Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, / 10th Edition, 1890

by Unknown

3. There is one appeal which the New Testament makes to the Old which was not alluded to above, as it does not in fact fall naturally under S. Augustine's principle of the New Testament lying hid in the Old—namely the appeal to it as to a historical record of God's actual dealings with His people: a record of things which actually 'happened unto them for ensamples, and are written for our admonition.' But this appeal again would not be invalidated unless it were shown—not merely that there is an ideal element mixed with the history in the Old Testament record, but—that the element which is not mere narrative of events as they happened, the element of idealism, reaches to the point of obscuring the real significance of the facts and distorting their divine meaning. Whereas the truth is that the ideal element in the narrative comes from the real divine meaning in the facts being brought into emphatic prominence rather than overlooked; and we may depend upon it that no results of criticism have tended to weaken our belief that the chroniclers of Israel's history, whether prophetic or priestly, were inspired to see its true meaning and tendency, and from their different points of view to bring it out in its completeness. And it is important to remember in this connection that the Jewish idea of 'history' was never our modern critical idea of a mere record. They ranked their history from Joshua to the books of Kings under the head of 'prophecy,' and intimate to us by this very classification that they see in the historian one who not only records but interprets facts[27].

4. The changed view of the Old Testament books which modern criticism asks of us, concerns, then, not so much their contents, as the circumstances of their composition and the method by which they reached their present form. When we pass to this latter class of considerations we are prepared for any information which criticism or tradition can give us, while at the same time our indestructible conviction, fortified by the strongest internal testimony of the books, that here is the Holy Spirit's work, gives us an antecedent expectation that the mode of composition in the case of each book will be such as God in His condescension can have sanctioned and used. God, I say, in His condescension—because undoubtedly the whole Old Testament does represent a condescension of God to a low stage of human development. Here then we need the recognition of a second great principle which S. Augustine lays down, viz. that 'as wrong is done to the Old Testament if it be denied to come from the just and good God, so wrong is done to the New if it be put on a level with the Old[28].'

For all the reality of its inspiration the Old Testament is on a lower level than the New. Thus it is now almost universally recognised that God in the Old Testament is seen appealing to the human conscience at a low stage of its development, tolerating what was not according to His original will or His ultimate purpose[29], as in the case of divorce, and even, as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice, appealing to men to do things which in a more fully developed state of the conscience could not be even conceived of as commanded by God, in order that through their very obedience to the appeal they might be led higher into the knowledge of what God could, and could not, enjoin. How fully this principle in God's dealings was recognised and justified by the early Christian authorities has been already brought out in this volume[30].

Again, the same method of condescending to what was not in itself perfect, but was susceptible of a gradual education, appears in the institutions of the Old Testament law of worship. Modern enquirers are pressing upon us the fact that the ritual law of Israel is closely akin to the common ritual customs of Semite races. 'What I may call the natural basis of Israel's worship,' says Prof. Robertson Smith, 'was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults[31].' The peculiarity of Israel's religion lay in fact not in the ritual itself, but in the moral and theological turn given to the ritual. According to this view God in the law appears as diverting to good uses, by an act of condescension, ritual customs which it would have been premature to abolish. Such a view of the ritual is somewhat strange to the ears of modern Churchmen, but it was undoubtedly the prevalent view of the law among the great writers of Christian antiquity. References to illustrate this have been given in the eighth essay[32].

But I may add to the passages there referred to another of very striking force. S. Chrysostom is explaining why God should have appealed to the astrological notions of the wise men and led them by no other leading than that of a star. It is because 'in exceeding condescension He calls them through what is familiar.... In imitation of this Paul too reasons with the Greeks from an altar, and adduces testimony from the poets, while he harangues the Jews with circumcision, and makes from the sacrifices a beginning of instruction for those who are living under the law. For since to every one familiar things are dear, therefore both God Himself and the men who were sent from God, with a view to the salvation of the world, manage things on this principle. Think it not then unworthy of Him to have called them by a star; for by the same rule thou wilt find fault with all the Jewish rites also—both the sacrifices and the purifications and the new moons, and the ark, and the temple itself. For all these things had their origin from Gentile grossness. Yet God, on account of the salvation of those in error, endured to be worshipped by means of the very things through which those outside were worshipping demons, only giving them a slight alteration, that little by little he might draw them away from their customs and lead them up to the high philosophy.'

