The necessary limitation of the number of these lectures caused the giving up of the first intention to open the course with a treatment of the historical method of Bible study. Every lecture is based upon the use of that method. ...the Scriptures cannot be understood, nor their power appreciated, without some knowledge of the historical situations out of which they grew. [From the preface.]
V
HIS RELATION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN UNITY
The Fact of Sectarianism
The ministry of the teaching pastor has a vital relation to the problem of Christian unity. Every devout Christian must grieve over the divided state of the Christian church. The body of Christ has been dismembered. There are those who apologize for and defend this schism as beneficial to the total work, and promoting the increase of church-members. They quote Paul’s words1 as justification for their opinion: “Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will... What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and therein I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.” They forget that the whole passage was a plea for unity of sentiment. Men try to frighten believers in Christian unity by the picture of the difficulties they imagine would exist in the organization and work of one vast aggregation comprising all Christians. A united church could not be so wasteful and inefficient.
1Phil. 1: 15-18.
V A. The Harmfulness of Sectarianism
VA 1. Inability to Make United Sentiment Effective
Think of the inability to express united Christian sentiment. Disciples of our Lord are also citizens of the countries in which they reside. They should wish to make effective in political life the ideals they profess. Their first obligation is to Jesus Christ and the promotion of his kingdom. Whatsoever they do, whether they eat or drink, work or vote, should be done to the glory of God and in the name of Jesus Christ.2 The Christian element in a community or a country is now so divided that it has no way of expressing itself. In our own country over forty-five millions of members of Christian churches are separated into Roman Catholic and Protestant groups. In Romanism there are modernists and ultra-montaines and various other divisions, unified externally through the strong ecclesiastical bonds of hierarchy. In the Protestant world there are about two hundred sects and insects. Many of these are mere fissures that have occurred upon the slightest provocation and without reasonable justification. In a certain city there was a group calling itself “The Church of God.” A faction left and organized with the name “The True Church of God.” Even that faction did not find itself harmonious. Another cleavage withdrew and organized itself under the name of “The Only True Church of God.” Any one can mortify his feelings by looking at the United States Religious Census. These forty-five millions of Christians who profess to love God supremely and obey Jesus alone and to love one another according to the commandment of their Lord3 have no way of uniting their sentiment. This vast number of church-members represents a constituency of at least eighty millions in the United States, but they have no way of making their united sentiments felt in public life. The low state of Christian life prevailing in millions of these hearts, and the facts of disorganization and disagreement hush their united voice against the selfish, unchristian policy of isolation in international affairs. The selection of Senators and members of the House of Representatives is left to selfish politics. There is no union of effort to declare to the world that the Christian church is against war and in favor of brotherhood, and that the majority of the eighty millions wish to outlaw legalized murder as a method of settling differences of opinion. There is no way by which this Christian sentiment can join itself to the same Jewish sentiment and the identical opinion of organized labor and thus unitedly make Christ’s ideal of brotherhood felt. If there were no other reason for lamenting schism in the body of Christ, this alone would be ample to bring shame to the heart of every true Christian.
2Cor. 10: 31; Col. 3: 17. 3John 15: 12-17.
VA 2. Disunion in Christian Work
There is also difficulty in working together for the spiritual, educational, and philanthropic enterprises which Christianity always produces. Is it not true that many young ministers go out from seminaries to propagate denominationalism, that a pastor achieves a reputation far more as a builder of a local denominational group than because he spreads the power of vital Christianity and its ministries to the ignorant, the suffering, and the lonely? Efficiency in propagating sectarianism is too often the standard by which the success of a Christian minister is judged. The whole tendency of this separatism is toward fruitless selfishness.
VA 3. Waste of Money
All this brings in its train a waste of money and becomes an economic scandal among those outside the churches. Business men who consider the relation of expense to achievement are repelled by the over-churching of some communities and by the neglect of others. If Christians, more devoted to the ideals of Jesus than to the multiplication of denominational statistics, protest against this waste, they are accused of disloyalty to principles, if not to Jesus Christ. In the country at a crossroad are three churches of different denominations all closed because none of the three could be supported by its partisans in the community. The treasuries of the respective denominations with which this trinity of idle temples is connected, feel that they are wiser in wasting their money in building more idle temples than in using those already erected. This is a wicked squandering of funds given in the name of religion. Many city centers are likewise over-churched. No one can look upon the situation at which we have barely hinted without the deep conviction that the blessing of God could not honestly be asked upon such sectarian folly.
