B. IN DEFENSE OF THE NEW VIEW

The Bible is inspired as it is inspired, and not as we may think it ought to be inspired.-William Newton Clarke.1

A man has no idea how great a man Paul was, or how great his teaching, as long as he feels obliged to agree with him.— William Newton Clarke, quoting from a friend."

FUNDAMENTALISM, MODERNISM AND THE

BIBLE

3

In discussing the nature of the Bible as conceived by fundamentalism and modernism, it is apparent that a large body of belief regarding this collection of writings is held in common. Both hold that the Bible is inspired of God, and is in a unique sense the word of God; both hold that it is the record of a disclosure of the divine nature and purpose in history; both believe that it possesses moral and religious authority excelling by broad diameters that quality as exhibited in any other documents; and both believe that rightly understood it is an adequate standard of appeal in matters of the spiritual life. It would seem that agreement on these elemental aspects of the Scripture, however widely people may vary in precise definition, would afford a common ground of faith and conduct. Yet such seems to be far from the case. As contrasted with the confessors of other religions, such as Buddhism and Islam, the difference between the two groups is not so obvious. But when brought into contact in the attempt to make clear their respective opinions, the chasm is evidently too wide and deep to be crossed. There is no virtue in attempting to obscure this fact.

1 Sixty Years with the Bible. p. 133.

2 Sixty Years with the Bible. p. 92.

• Christian Century. 41: 424-5. April 3, 1924.

Fundamentalists regard the Bible as the product of the divine mind revealed through human instruments much as a man of business dictates his correspondence to secretaries and stenographers. They say that if it is to be accepted as the word of God, then it is reasonable to infer that the method of its communication has been such as to leave unimpaired its validity as an accurate and authoritative record. The authors of the various books doubtless exercised a limited amount of freedom in their approach to the themes of which they spoke. But that freedom was wholly eliminated in relation to the subject matter and even the verbal form of their messages. If the Bible cannot be trusted to provide its readers with the very thoughts and words of the Holy Spirit, then it is worthless as a guide in religion. Indeed it is the claim made by the book itself that it is the product of holy men who spoke as they were moved by the Spirit. All Scripture is by inspiration of God. If there are minor variations in text and narrative, such as those pointed out by textual and literary students, these are the result of human fallibility in the transmission of an originally perfect record. And the fact that the meanings of numerous passages in the Bible are made to depend upon the precise term that is employed, proves that the inspiration of the Scriptures applies to their verbal form, and not merely to their general tone and direction.

On the other hand, the Modernist starts with no preconception as to what the Bible ought to be, but is interested to discover what it actually reveals regarding its origin and nature. He perceives that the Protestant reaction from the papal dogma of an infallible church resulted in the opposing doctrine of an infallible Bible, and that neither of these claims rests upon valid grounds. The Bible is not a supernaturally produced or safeguarded collection of documents, but the honest and reverent work of men living at various periods in the history of the Hebrew and Jewish people, over an interval

of more than a thousand years; that it is the record of the most notable chapters in the history of religion; that its contents include legislation, sermons and sermonic use of narratives dealing with former and current events, reflections upon the most outstanding religious problems, hymns of the faith, apocalyptic hopes, and most important of all, a body of writings dealing with the life and message of Jesus Christ and the growth of the Christian society in its earliest years. These writings lay no claim to exactness in matters of history, chronology or science; yet their record is so adequate regarding the Hebrew faith as disclosed in the volumes of the Old Testament, and the nature of Jesus and the movement he inspired in history as described in the New, that interest in the mere niceties of narrative, the accuracies of quotation and the details of ritual is thrown into lesser significance by the tremendous sweep and impulse of these movements that make clear the divine activity in human life.

It is a commonplace to say that the Bible is inspired. To be sure, that expression is nowhere used by the writers of the Scriptures to characterize its contents. Paul used it not only in reference to the Old Testament, but evidently of a much larger collection of holy writings than we now admit into the canon. But inspiration is a word applied to so many other products of human genius that it is only a weak and pallid term to set forth the rich complex of values that appear in the Bible. In the sense in which it can be applied to the Biblical writings at all it does not refer primarily to any beauties or urgencies that inhere in texts and documents. It is rather a certain moral passion in the lives of such forceful personalities as are portrayed in the Bible and had part in its production, men like the prophets who were moved, urged on, pushed out, by their deep concern to assist in the realization of the divine purpose for their age; or who like the apostles had caught according to their varying capacity something of the social, ethical and spiritual contagion of

the life of Jesus, and could not rest until in turn they had exhausted their energies in transmitting it to other men. Some part of this disclosure of the divine life and program they incarnated in their own characters; some smaller part they uttered in their preaching; and a portion, less than either, they were able to record in those masterful writings which are the most precious of the religious inheritances of the race. The Scriptures are as various as their writers, and it is that same variety of material, as the productions of men filled with a holy passion to make known the good news of the divine purpose in the world, that makes them the vital, compelling, authoritative messages they are. There is no term by which the unique character of the Bible can be defined, least of all the much used and misused term inspiration. The Bible is just the sum total of the rich and varied elements which appear in it and in no other body of literature. Therein lies its distinction and its finality among the books of religion.

Both Fundamentalists and Modernists believe in a certain element of progress in the revelation which the Bible makes of the character and purposes of God. But this element has very different values as assessed by the two groups. Most Fundamentalists would concede that there is movement in the story of religion as portrayed in the Scriptures. Even the covenant theologians of the eighteenth century emphasized that fact, and defined the pre-Mosaic period as the starlight age, the classical epoch of Hebrew history as the moonlight age, and the Christian dispensation as the sunlight age. God was represented as releasing from time to time some fresh increment of an eternal revelation already complete from the beginning. In so far as the Fundamentalist is willing to depart in the least from his normal attitude of belief in a level Bible, all parts of which are of equal validity, it is to adopt some principle of segmentation which assigns to the dispensations fixed and stratified forms of religious

teaching just as fossil remains are assumed to have been placed in their appropriate settings by creative act at the beginning.

The Modernist on the other hand believes that the self-revelation of God, like creation, is a continuous process. It is the nature of a father to make known his character and purposes in all his relations with his children. All human history is the record of the divine effort at selfinterpretation to the race. No one people has been the sole beneficiary of this process, for God has never left Himself without witness among any people. But some of His children have understood Him better than others, and to them He has been able to make fuller disclosure than to the rest. These disclosures have not been arbitrary and partial acts of revelation to special and favored groups. But those who best apprehended the meaning of the divine work in creation, in human experience and in the disciplines of the years, were able to speak a fuller message than the rest. Among the races some have shown marked aptitudes for particular tasks. The unique quality of some of the Hebrew people was their perception of moral and religious values as made clear to them in their relations with God. These values were best interpreted by the prophets of Israel, and were brought to their supreme expression in the life and ministry of Jesus. The Bible is therefore the record of these expanding ideals as they were given utterance and illustration from age to age in a unique history. The beginnings were lowly and crude. The early prophets did not hesitate to use brute force to emphasize their mandates, as when Elijah put to death the priests of Baal at the Kishon, or Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. But gradually they learned the lesson that the best instrument of the preacher is a voice and not a sword. Those of one generation corrected the mistakes of their earlier brethren, as when Hosea denounced the bloody reform of Jehu, which had received the approbation of Elisha and