The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In daily parlance it is often said. “Put yourself in his place”: but the value of that transfer of self is small if you do not know what the self is after you give it the new place! The revelation of self is likewise the revelation of other men. We know our neighbors only as we know ourselves.

Presuming, therefore, that we send a man to the Scriptures to find the doctrine of his own nature, what will be his discovery? The question is not a new one, and its answer has sometimes been touched by prejudice. Many have contended that in its effort to magnify God, the Bible is guilty of belittling man. Fragments of Scripture might be presented to support this criticism. We must, however, insist that the biblical teaching is to be determined by its main current rather than by its eddies. The Book does present God as high and lifted up, while man lies with his lips in the dust. It does make God a King, while it proclaims man a subject. It does stress divine sovereignty, while insisting on human obedience and reverence. It does call for humility on the part of man. We may well admit that it is possible to overdo the call to humility. That good mood may easily pass over into a false mood. Occasionally men, in an effort to be humble, speak untruth concerning their own souls. It is just here that the “worm-of-the-dust” theory gets its chance. That phrase was a biblical one, used by a character in his moment of self-abasement. Yet the Concordance will prove that this lowly estimate of man is by no means the staple of teaching, as well as that much of the cheap preaching of human nature is a radical departure from the doctrine of the Book. It is always good to keep clear the distinction between vanity and self-respect, so that if a man may not have the right to look down on his neighbors he may still have the right to look up to himself. Humility must ever be based on truth, and self-respect can have no other foundation. The two moods are not contradictory. The one comes from the recognition of the nature of God, in the utter and unspeakable perfection of his attributes; the other comes from the recognition of the nature of man as being himself a partaker of that divine nature. In reality the two moods grow out of the same truth.

A still deeper objection is sometimes offered against the scriptural theory of human nature. It is charged that the doctrine of the Fall, together with the constant emphasis of man’s “exceeding sinfulness,” deprives man of special dignity. Without doubt the theory of the Fall has sometimes been presented in such a manner as to cancel all human claims to greatness. Whenever a religious teacher carries his doctrine of the Fall to unjust lengths, we must all be tempted to declare that we can readily prove an alibi! And if he shall employ that doctrine as a vast slur on humanity, we shall insist that the length of the fall must be the length of the possible rise! In harmony with this idea a great preacher has given the world a sermon on “The Dignity of Humanity as Evidenced by its Ruins.” Much of the glory of the Coliseum at Rome has departed, but even its ruins are a testimony to its greatness. Seeing its gaunt grandeur in the sunlight, or viewing its impressive shadows in the moonlight, the tourist gets the shock of its glory. The simple truth is that a doctrine of the Fall is possible only when you start with human greatness. God made one creature strong enough to resist Himself—one creature with sufficient self-determination to make mutiny in the world. We would not torture the doctrine of the Fall into a mere compliment for humanity; but we would insist that the possibility of a Fall implies a height to fall from, and that responsibility for a Fall implies a nature great enough and free enough to make far-reaching choices. The evidence of the dignity is still found among the ruins.

We must always supplement any doctrine of the Fall with a doctrine of human responsibility. The Bible is most explicit in this insistence. Its pages are crowded with the moral imperative for man. The thorn and the brier are on the earth; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the era of the good people. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain; but the creation is not blamed, because it waits for the revealing of the sons of God. The lion and the lamb do not lie down together; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the age of peace that can issue only from the hearts of men. The coin rolls into dust and shadow and is lost; we do not blame the coin. The sheep wanders into desert and darkness and is lost; we do not blame the sheep. The son goes off into the swine field and is lost; and we do blame the son. The coin and the sheep have no communings with self, no sense of guilt, no road of repentant return; but the son has all these. The Bible does utter its vigorous charge against man’s sin; it is the ever-open court room into which the human conscience is summoned for judgment. The Book does not treat man as a machine whose cogs and wheels are moved only by outside force; nor does it treat him as a manikin, jerked hither and yon by irresponsible sensations; it rather dignifies him with personal responsibility. The Fall does not prevent climbing, if only man will take advantage of those gracious powers that are offered for his help. Emerson saw the meaning of this when he wrote his tribute to mankind based on its ability to respond to the moral order:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, “Thou must,”
The youth replies, “I can!”

Words like “ought” and “should” and “must” have gone forth from the Bible and have fairly penetrated the moral consciousness of the race. No other book so honors human nature with a sublime call to responsibility.

We now leave these general considerations and take up the several portions of the Scriptures with a view to ascertaining their contributions to a doctrine of man. The foundation of that doctrine is seen in the account of the creation. Whether that account be poem, parable, allegory, or history, its meaning for this special point is the same. The climax of the creation is man. God is represented as changing chaos into cosmos, separating waters and land, fixing sun and moon in their places, bringing verdure to the surface of the earth, assigning birds and beasts and fishes to their spheres, and then as giving to man a wide rulership. “God made man to have dominion”—that is the biblical word; and the ages have been telling how true that word is. The Bible theory and the facts of life join in a coronation of man.

The account of the creation goes deeper than this in its estimate of mankind. Its conferring of power on man is explained by its conferring a nature on man. Man is made in the divine image. The Word was not content with one statement of that fact; it must needs give it double emphasis. “So God created man in his own image”—that would seem simple and strong enough. But the statement is strengthened by repetition, “In the image of God created he him.” These twice-repeated words are the real charter of man’s greatness. The atheist must admit that man has the dominion, but the believer holds that man has the dominion because he has the birthright. Man is not only God’s submonarch, he is God’s image.

It is interesting and convincing to note how soon that primary truth about man’s nature began to work. In the persecution under Diocletian the precious parchments of the Bible had been secretly carried from house to house. The charge that a Christian had given up the sacred Book in order to save himself from death was one of the most serious that could be presented. Many martyrdoms occurred because men preferred the Bible above their own lives. Though circulated under such difficulty, and though made into readable parchments at such expense of labor and money, the Bible was slowly impressing its doctrine of man upon the stubborn period. We are often smitten with horror as we read stories which show how lightly human life was regarded by the Romans. Those dreadful scenes in the arena, where thumbs so often declined to turn down as a sign of mercy, are dire mysteries to men who have gotten the biblical standpoint. We are distant from that heartless mood because we are near to the Bible. The Book and the gladiator could not live together in peace. The Book at once began to call men from the tiers of bloody pleasure. With the conversion of Constantine, superficial as it may have been, the change began. The emperor ordered many splendid copies of the Bible for the churches of his capital. He himself came under the spell of its human doctrine. Zealous Christian teachers may sometimes overstate the influence which the Bible exercised over later Roman law. Still there are some undoubted evidences of that influence. Constantine made a law forbidding that a criminal should be branded on the face, and he gave as his reason for the law that the image of God should not be marred! This leaves us in no doubt as to what had inspired the legislation. It was the simple beginning of a program that has not yet come to its consummation. The biblical idea of man routed one form of slavery, and it will yet rout all other forms. When men come to believe that man is made in the divine image all good movements for the betterment of life are set in the way to victory.