VA 4. Waste of Ministerial Service
There is also a waste of men. On the one hand there are thousands of ministers without churches. On the other hand, thousands of churches without pastors. Ministerial unemployment and ecclesiastical destitution are only obverse and reverse sides of this situation. City churches within a few hundred yards of one another are struggling to meet current expenses for the support of public worship and of Christian activity. They are throwing upon a single man the burden of the pulpit, of pastoral visitation, administration, teaching, and all other offices necessary in connection with the support of the institution. There are cases where one man discharges every duty from that of the pulpit to the work of the janitor. Such a disgraceful situation from the economic view-point is from the religious view-point more than a scandal in the eyes of the world. In the case referred to in a previous lecture of a town of four thousand people with five churches struggling for existence, one church with a proper plant, a preacher of ability, a teaching pastor, and another worker would do more work for the regeneration of men and women and the Christianizing of the community than the five churches combined have been able to do. Sectarianism has robbed communities of the possession of the multiform ministry mentioned in the records of the early church.
VA 5. Impression on Non-Christians
Perhaps saddest of all is the impression made upon the outside world by the unseemly spectacle of denominational rivalries. Those who are not church-members are perplexed over the clashes of dogmas, battles of creeds, contentions concerning rites and ceremonies, the arrogance of different ecclesiasticisms, and the undignified and unbecoming methods resorted to in the name of the glorious Christ to secure adherents to the various groups. Some pulpits are shut against ministers of other groups. Pipeline theories of charismatic grace through digital contacts, assumptions of orthodoxy that banish to the deserts of heterodoxy all who do not subscribe to dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, have exiled worthy and powerful preachers from a few square yards of pulpit platform in the possession of those who cherish such assumptions. Is it any wonder that when Christ affirmed that all the law and the commandments and the very essence of the life that he came to give to the world, were summed up in the loving God with all the powers of personality and loving our neighbors as ourselves,4 his teaching stands discredited in the eyes of the world by these consequences of disintegration?
4Mark 12: 28-34; Matt. 22: 34-39; Luke 10: 25-28.
VA 6. Confusion in Foreign Mission Work
And what of the impact of Christianity against the darkness of paganism? The “heathen” know nothing of and care less for the historical and personal reasons which have produced sectarianism in the church. They are met by the jangling, discordant voices of the apostles who propagate schism. Underneath all this is the absurd assumption that each sect has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The perplexity of an African or a Chinaman over this entire situation can hardly even be imagined by those of us who have been born into this tangled theological and ecclesiastical jungle.
V B. Conditions Demanding Teaching Pastors
VB 1. Each Sect Appeals to the Bible
What has the teaching pastor to do with all this? Much every way, for every schism claims Biblical reason for its existence. Each claims that loyalty to the Scriptures compels isolation, and authorizes the building of middle walls of partitions and the theological and ecclesiastical manufacture of barbed-wire fences to keep its adherents in and to keep out all others who do not agree with its peculiar Biblical interpretations. This is not the least melancholy aspect of the entire situation. We print more Bibles than any other book, sing about it in our hymns, declaim about it in our pulpits, translate it into more languages than any other literature, and fight over it more than over any other volume. We do everything with the Bible and for it except to live its holy truths as really intelligent study reveals them to us.
VB 2. Love and Scholarship the Solution of the Problem
There are two solutions for the problem and only two. One is moral, and the other is intellectual. The spiritual solution is the enthronement of love in the hearts of all believers. The other solution is to be made by Christian scholarship. This contribution is always slow in filtering itself through the prejudices of men. The traditional creedal and ceremonial vessels have been glazed by centuries of handling by hierarchies, and established usages of denominations. Christian scholarship is also slow in reaching the minds of those who surrender themselves to fantastic conceptions, who are willing disciples of grotesque notions, and who so exalt eccentricities that idiosyncrasies seem to be the most desirable things in religion. Any hope of healing the schisms in the body of Christ lies with these two agencies of Christian love and Christian scholarship. With them in control all financial waste would take care of itself and the church would use its man power intelligently. The ministry would assume a more dignified place in the minds of the thinking elements of a community, and church work would appeal to business men who enthrone common sense in their methods.
