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Page 13
The divine revelation which is in the experience has been at times
identified with the thought that interprets it, or even with the words
which attempt to describe it. "Faith in the thing grows faith in the
report"; and fantastic doctrines of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible
have been held by numbers of earnest Christians. Certain recent
scholars, acknowledging that no version of the Bible now existing is
free from error, have put forward the theory that the original
manuscripts of these books, as they came from their authors' hands, were
so completely controlled by God as to be without mistake. Since no man
can ever hope to have access to these autographs, and would not be sure
that he had them in his hands if he actually found them, this theory
amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme:
Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows,
Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows.
We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to
reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors
probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the
religious experience they attempt to express.
As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine
assistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he
has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various
amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not
literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its
authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half
appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the
metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view
and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated
from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.
The Bible is the record of an _historic_ religious experience--that of
Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His
followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown
that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic
peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's
faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its
God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the
greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in
Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the
Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious
meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a
character of its own. Its record brings into the succeeding centuries,
and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with God.
The Bible is a record of _progressive_ religious experience. As every
poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem
that God had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher
inspirations. When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its
historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent. Its God grows
from a tribal deity to the God of the whole world; from a localized
divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their
gods on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from "a
man of war" and a tribal lawgiver into the God whose nature is love. "By
experience," said Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long
wandering," and it took at least ten centuries to pass from the God of
Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ.
Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by
the more perfect consciousness of God. The Scriptures, like the land in
which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty
peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines of human passion and
doubt and cruelty; and to view it as a level plain of religious equality
is to make serious mistakes. _Ecclesiastes_ is by no means on the same
level with _Isaiah_, nor _Proverbs_ with the _Sermon on the Mount_.
Doctrines and principles that are drawn from texts chosen at random from
all parts of the Bible are sure to be unworthy statements of the highest
fellowship with God.
Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to
the progress; there was loss as well as gain. All mountain roads on
their way to the summit go down as well as up; and their advance must
be judged not from their elevation at any particular point, but from
their successful approach towards their destination. The experiences of
Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate
followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him. In form the
Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends.
Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by
its approximation to the faith and purpose of Jesus.
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