Understanding the Scriptures

by Francis John McConnell

GEORGE R. GROSE,

President De Pauw University.

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY

The problem as to the understanding of the Scriptures is with some no problem at all. All we have to do is to take the narratives at their face meaning. The Book is written in plain English, and all that is necessary for its comprehension is a knowledge of what the words mean. If we have any doubts, we can consult the dictionary. The plain man ought to have no difficulty in understanding the Bible.

Nobody can deny the clearness of the English of the Scriptures. Nevertheless, the plain man does have trouble. How far would the ordinary intelligence have to read from the first chapter of Genesis before finding itself in difficulties? There are accounts of events utterly unlike anything which we see happening in the life around us, events which seem to us to contradict the course of nature's procedure. There are points of view foreign to our way of looking at things. More than that, there seem to be actual contradictions between various portions of the books. And, above all, the way of life marked out in the Book seems to lead off toward mystery. To save our lives we have to lose them. All the precepts of common sense seem set at defiance by some passages of the Book. How can we explain the hold of such a book on the world's life?

When once the problem of the understanding of the Scriptures is raised, various solutions are offered, all of which contribute a measure of help, but most of which do not greatly get us ahead. For example, we are told that the Book is translated literature, and that if we could get back to the original narratives in the original languages, we would find our perplexities vanishing. There is no question that a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew does aid us in an understanding of the Scriptures, but this aid commonly extends only to the meaning of particular words. One who knows enough of Greek or Hebrew to enter sympathetically into the life of which those languages were the expression is prepared to sense the scriptural atmosphere better than one who has not such equipment. Very few Scripture readers, however, are thus qualified to understand Greek and Hebrew. Very few ministers of the gospel are so trained as to be able to pass upon shades of meaning of Greek or Hebrew words against the judgment of those who teach these languages in the schools. With graduation from theological school most ministers put Hebrew to one side; and many pay no further attention to Greek. Even a trained biblical student is very careful not to question the authority of the professional linguistic experts. Apart from sidelights upon the meaning of this or that passage, there is very little that the biblical student can get from Greek or Hebrew which is not available in important translations. We cannot solve the greater difficulties in biblical study by carrying our investigations back to the study of the original languages as such. The fact is that emphasis upon the importance of mastery of Greek and Hebrew for an insight into scriptural meanings rests largely upon a theory of literal inspiration of the biblical narratives. It requires only a cursory reading to see that the narratives in English cannot claim to be strictly inerrant, so that the upholder of inerrancy is driven to the position that the inerrancy is in the documents as originally written. No doctrine of inerrancy, however, can explain away the puzzles which confront us, for example, in the accounts of the creation as given us in the early chapters of Genesis, or throw light upon the possibility of a soul's passing from moral death to life.

Great help is promised us by those who maintain that the modern methods of critical biblical study give us the key to scriptural meanings. There is no doubt that many doors have been opened by critical methods. Now that the flurries of misunderstanding which attended the first application of such methods to biblical study have passed on, we see that some solid results have been gained. In so far as our difficulties arise from questions of authorship and date of writing, the critical methods have brought much relief. Even very orthodox biblicists no longer insist that it is necessary to oppose the teaching that the first five books of the Bible were written at different times and by different men. In fact, there is no reason to quarrel with the theory that many parts of these books are not merely anonymous, but are documents produced by the united effort of narrators and correlators reaching through generations—the narratives often being transmitted orally from fathers to sons. There is no reason for longer arguing against the claim that the book of Isaiah as it stands in our Scriptures is composed of documents written at widely separated periods. It is permissible even from the standpoint of orthodoxy to assign a late date to the book of Daniel. No harm is wrought when we insist that the book of Mark must have priority in date among the Gospels, and that Matthew and Luke are built in part from Mark as a foundation. It is not dangerous to face the facts which cause the prolonged debate over the authorship of the fourth Gospel. It is not heresy to teach that the dates of the epistles must be rearranged through the findings of modern scholarship. There is not only no danger in a hospitable attitude toward modern scholarship, but many difficulties disappear through adjusting ourselves to present-day methods. If contradictions appear in a document hitherto considered a unit, the contradictions are at least measurably done away with when the document is seen to be a composite report from the points of view of different authors. The critical method has been of immense value in enforcing upon us that the scriptural books were written each with a distinctive intention, apart from the purpose to represent the facts in the method of a newspaper reporter or of a scientific investigator. In a sense many of the more important scriptural documents were of the nature of pamphlets or tracts for the times in which they were written. The author was combating a heresy, or supplementing a previous statement which seemed to him to be inadequate, or seeking to adjust a religious conception to enlarging demands. The biblical writers are commentators on or interpreters of the truth which they conceive to be essential.