VB 3. The Pastors Are Leaders of Their Groups
The pastors are the leaders, the keys to the situation. They not only preach the vitalities of religious experience but also propagate the various dogmas and usages that divide the church. Appeals from propagating denominational organizations come through the pastor. Ostensibly the prime consideration of these appeals is loyalty to Christ and the bringing of men into discipleship to him and the Christianizing of social relations. But a loud undertone is the thought of denominational increase. We worship the great god Statistics, whose standards are mathematical. We judge the growth of Christianity by the number of nominal adherents secured, and the number of church buildings erected. We do not emphasize the development of personal character, nor the degree to which we have Christianized business, recreations, social life, and politics. The call to the pastor is that of fidelity to the denominational group and its enterprises. To make this importunity more powerful it is often clothed in garments of orthodoxy that would force a man either to wear a conventional dogmatic costume, or go naked, or else identify himself with some other ecclesiastical haberdashery. Precisely because the pastor is the acknowledged key to the situation, his opportunity is unique. Both in his local church and as a member of the general bodies with which his church is connected, he can make his voice felt and can bring to bear upon conditions the contribution of Christian love for all men and sound scholarship concerning the Scriptures. So long as churches are led by ministers who think they have been sent out to propagate ready-made sectarian ideals rather than to lead people into the glorious privilege of sharing the very life of Christ, we shall have the existing conditions. So long as the members of churches are not led into the genuine knowledge of the Scriptures and educational processes are held in abeyance, just so long will the uninformed be content with the ministry that confirms existing notions, intensifies ecclesiastical narrowness, and stimulates enthusiasm for partisanship. The beginnings of sectarianism cropped out in Corinth.5 No one can fail to feel the wideness of our Christian possessions when he reads the glorious statement that all things are ours:6 “Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come: all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.” Certainly Paul’s attitude as the founder and pastor of the church at Corinth did not favor division of that group.
51Cor. 1: 11-17; 2: 3-9. 61Cor. 3: 22, 23.
VB 4. Varieties of Biblical Interpretation
The teaching pastor has a vital relation to this situation because of varieties of Biblical interpretation. If there be anything beyond question, it is that this one common basis was not produced with a multitude of meanings. A sane man in writing has one single, definite, clear-cut meaning in his words. When he is writing about religion the vital issues involved would prevent him from deliberately writing ambiguously. Double meanings to Scripture are unthinkable. It may be granted that no Biblical writer could realize the full, far-reaching import of any utterance, since none can ever foresee all the applications of a principle which he enunciates. That, however, is not to say that a Biblical writer did not understand his own words or purposely meant them to be construed in a double sense. Moreover, if to these two ethical canons of writing and speaking we should add convictions of guidance by the Holy Spirit, the case is all the stronger. Did God trifle with human intelligence? Did he ever mean when he spoke through prophet or apostle that his message should be capable of more than one interpretation? Did the divine plan purpose that heaven’s illumination of human ignorance should be doubtful, that light should be confused, that the lamp to our feet should tantalize us by indefiniteness and uncertainty? On any theory of inspiration, whether dynamic or verbal, none can assume that God meant two things, talked two ways, and intended to justify opposite theories about himself or about our relations to him or to one another. To make such an assumption is to dethrone the Scriptures as authority, to accuse the Almighty of duplicity, of intellectual insincerity, and of trifling with the highest interests of his creatures. The teaching pastor will insist upon these things and will do his best to discover precisely the significance of any Scripture, and also to test it by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ which likewise will be sought in the most honest spirit and method possible. Into such an attitude he will conduct his followers. The very word “rule” in the expression “the Bible is our rule of faith and practise” is misleading. The Scriptures are not a collection of rules. That mistake the unthinking have made. It is a literature which records life, and in the life thus recorded there are revealed principles, axiomatic, self-evident spiritual ideals according to which God would have men live. In the use of the Bible for guidance in Christian living and thinking there are three elements to be considered: First, the conditions of life at the time when the Scriptures were produced; second, the principles involved in those conditions discovered by honest, intelligent study; and third, the specific rule which comes from the application of the principle to the conditions. Rules are the children of the marriage of principles to conditions. Principles are eternal, self-evident and axiomatic. Rules vary as conditions change. For instance, this is the Lenten season. Jesus told people when they fasted to anoint their hair with oil.7 That was his rule. It is violated today throughout Christendom by all who observe Lent. Hair-oil