(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and grow in a changing world.
(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.
And not from nature up to nature's God,
But down from nature's God look nature through.
(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.
(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to light.
A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this scientific quarry, is the historical and literary investigation of the Bible. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed, but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church, and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, pronounced the Books of the Chronicles less accurate historically than the Books of the Kings, considered the present form of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Hosea probably due to later hands, and distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less moment. Calvin, too, discussed
the authorship of some of the books, and suggested Barnabas as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.
We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian thought to these scholarly investigations:
(1) The conception of revelation as progressive—a mode of thought that falls in with the idea of development or evolution.
(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history, science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.