Making most generous allowances, however, for the advantages of the critical methods, we must use them with considerable care. Results like those suggested above seem to be well established, but there is always possibility of the critic's becoming a mere specialist with the purely technical point of view. Suppose the critic holds so to the passion for analysis that for him analysis becomes everything. We may then have a single verse cut into three or four pieces, each assigned to a different author, the authors separated by long periods. Even if the older narratives are composite, the process of welding or compression was so thorough that detailed analyses are now out of the question. Apart from its broader contentions, the method of the critical school must be used tentatively and without dogmatism. Moreover, we must always remember that the critical student comes to his task with assumptions which are oftentimes more potent with him from his very blindness to their existence. Assumption in scientific investigation is inevitable. Suppose a critic to be markedly under the influence of some evolutionary hypothesis. Suppose him to believe that the formula which makes progress a movement from the simple to the complex can be traced in detail in the advance of society. He is prepared to believe that in practically every case the simple has preceded the complex. He will forthwith untangle the biblical narrative to get at the ideal evolutionary arrangement, ignoring the truth that except in the most general fashion progress cannot thus be traced. In the actual life of societies the progress, especially of ideas, is often from the complex to the simple. Many evolutionists maintain that movement is now forward, now backward, now diagonal, and now by a "short cut"; but if the evolutionary critic sticks closely to his preconceived formula about progress as always from the simple to the complex, he can lead us astray. Again, almost all great prophetic announcements are ahead of their time. They seem out of place at the date of their first utterance—interruptions, interjections hard to fit into an orderly historic scheme. Or suppose the critic to be a student of the scientific school which will not allow for the play of any forces excepting as they openly reveal themselves, the school that will not allow for backgrounds of thought or for atmospheres which surround conceptions. Such a student is very apt to maintain, for example, that Paul knew only so much of the life of Jesus as he mentions in the epistles. Such a student cannot assume that Paul ever took anything for granted. We can see at once that a method so professedly exact as this may be dangerously out of touch with the human processes of the life of individuals and of societies. Or suppose still further that the biblical student holds a set of scientific assumptions which are extremely naturalistic; that is to say, suppose that he assumes that nothing has ever happened which in any way departs from the natural order. We have only to remind ourselves that the natural order of a particular time is the order as that time conceives it; but it is manifestly hazardous to limit events in the world of matter to the scientific conceptions of any one day. To take a single illustration, the radical student of the life of Jesus of a generation ago cast out forthwith from the Gospel accounts everything which suggested the miraculous. The conceptions of the order of nature which obtained a generation ago did not allow even for works of healing of the sort recorded in the Gospels. At the present time radical biblical criticism makes considerable allowance for such works. Discovery of the power of mental suggestion and of the influence of mind over body has opened the door to the return of some of the wonders wrought by Jesus to a place among historic facts. This does not mean that the radical student is any more friendly to miracles than before. We are not here raising the question of miracles as such, but we do insist that an assumption as to what the natural order may or may not allow can be fraught with peril in the hands of critical students of the Scriptures. We say again that while, in general, the larger contentions of the biblical school can be looked upon as established beyond reasonable doubt; and while, in general, the methods of the school are productive of good, yet, because of the part that assumption plays in the fashioning of all critical tools, the assumptions must be scrutinized with all possible care. A good practical rule is to read widely from the critics, to accept what they generally agree upon, to hold very loosely anything that seems "striking" or "brilliant." This is a field in which originality must be discounted. There is so little check upon the imagination.