is not specially used among certain Christians during Lent nor on Fridays. Customs have changed. The principle was that ye “appear not unto men to fast.” If we observed the rule now we would violate the principle. A principle can be applied to many other situations than that out of which its statement came. Jesus’ ideal that personal religious exercises were not matters of advertisement is applicable to many things other than fasting.8 The same intelligence in the use of the Bible will not send us to it for “rules.” We shall seek for the eternal principles of righteous living, as good in one generation as in another. We shall emancipate ourselves from the mechanical attitude that turns the Scriptures into a manual of religious etiquette. It is precisely because of unintelligent teaching in the pulpit that some denominations exist and put a “Thus saith the Lord” behind their mistaken conceptions of the teachings of the Bible.
7Matt. 6 16-18. 8Matt. 6 : 1-7.
VB 5. Influence of Dogmatic Prepossessions
Another cause for divisions among Christians is dogmatic prepossession. This is especially true of denominations that have historic creeds, to which perpetual adherence is demanded. The Russian Church which arrogates to itself the title “Orthodox,” boasts that through the centuries of the Christian era it has never changed an iota of its creed. More or less of this pride of consistency and tenacity is in the minds of those who rest upon historic statements of faith. “Orthodoxy” in the sense of right thinking is to be commended, but there must be no tolerance for the assumption that the only straight thinking in the history of the Christian church has been done by those who lived centuries or millenniums ago. The youngest of our great creeds, the Westminster Confession, was published in 1646, about a generation after King James’ Version of the Bible was issued in 1611. More interesting yet is the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1642. The discoverer of the law of gravitation and the author of the Principia was a boy four years old when the Westminster Confession was adopted. Modern science had not begun when the youngest of the great confessions of Christendom appeared. The history of symbolics is forced to face this fact. The birth of Newton and the publication of the Westminster Confession were practically synchronous. Since then the whole field of human thought has changed, a new heaven and a new earth have appeared, the scientific age has come with its new knowledge of the physical universe, a new conception of the history of man, a new anthropology. Archeology as now understood was not in existence at the time this confession of faith was made. One has only to compare the knowledge of the middle of the seventeenth century with that of the twentieth to see how methods and view-points have all been changed. Since God reveals himself through creation and human life, we are forced to say, not that God has changed, but that our conceptions of him have become larger and vaster. In the face of all this shall the pastor ignore the light that has come upon the Scriptures? Moreover, archeology and lexicography have made marvelous advances since that confession was formed. Today we make dictionaries and grammars of New Testament Greek in the light of thousands of papyri, ostrica, and monuments which reveal to us the koine, or the ordinary colloquial language of the first century, which is the language in which our New Testament was written. The space of this lecture does not permit even one illustration of the effect of this new knowledge upon New Testament lexicography or grammar or interpretation. Archeology is throwing vast light upon both New Testament and Old Testament history out of which the literature grew, and the end is not yet. When Casper Rene Gregory was last in this country, he told the writer that he was then gathering a staff of workers for a new lexicon of New Testament Greek. Alas, that he lost his life in the World War! In the face of these and many other facts which cannot be recited here, how preposterous it is for men to buttress denominational existence by a creed which was published in an unscientific age before the world had received the means for such a study of the Scriptures as we now possess. If the question be put to a sincere pastor, who desires to teach his people the truth and only the truth, whether he shall cling to a traditional creed and propagate its conceptions, or whether he shall do the questionably ethical thing of using that creed with a loose interpretation, of which the framers of the creed never dreamed, or whether he shall cut loose from the creed and give the people the truth as God has revealed it to him in the providential revelations that have come through the increase of human knowledge, there can be but one answer for an honest man. But in asking this question we have struck at the root of denominationalism so far as it rests upon dogmatic prepossessions. Why should the men of today, richly blessed indeed by what the men of yesterday perceived, and enriched by the legacies of their Christian lives, be content to think that the same God who revealed light to their ecclesiastical and theological ancestors has stopped the shedding of light? Today with our advantages the obligation should be greater than upon any previous generation. Of this increased opulence the teaching pastor should make as abundant use as his opportunities will allow. After all, what is the preservation of a creed, or as Baptists call it, a “confession of faith,” compared with the understanding of the truth of God? Every generation should try to learn the will of God more perfectly. We have the best Biblical example for this.9 From vows of loyalty to past confessions of faith made by fallible men like ourselves but not endowed with light as great as we possess, God has absolved every man by the very increased illumination he has sent. The function of a teaching pastor is not to indoctrinate his people with bygone statements of faith which a growing world has left behind, but to lead men into the vital truth. Here is a vast contribution which Christian scholarship incarnated in the teaching pastor can make to the vital problem of Christian union.
