It may also fairly be represented, on a review of our Lord's teaching as a whole, that if He had intended to convey instruction to us on critical and literary questions, He would have made His purpose plainer. It is contrary to His whole method to reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural knowledge. The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the human point of view. We are able to draw a distinction between what He revealed and what He used. He revealed God, His mind, His character, His claim, within certain limits His Threefold Being: He revealed man, his sinfulness, his need, his capacity: He revealed His purpose of redemption, and founded His Church as a home in which man was to be through all the ages reconciled to God in knowledge and love. All this He revealed, but through, and under conditions of, a true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its relation to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge, its limitation of knowledge[331]. He feels as we men ought to feel: he sees as we ought to see. We can thus distinguish more or less between the Divine truth which He reveals, and the human nature which He uses. Now when He speaks of the 'sun rising' He is using ordinary human knowledge. He willed so to restrain the beams of Deity as to observe the limits of the science of His age, and He puts Himself in the same relation to its historical knowledge. Thus He does not reveal His eternity by statements as to what had happened in the past, or was to happen in the future, outside the ken of existing history[332]. He made His Godhead gradually manifest by His attitude towards men and things about Him, by His moral and spiritual claims, by His expressed relation to His Father, not by any miraculous exemptions of Himself from the conditions of natural knowledge in its own proper province. Thus the utterances of Christ about the Old Testament do not seem to be nearly definite or clear enough to allow of our supposing that in this case He is departing from the general method of the Incarnation, by bringing to bear the unveiled omniscience of the Godhead, to anticipate or foreclose a development of natural knowledge.
But if we thus plead that theology may leave the field open for free discussion of these questions which Biblical criticism has recently been raising, we shall probably be bidden to 'remember Tübingen,' and not be over-trustful of a criticism which at least exhibits in some of its most prominent representatives a great deal of arbitrariness, of love of 'new views' for their own sake, and a great lack of that reverence and spiritual insight which is at least as much needed for understanding the books of the Bible, as accurate knowledge and fair investigation. To this the present writer would be disposed to reply that, if the Christian Church has been enabled to defeat the critical attack, so far as it threatened destruction to the historical basis of the New Testament, it has not been by foreclosing the question with an appeal to dogma, but by facing in fair and frank discussion the problems raised. A similar treatment of Old Testament problems will enable us to distinguish between what is reasonable and reverent, and what is high-handed and irreligious in contemporary criticism whether German, French, or English. Even in regard to what makes prima facie a reasonable claim, we do not prejudice the decision by declaring the field open: in all probability there will always remain more than one school of legitimate opinion on the subject: indeed the purpose of the latter part of this essay has not been to inquire how much we can without irrationality believe inspiration to involve; but rather, how much may legitimately and without real loss be conceded. For, without doubt, if consistently with entire loyalty to our Lord and His Church, we can regard as open the questions specified above, we are removing great obstacles from the path to belief of many who certainly wish to believe, and do not exhibit any undue scepticism. Nor does there appear to be any real danger that the criticism of the Old Testament will ultimately diminish our reverence for it. In the case of the New Testament certainly we are justified in feeling that modern investigation has resulted in immensely augmenting our understanding of the different books, and has distinctly fortified and enriched our sense of their inspiration. Why then should we hesitate to believe that the similar investigation of the Old Testament will in its result similarly enrich our sense that 'God in divers portions and divers manners spake of old times unto the fathers,' and that the Inspiration of Holy Scriptures will always be recognised as the most conspicuous of the modes in which the Holy Spirit has mercifully wrought for the illumination and encouragement of our race?
'For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.'
[248] Cyprian, ad Donatum 3. Trans. in Library of the Fathers, iii. p. 3.
[249] Athanasius, de Incarnatione, 31, 48-52.
[250] See S. Basil's fine definition of the term in his treatise on the Holy Spirit, ix. 22. This treatise has been translated by the Rev. G. Lewis for the 'Religious Tract Society.'
[251] See Basil, as above, xvi. 37: 'We must not suppose because the Apostle (1 Cor. xii. 4) mentions the Spirit first, and the Son second, and God the Father third, that the order at the present day has been quite reversed. For he made his beginning from our end of the relation: for it is by receiving the gifts, that we come in contact with the Distributor; then we come to consider the Sender; then we carry back our thought to the Fount and Cause of the good things.' Cf. xviii. 47: 'The way of the knowledge of God is from one Spirit, by the one Son, to the one Father: and reversely, the natural goodness of God, His holiness of nature, His royal rank taking their rise from the Father, reach the Spirit though the Only-begotten.'
[252] Ambrose, de Spiritu Sancto, i. 15, 172.
[253] So Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Basil, Didymus, Victorinus, express the relation of the Divine Persons in Creation.
[254] Ps. xxxiii. 6; Gen. i. 2; Ps. civ. 29, 30.