Now if we recognize that God in the Old Testament can condescend for the purposes of His revelation to a low stage of conscience, and a low stage of worship, what possible ground have we for denying that He can use for purposes of His inspiration literary methods also which belong to a rude and undeveloped state of intelligence? If He can 'inspire' with true teaching the native Semite customs of ritual, why can He not do the same with their traditions of old time? How can we reasonably deny that the earlier portions of Genesis may contain the simple record of primitive prehistoric tradition of the Semites[33], moulded and used by the Holy Spirit, as on all showing the record manifestly has been moulded and used, to convey the fundamental principles of all true religion? Or again, granted that, on the 'dramatic' hypothesis, Deuteronomy written not by Moses, but in Moses' name, to incorporate the Mosaic tradition, represents a literary method greatly inferior, in sense of exactitude, to the method of personal testimony as we have it in S. John[34], or of careful investigation and use of original testimony, as we have it in S. Luke[35]; granted this—how can we, in view of the manifest facts of God's condescension, find ourselves in a position to deny that He can have used such a method as a vehicle of His inspiration[36]? There is, it must be emphasized, no critical reason why we should assign the composition of any book of the Old Testament to the motive of fraud. No doubt hostile critics have sometimes suggested, for example, that the 'discovery' of the book of the law in the Temple in the days of Josiah was a 'got up' proceeding, the book having really been written and hidden at the very time in order to be 'discovered'; but there is no positive evidence at all to support such a view, while all the evidence is satisfied by the hypothesis that an earlier prophet, some hundred years previously[37], working upon an actual and possibly written tradition of Moses' last speech, had cast this tradition into the dramatic form and promulgated, as from Moses' lips, the law which he knew to represent ultimately Moses' authority or the authority of God in Moses. That such a method should have been adopted surprises us surely no more than that Hosea should have been led to use such extraordinary means, as he seems in fact to have been enjoined to use, of revealing God's mind of love towards His people. It involves no intention to deceive, and the discovery of this 'book of the law,' lost in the careless period which intervened, was a genuine discovery unattended by any element of fraud.

Once again, if the book of Chronicles contains not pure history but the priestly view of the history, granted that this priestly point of view was morally part of the divinely intended education of the chosen people, even though its intellectual method was as imperfect as ordinarily is the case with the treatment of traditions in 'schools' or religious orders, in nations or churches or families, is there any à priori reason why God, who used so much that was imperfect, should not have inspired the record of this tradition? Here again we must emphasize that all that criticism requires of us is to recognise in the book of Chronicles the record of the history as it became coloured in the priestly schools; there is nothing here of a morally unworthy sort from the point of view of the contemporary conscience, but only the same features as are noticeable in the record of tradition all the world over[38]. Fraudulent dealing, forgery in literature, always involves the conscious and deliberate use of methods calculated to impose on others, methods other than those sanctioned by the literary conscience of the time[39].

No doubt a particular writer, like Wellhausen, may make a bias hostile to the supernatural apparent in his use of the critical method, and may give in consequence an antitheological turn to his reconstruction of history; just as many a scientific writer has done with scientific facts and scientific method. In view of this we must 'try the spirits' and not attribute too much force to the point of view of a particular individual. But this will not be at all the same thing as rejecting the modern method of criticism or repudiating those results which are certainly accepted by many critics who are as far as possible from rejecting the supernatural[40].

5. No serious attempt has, I think, been made to show that the view of the development of the Old Testament literature which the modern critical schools, with great unanimity, demand of us, is contrary to any determination of Church authority. By this it is not meant that the theology of the Church suggests this view: it is not the function of the Church to advance literary knowledge, except indirectly; and thus the Church has not had the power to anticipate the critical, any more than it had to anticipate the scientific movement. The advance of knowledge comes in all departments through the natural processes of intellectual enquiry. It is only now, in fact, that the critical problem is before the Church; but now that it is before the Church it does not seem that the Church ought to have any more difficulty in welcoming it and assimilating it, than it has had in welcoming and assimilating the legitimate claims of science.

With reference to the bearing of Church authority on the present discussion, there are three points which I should wish to urge. First, that the undivided Church never took action on the matter, in spite of an extravagant tendency to allegorism in Origen and those who were influenced by him.