9Acts 18: 26; 19: 1-5.
VB 6. Bondage to Historical and Hereditary Accidents
Where denominational divisions shelter themselves under great names, or temperamental peculiarities, or temporary historical considerations, the teaching pastor will lead people to see that the possession of spiritual reality is above all other considerations. We may well thank God for the great men who had the courage to stand against what they conceived to be invasions of religious rights and also impositions upon their freedom. We may give due credit to historical conditions that at the time made protest necessary. A retrospect of church history will reveal the large part that Christian men have had in religious movements. Far be it from us to minimize their heroic functions. Yet in the light of the newer day and the developments of the years it ought to be easy to review their contentions. The discouraging thing that meets the teaching pastor is the frequency with which these men are quoted as if their utterances justified the perpetuation of divisions, the historical reasons for which have long since ceased. Even their conceptions of the Bible are not necessarily infallible. They are subject to review, and in the spirit of consideration and appreciation should be fearlessly examined by men today. If their contentions will not stand the test of modern Biblical study, then they should be surrendered as authoritative, no matter how interesting they might be historically. If on the other hand the things for which they stood prove to be of eternal value, there is no reason why these things should not be joined with others of like value stated by other persons. No reality can ever be inconsistent with any other reality. Truth is one. The nearer we approach to reality, the nearer we come to one another. Where denominational divisions are temperamental, the problem is somewhat keener. Many whose esthetic sense is highly cultured wish to worship God in ways that commend themselves to refined souls. They should not be denied that privilege. Worship is a function of the esthetic faculty, the perception of the worthship of God. “One thing have I asked of Jehovah, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of Jehovah all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Jehovah, and to inquire in his temple.”10 Whoever gave expression to that desire wanted to bring both his esthetic sense and his interrogation-mark into the place of worship. There is no reason why they should not be brought there together. How many times the ugly barrenness of a church service has offended the sense of the beautiful. How many times the dogmatism of a church or its preacher has prevented the entrance of the interrogation-mark into the house of the Lord. There is no reason why denominational divisions should be based upon these lines, why one group should emphasize whatever is beautiful in worship, and another should emphasize the spirit of free inquiry, and neither should have communion with the other. Often sectarian feeling is hereditary. Denominational labels have been handed down as heirlooms. In many cases those who wear these labels are like certain hybrid animals without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity. Hereditary ecclesiasticism is seldom based upon conviction. What is the teaching pastor to do in all these cases? Surely he will be able to show from the Scriptures that the perception of the worthship of God is the essence of worship, that the Christ turned away no questioner from his illumination but welcomed all inquiries, and that so far as purely hereditary ecclesiasticism is concerned, God is able out of stones to raise up children unto Abraham.11 The teacher using the historical method will at least show his people the essential truth that God is worshipped both in Jerusalem and in Gerizim, and that neither shrine can monopolize adoration, that what God seeks is communion of our spirits with his based upon reality.12 If the teaching pastor will exalt Jesus’ idea of the kingdom of God, and get his people to see that churches exist to realize this matchless dream of our Lord of a state of human society characterized by freedom in thinking and in conduct (unregulated by the devices of legalism), by righteousness in character and in relations with others, and by love expressing itself in service even to the degree of sacrifice, he will do much to take away the pride that many feel in belonging to groups that exalt minor considerations. The kingdom of God as dreamed of by Jesus was human society without regard to race or geography in which every person lives like a child of the heavenly Father, and therefore all live together as God’s human family. The church is supposed to consist of those who appreciate and practise this ideal of Jesus, who through Christian social instinct have banded themselves together to promote this ideal throughout the world. In the face of this conception, the trifles that divide Christian people appear insignificant. The pastor who understands his Bible, and who will show the evolution from the narrowness of Judaism through the wide views of the noblest Old Testament prophets13 to the perfect teaching of our Lord14 and the vision of the new humanity expressed by Paul,15 will do more to destroy the blight of crass sectarianism than all the polemics in the world can accomplish.
