THE PROTESTANT RULE OF FAITH[108]
Dr. Hodge is an Old School Presbyterian, and a sturdy opponent of what among Protestants is called the “New England theology.” He is a man of learning and ability, and one of the most distinguished theologians in the Presbyterian Church. If he has failed to reduce Protestantism to a system, complete, uniform, and coherent in all its parts, it is not his fault, but undeniably the fault of Protestantism itself, which is not all of a piece, which consists of fragments only of truth, with no genetic relation one to another, or connecting links, and which no mortal man can mould into a systematic whole. What man can do with so untoward a subject Dr. Hodge has done, if we may judge from the volume before us, and, as far as our knowledge goes, his work is the least unsuccessful attempt to construct a complete and consistent system of Protestant theology that has as yet been made.
Neither our space nor our leisure permits us to review the entire volume, or to discuss the author’s system in its several bearings; a better opportunity to do that will be presented when we have the completed work before us, of which only the first volume has as yet been published. We shall confine ourselves for the present to a single question, namely, the Protestant rule of faith. The author devotes the entire Chapter V. of his Introduction to the statement and refutation, as he understands it, of the
Catholic, or, as he says, the Romanist rule of faith; but as his objections to that rule and his supposed refutation of it presuppose the truth of Protestantism, and are of no account if the Protestant rule of faith is invalid or inadequate, we need not stop to defend it, but are free to pass at once to the examination of the Protestant rule which he opposes to it. If that can be asserted and maintained as a rule of faith, or authority for determining what is the faith God has revealed and commanded us to believe, the Catholic rule is indefensible, or at least unnecessary.
The author is not very clear and definite in his statement of the Protestant rule of faith. He says (p. 150), “All Protestants agree in teaching that ‘the Word of God as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the only infallible rule of faith and practice’;” but from his assertion of the right of private judgment and several of his objections to the Catholic rule, we may, without danger of error, take the Protestant rule of faith to be the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, or the Bible interpreted by private judgment—that is, interpreted without any public or catholic authority—as the Protestant rule or standard of faith. But this is rather the denial than the assertion of a rule, because it presents no rule or standard to which private judgment must conform in order to be anything but naked opinion. The Bible, even conceding its divine inspiration and sufficiency, cannot be the rule or standard for private judgment, if
it is to be interpreted by private judgment, for that would require private judgment to judge what the faith is, before it has any rule by which to judge what it is. The Protestant doctrine confounds the rule of faith with the place of faith, and private judgment with individual judgment. In private judgment, the individual judges by no objective rule or standard, and his judgment is purely subjective, and is worth nothing even for himself; but an individual judgment is not necessarily private, for it may be by a rule or standard common to all men, what we call a public or catholic rule. A judgment dictated by reason, or the reason which is common to all men and the same in all, is not a private but a public judgment, and binds all men to whose knowledge it comes as much as it does the individual who renders it. Men may sin against reason as well as against faith. Men are bound to exercise their reason, the reason common to all men, in all questions submitted to reason or within its province, and are bound to do so in interpreting the Bible so far as its interpretation comes within the province of reason, and may abide by its decisions, unless overruled by a higher authority—as the lawyer has the right to abide by his own judgment of the meaning of a statute, or as to what the law is, till the court decides against him; but private judgment is a private opinion, and binds nobody.
Dr. Hodge holds that the Scriptures contain not all the revelation Christ and his apostles made, but all that is now extant. But, even if so, his doctrine only makes them the place of faith; it tells where the faith is, but not what it is. They may be the fountain, but they cannot be the rule or standard, of faith. The rule is precisely that which is necessary to enable us to draw the faith from the
Scriptures, and determine that it is the faith God has revealed and commanded us to believe as his word. The Protestant rule as given, then, is no rule of faith at all, and it is impossible to elicit by it an act of faith. The author is too hasty, then, in setting aside the Catholic rule on the authority of his Protestant rule, which, in order to be a rule, demands a catholic rule of judgment, as he himself virtually concedes (p. 127).