CHAPTER II.
I. COLET’S LECTURES ON ST. PAUL’S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS (1496-7?).
The state of Scripture study at Oxford.
To appreciate the full significance of Colet’s lectures, it is needful to bear in mind what was the current opinion of the scholastic divines of the period concerning the Scriptures, and what the practical mode of exposition pursued by them at the Universities.
The scholastic divines, holding to a traditional belief in the plenary and verbal inspiration of the whole Bible, and remorselessly pursuing this belief to its logical results, had fallen into a method of exposition almost exclusively textarian. The Bible, both in theory and in practice, had almost ceased to be a record of real events, and the lives and teaching of living men. It had become an arsenal of texts; and these texts were regarded as detached invincible weapons to be legitimately seized and wielded in theological warfare, for any purpose to which their words might be made to apply, without reference to their original meaning or context.
The Bible regarded as verbally inspired. Method of exposition textarian.
Thus, to take a practical example, when St. Jerome’s opinion was quoted incidentally that possibly St. Mark, in the second chapter of his Gospel, might by a slip of memory have written ‘Abiathar’ in mistake for ‘Abimelech,’ a learned divine, a contemporary of Colet’s at Oxford, nettled by the very supposition, declared positively that ‘that could not be, unless the Holy Spirit himself could be mistaken;’ and the only authority he thought it needful to cite in proof of the statement was a text in Ezekiel: ‘Whithersoever the Spirit went, thither likewise the wheels were lifted up to follow Him.’[67] It was in vain that the reply was suggested that ‘it is not for us to define in what manner the Spirit might use His instrument.’ The divine triumphantly replied, ‘The Spirit himself in Ezekiel has defined it. The wheels were not lifted up, except to follow the Spirit.’[68]
Theory of manifold senses.
Literal sense neglected.
The Bible a dead book.