10Ps. 27: 4.
11Matt. 3: 9.
12John 4: 20-24.
13Isa. 19: 23-25; 42: l-4.
14Matt. 8: 11; Luke 13: 29.
15Col. 3: 11.
VB 7. Failure of All Other Plans for Union
The failure of all other devices to promote Christian unity drives us back upon education. There have been conferences to see how people could get together. The world is still studying the recent appeal of Bishops of the Anglican Church. A Conference on Faith and Order is facing Christendom. In it there will come up for discussion confessional matters; comparisons of creeds, and possibly the effort to construct some new confession of faith, or obtain adherence to one that already exists. There will also be presented views of “ordination” and of ecclesiasticism. All differences of opinion that will be presented on these matters will be historical and will be based upon various methods of Biblical study. One of three things is possible: The yielding of some to others; or, amalgamation of all in some great inclusive movement; or, one more instance of compromise to be put alongside of many that church history records. How much better it would be if the sane scholarship of the world would set itself afresh to study all mooted questions in the spirit of love and of absolute intellectual honesty emancipated from preconceptions and historical considerations, and seek to discover just what are the principles that the Bible which is “the rule of faith and practise” intended men to believe and live. Even this would raise a question. No one can study the New Testament intelligently without discovering that the early church believed that Jesus himself would soon return to the earth and establish a Messianic era. Paul’s letters reveal this hope in very intense forms. So consuming was it that the church did not make creeds, nor establish governments, nor erect edifices, nor concern itself with social reforms, such as abolition of slavery, intemperance, and industrial injustice. These matters are virtually ignored except as general principles of Christian life are stated in the light of which men were to live. Paul advised against marriage because the time was short.16 He told slaves not to seek their freedom, but to abide in the calling where they were.17 He sent Onesimus back to Philemon. He declared that the Lord’s Supper was intended to show forth the death of Jesus until he returned,18 and in the same letter that contains that statement said that the Lord was at hand.19 Have we not made permanent things which the early church considered transient and temporary, and then divided ourselves into segments by mistaken interpretations of a literature the very existence of which was due to the disappointment of the early church in its expectation of the speedy return of Jesus to the world? Had he returned when the early church expected him, would we have had a New Testament? Would the communion have existed to the present day? What would have been the course of church history had this expectation been satisfied? We are not discussing the origin of this hope, but simply the patent fact that it was disappointed, and that because of this disappointment many things have arisen that are now contributing to our divisions. The teaching pastor who studies his New Testament historically and seeks to account for the very literature he is studying and for specific utterances it contains, will so educate his people that they will be immune against many things that today perplex Christendom because we have been lacking in teaching pastors. We have tried all other methods to promote unity. Is it not time to try this method which should suggest itself to every lover of the Bible as the easiest way to a solution of differences among all those who claim to appeal to the Scriptures as the authority for their separation from their fellow Christians?
161Cor. 7: 7-9, 27, 29, 32-34, 38-40.
