christ was the author and inspirer of the Scripture which he afterward interpreted. He used human agents, with their natural language and surroundings, as his instruments, but he could, on the way to Emmaus, "beginning from Moses and all the prophets," interpret to those humble believers "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." Scripture can have, and it does have, two authors, man and God, the writer and Christ; and to ignore Christ in the evolution of the Bible is to miss its chief meaning, to teach falsehood instead of truth, and, consciously or unconsciously, to deny Christ's deity.