authors, to be compiled out of earlier and sometimes inconsistent documents, and consequently to be not throughout reliable history. All these tendencies are essentially modern, and therefore the theology that is affected by them is properly called "modernism." To all these modern tendencies there has been, in Christian theology, a twofold attitude. On the one hand, there are those who regard the new ways of thinking as discoveries of truth, and hold that Christian belief must be adjusted to them. This is possible, the Modernists hold, for the new ways of regarding nature and history do not necessarily mean the elimination of the activity of God. When the scientist denies God he is no longer a scientist, but a philosopher, and the Christian can refuse to follow him though accepting his scientific facts. The modern views modify the outer forms of Christian beliefs, but leave their inner substance unharmed, or even strengthened. The modernist theology has, of course, many varieties. Some insist that there is no one theology called "modernism." Some religious liberals retain almost the whole system of doctrines in a qualified form. Others are ready for a drastic discarding of the whole traditional "religion about Jesus" in favor of a return to "the religion of Jesus," which, it is believed, is shown by a critical study of the earliest traditions to have been essentially "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man," with a "plan of salvation" as simple as the parable of the Prodigal Son. Most Modernists protest that they are not Unitarians. (The Unitarians have for long frankly regarded Jesus as a human teacher and leader, not in any unique sense divine). In some cases the distinction is real; in others, it can perhaps be traced but is very fine and quite unimportant. Many persons were amused at the embarrassment of certain Modernists in New York when a Unitarian minister came forward as a defender of modernism against a leading Fundamentalist. But all Modernists agree upon the necessity of revising religious beliefs in the light of the new knowledge. On the other hand, other theologians have regarded the whole system of modern ideas as destructive of Christianity. It is not new facts, they believe, to which the Modernists have yielded, but an atheistic philosophy. It is a modern prejudice against the miraculous and the supernatural, which, if the Modernist were but clearsighted enough to see it, really springs from a disbelief in God. The Copernican astronomy, to be sure, has long since been assimilated and the Bible interpreted in accordance with it. But evolution is denied as unproved, a mere atheistic guess. The whole critical reconstruction of Biblical history is rejected as untenable, and the Bible set forth over against modernism as wholly without error. Sometimes modernism is said to spring from a moral fault. The desire to revise theology is said to issue from man's unwillingness to think of himself as a lost sinner who needs a Divine Savior. THE BIBLE Most important of all, in this discussion, is the question of the nature and proper use of the Bible. For centuries it has been commonly assumed by Christians that the Bible is in such a sense a revelation from God,-that its authors were in such a way inspired-that whatever the Bible declares is to be accepted as truth without question. The Reformers of the sixteenth century showed a certain tendency at first to deal more boldly with the Bible, but the necessities of controversy with the Roman Church, which they had left, soon led the Protestants to develop an even stricter doctrine of Biblical inspiration than was necessary in Catholicism. When, as is often pointed out, the authors of the Westminster Confession of 1647 failed to state explicity that the Bible is without error, the reason is probably that this was so completely taken for granted that it occurred to none of them to declare it. Now, even many moderate conservatives will agree that the theory of verbal inspiration is not tenable. The credibility of the Bible, such men hold, is not affected by trifling discrepancies of detail or occasional misquotations. Still other conservatives give up entirely the attempt to draw authoritative statements from the Bible on any subject but religion and ethics. These, they say, are the true subject matter of the Bible, and it is in these fields only that the Bible is an authoritative revelation. But the genuine Modernist goes further than this. He maintains that the Bible does not teach a single, harmonious system of doctrine, but contains various theologies of unequal value. The primitive representations of the early Hebrew traditions, the ethical religion of the great prophets, the religion of temple and sacrifice, the teachings of Jesus, the elaborate theology of Paul, the Christ shown in the fourth Gospel, the peculiar theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the visions of the Apocalypse of John-it is impossible, say the Modernists, to combine all these into one system of doctrine without doing violence to some of them. The Bible is a varied literature issuing out of the long development of Hebrew and Christian religion. It is not adapted to be a final authority for our belief, in the sense that all its declarations must be accepted without question; but its true value is found when it is used like any other literature, for whatever inspiration and guidance its various parts are found actually to contain. The Bible becomes a more wonderful book when so used, the Modernist claims. Old attacks like that of Robert Ingersoll lose all point the moment the Christian is not required to defend everything said about God in the Old Testament. No longer is it necessary to expend labor upon harmonizing the hopelessly discordant, in the interest of an artificial theory of Biblical inerrancy. On the contrary, the Bible as rear ranged by modern literary and historical criticism presents an impressive picture of the development of religion. from naive, grotesque, and barbarous forms up to the matchless teachings and life of Jesus, a picture so impressive as to call forth a faith in a self-revealing God within. the process. To all this the Fundamentalist replies, that the Bible. does not gain from the new view, but on the contrary. loses all the value that Christian faith found in it on the old view. As represented by the Modernists, it is simply a human literature. Instead of a message from God to men, it is only men's thoughts about God. In a word, the Bible is no more a revelation. Since the Bible is declared to contain error, it is only our fallible judgment which decides what in the Bible is true. But what religion needs is an infallible message from God, to which our human reason and conscience shall be subject, which may on occasion contradict human ideas. If it is to have any value, therefore, the Bible must be supernaturally inspired and infallible. The true Fundamentalist draws the full conclusions from this principle. It is not enough that the thoughts of the Bible be divinely given, for thoughts are communicated in words, and an error in a word might conceal the Divine thought. Therefore it must be that the very words of Scripture are just what God intended the writers to use. Being thus convinced of the antecedent necessity of an infallible Bible, the Fundamentalist then examines the evidence which the Modernist offers against it, and finds that the Modernist's case is not proved. The supposed discoveries of the literary critic are declared to be largely subjective. The critic, it is charged, rewrites the sacred history according to a preconceived theory of the evolution of religions. He is unwilling to admit the possibility of a supernatural revelation and of miraculous events accompanying it, and therefore must recast the story so as to remove these features. The inconsistencies and varia tions of style, on the ground of which the critic divides books of the Bible into supposed earlier documents, are declared to be mostly imaginary. Where actual discrepancies occur, these are disposed of by an interpretation which harmonizes them, or the Fundamentalist waits for further light which shall remove them. There is always the possibility that the difficulty is due to an error in transcribing the manuscripts, and therefore it is the original documents only for which verbal inerrancy is claimed. These are, to be sure, lost, but a comparison of manuscripts enables us to reconstruct the original text with a considerable degree of accuracy. EVOLUTION The inerrancy of the Bible comes conspicuously into question in connection with the creation of the world and the origin of man. The modern theory of evolution is in striking contrast with the Biblical representation of a series of special acts of creation. More serious still is the contrast between the evolutionary view of the origin of society, morals, and religion, and the Biblical story, according to which the present state of man is to be explained by a fall of our first parents from the state of original innocence in which they had been created. Modernists, and many who are otherwise theologically conservative, give general assent to the theory of evolution. The argument for it they usually leave to the biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists, discussing on their own part rather the question how evolution affects theology. That it does modify the traditional system of doctrines is freely admitted, but the Modernist argues that the story of evolution furnishes a new evidence for the existence of God, better than the old argument from design. Evolution is said to give relief in many old difficulties. It sheds a little light upon the mystery of evil, in that it represents the world as still in process of com |