171Cor. 7: 20, 21.
181Cor. 11: 26.
191Cor. 16: 22, Maranatha.
V C. The Specific Contributions of the Teaching Pastor
VC 1. Leadership in Sane Bible Study
He can lead into sane Bible study, and strenuously insist that for any passage of Scripture there can be but one meaning, that which was in the mind of the writer or speaker, and make honest effort to find out precisely what that meaning was. How gross the departure from this simple, ethical, axiomatic canon of interpretation can be will be seen by a glance at “Science and Health; A Key to the Scriptures.” Think of this!
The name Adam is from the Hebrew adamah, signifying the red color of the ground, dust, nothingness. The word Adam should be regarded as identical with the Latin daemon.20 Originally demons were not always considered as evil beings, but as partly good, though now the word is used exclusively of harmful and mischievous spirits—somewhat in this way ought Adam to be thought of: as a dam, an obstructionist, as error opposed to Truth.21
20O ye shades of philology! 21“Science and Health.” Twenty-first Edition, 1886, p. 381, par. xvii.
All adjectives are defied by the grotesqueness of this glossary.
Eve. A beginning; mortality; that which does not last forever; a finite belief concerning life, substance, and intelligence in matter; error; the belief that the human race originated materially instead of spiritually, that man started firstly from dust, secondly from a rib, and thirdly from an egg, self-imposed folly and its consequences.22
22From Glossary to “Science and Health, A Key to the Scriptures,” Twenty-first Edition Revised, 1886. In the Edition published in 1916, in English and German, Eve was mercifully spared the burden of “self-imposed folly and Its consequences” by the omission of that clause.
That may be a dazzling appeal to those who are ignorant of the real nature of Scripture. If such nonsense could be accepted, it will only confirm in deeper ignorance than they had before those who show it hospitality. This is only an extreme illustration, but there have been many interpretations of the Bible outside of “Christian Science” that will approach these in absurdity. Anything else than honest, painstaking effort to discover the meaning of Scripture will inevitably plunge those who profess to love the Bible into all kinds of variations of opinion, many of them unspeakably absurd. Swedenborg’s “correspondential interpretation” could furnish instances. The open mind, the spirit willing to surrender all misconceptions and to admit all light, is the primary consideration. When a scholarly, ethical, and spiritual attitude exists in the pastors and can be implanted in the mind of followers, then researches as to faith, ecclesiasticism, dogma, and the meaning of words will bring forth essential unity and harmony.
VC 2. Moral Courage in Facing Truth
Teaching pastors can show and inculcate moral courage in facing the truth without regard to consequence. Whatever may have been believed will be cheerfully surrendered if the discovery of reality compels it. Paul counted as refuse the things that formerly were gain to him that he might win Christ and be found in him.23 How splendid a vision it is to see that the Bible is the literary record of spiritual experiences in the great laboratory of life, that in this literature men tell what they saw of God, that they hand over to us the apparatus they used in their observations, and say: “Here are the instruments we used and the discoveries we made. Take our apparatus, verify our discoveries, try to add to our knowledge, complete our partial visions, correct our mistaken conceptions, and if perchance you can add to the apparatus we used, do not hesitate to do so, for the knowledge [of] God is eternal life,24 and we desire not to prevent your own effort to know God nor to halt your energies by our discoveries, but to stimulate you to know for yourself and to enlarge if possible what we have found.”
23Phil. 3: 8. 24John 17: 3.
