Part III. The Scriptures A Revelation From God.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.
I. Reasons a priori for expecting a Revelation from God.
1. Needs of man's nature. Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.
A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.
(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs: “Renown is loud,” he says, “and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.” Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.”
(b) Versus Socrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically [pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths: “Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.” Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.” See also Flint, Theism, 305.