VC 3. Emphasis Upon Life Above Literature
After all, the teaching pastor will place his emphasis upon life and not upon literature. He will use the literature as the vehicle for the discovery of life. Jesus declared that life can come only from life. He told25 the theologians of his day: “You are searching the Scriptures, for in them you think you find eternal life, but you are mistaken. Life is not in literature, but only from life. The Scriptures testify concerning me, and ye will not come to me that ye might receive life.” It was his announcement that what we of this day call the law of biogenesis obtains in religion as well as in biology. By no processes of grammar, philology, lexicography, archeology, or exegesis can men produce the life of God in the souls of men. All these are important essentials for understanding the testimony of those who lead to the Master. Christianity will become for the teaching pastor the possession and impartation of the life of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, all studies for which we have been pleading will have as their objective the clear, clean-cut revelation of what kind of a life it is that God truly gives to men. We are not quickened by inspired punctuation-marks, but by the life of God that throbbed in men’s lives and determined their relations to others. No lexicon can ever regenerate. Life alone can accomplish that miracle in character. This was the method of the Great Teacher. He did not hesitate to say,26 “You have heard that it has been said . . . but I say unto you.” He could talk that way because in him was life.27 It was not in the literature, not even in that which he did not set aside, much less in that which he did abrogate. Everywhere he used the life which the Old Testament recorded as the vehicle through which the life of his Father came to the men of old. But most of all it was his own life that he used, his teaching, his living. Men do not raise wheat for the sake of straw or chaff, but without straw or chaff there could be no precious kernel for the food of men. When once we have seen the life that is life indeed and opened our hearts to its inflow, we shall have made the highest possible use of the Bible. There is an evangelistic power in teaching at least equal to that of mere pleading, or exhorting, or the telling of pathetic stories, or moving merely upon the emotions. A deep conviction is worth a thousand tears, unless the tears come because of the conviction.
25John 5: 39, 40.
26Matt. 5: 21, 22, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34.
27John 1: 4.
VC 4. If All Ministers Were Teaching Pastors
Lastly, what would be the result so far as healing the divisions of the church is concerned if all ministers of all denominations were for a single generation to practise this teaching function? What intelligence would come to the Christian body? How many grotesque, queer, and inexcusable segments of the Christian church would fall away? If just one generation could be free from allegorized, spiritualized, fanciful treatment of Scripture language and dedicate itself under the guidance of a competent ministry to the sane effort to find exactly what the Scriptures do teach, how wonderful the next generation would be in knowledge! With the Holy Spirit resident in the hearts of men, and the spirit of truth and of reality sanctifying the souls of men, what would come from such a treatment of the Bible? Why should men resist the Holy Spirit when he is trying to teach us through the general progress of human knowledge, through the triumphs of scientific methods, and through our own consciences that the only way to use the Bible is as God in his providence intended us to use it? If the church could have educated leadership for a single generation, its fragments would come together and all our unhappy divisions would disappear. The key to the solution of the problem lies in thoroughly educated pastors who are willing to perform the teaching function, and to bring up young and old in the knowledge of the truth. Let the Scriptures be “the rule of our faith and practise,” but let them be fairly interpreted. Some years ago the late President Harper of the University of Chicago had an experience which well illustrates this. He lectured in the city of New York before the Baptist ministers of that city and vicinity. The impression he made by his lecture upon one of the minor prophets was profound. An editor of a certain Baptist newspaper, not published in New York, arose and announced that he had engaged Doctor Harper to write twelve articles for his paper upon the study of the Bible, and offered the ministers a year’s subscription to his paper at greatly reduced rates so that they could have the advantage of reading the coming articles. Large numbers subscribed. The articles were never published. President Harper himself told the writer the reason. The editor of that paper desired in the announcement of the contemplated articles to make a statement concerning Doctor Harper’s views of the Bible. He handed the distinguished scholar a paper upon which was written, “I believe the Scriptures to be the rule of Christian faith and practise,” and asked Doctor Harper to sign that statement that he might print it in the announcement. The great man took the paper, put a caret after the word “Scriptures” and inserted two words “fairly interpreted.” The editor declined to allow the insertion of those two words and canceled the contract with the scholar, though he did not return the money to the subscribers. “Fairly interpreted.” On those two words with mutual Christian love really hangs the solution of the problem we have been discussing. What other words could an honest man use?
Preface lectures: ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX
[Note: Lecture V carefully compared to book on Thursday, 6-18-1998. All discovered errors and omissions corrected (this is not a claim of perfection!). The use of colors and links (if any), of course, are my additions, and the purposes may relate to considerations beyond the scope of the lecture. ...wcb2]
William C. Bitting II
wbitting@yahoo.com First posted 5/16/98. Revised 10/20/00 (prior 6/20/98).