The authority of the Bible [microform]

U>e University of Chicago
libraries

THE LIBRARY OF CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY

THEOLOGICAL EDITORS:
W. B. MATTHEWS, D.D.
H. WHEELER ROBINSON, D.D.

GENERAL EDITOR:

BIB JAMES MABCHANT, K.B.E., LL.D.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE

ll

THE
OF

BY
C. H. DODD

TATES PROFESSOR OP NEW TESTAMENT GREEK AND EXEGESIS AT

MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY LECTURER

IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES; GRINFIELD

LECTURER ON THE SEPTUAGINT

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1929

. .*. .*:;.. ;

'"

COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
HARPER & BROTHERS

First Edition
B-D

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

rTMIE Editors of this series are convinced that the
JL Christian Church as a whole is confronted with a
great though largely silent crisis, and also with an un-
paralleled opportunity. They have a common mind con-
cerning the way in which this crisis and opportunity should
be met. The time has gone by when "apologetics" could
be of any great value. Something more is needed than
a defence of propositions already accepted on authority,
for the present spiritual crisis is essentially a question-
ing of authority if not a revolt against it. It may be
predicted that the number of people who are content simply
to rest their religion on the authority of the Bible or the
Church is steadily diminishing, and with the growing
effectiveness of popular education will continue to diminish.
We shall not therefore meet the need, if we have rightly
diagnosed it, by dissertations, however learned, on the
interpretation of the Bible or the history of Christian doc-
trine. Nothing less is required than a candid, courageous
and well-informed effort to think out anew, in the light
of modern knowledge, the foundation affirmations of our
common Christianity. This is the aim of every writer in
this series.

i A further agreement is, we hope, characteristic of the
j books which will be published in the series. The authors

vi General Introduction

have a common mind not only with regard to the problem
but also with regard to the starting-point of reconstruc-
tion. They desire to lay stress upon the value and validity
of religious experience and to develop their theology on
the basis of the religious consciousness. In so doing they
claim to be in harmony with modern thought. The massive
achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have been built up on the method of observation and experi-
ment, on experience, not on abstract a priori reasoning.
Our contention is that the moral and spiritual experience
of mankind has the right to be considered, and demands
to be understood.

Many distinguished thinkers might be quoted in sup-
port of the assertion that philosophers are now prepared
in a greater measure than formerly to consider religious
experience as among the most significant of their data.
One of the greatest has said, "There is nothing more real
than what comes in religion. To compare facts such as
these with what is given to us in outward existence would
be to trifle with the subject. The man who demands a
reality more solid than that of the religious consciousness,
seeks he does not know what." 1 Nor does this estimate of
religious experience come only from idealist thinkers. A
philosopher who writes from the standpoint of mathematics
and natural science has expressed the same thought in
even more forcible language. "The fact of religious vision,
and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground
for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of

1 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 449.

General Introduction vn

occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and
misery, a bagatelle of transient experience." 1

The conviction that religious experience is to be taken
as the starting-point of theological reconstruction does not,
of course, imply that we are absolved from the labour of
thought. On the contrary, it should serve as the stimulus
to thought. No experience can be taken at its face value;
it must be criticised and interpreted. Just as natural
science could not exist without experience and the thought
concerning experience, so theology cannot exist without
the religious consciousness and reflection upon it. Nor
do we mean by "experience" anything less than the whole
experience of the human race, so far as it has shared in
the Christian consciousness. As Mazzini finely said, "Tra-
dition and conscience are the two wings given to the human
soul to reach the truth."

It has been the aim of the writers and the Editors of
the series to produce studies of the main aspects of Chris-
tianity which will be intelligible and interesting to the gen-
eral reader and at the same time may be worthy of the
attention of the specialist. After all, in religion we are
dealing with a subject-matter which is open to all and the
plan of the works does not require that they shall delve
very deeply into questions of minute scholarship. We have
had the ambition to produce volumes which might find
a useful place on the shelves of the clergyman and min-

*

ister, and no less on those of the intelligent layman. Per-
haps we may have done something to bridge the gulf which
too often separates the pulpit from the pew.

1 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 275.

I

viii General Introduction

Naturally, the plan of our series has led us to give the
utmost freedom to the authors of the books to work out
their own lines of thought, and our part has been strictly
confined to the invitation to contribute, and to sugges-
tions concerning the mode of presentation. We hope that
the series will contribute something useful to the greajb
debate on religion which is proceeding in secret in the mind
of our age, and we humbly pray that their endeavours and
ours may be blessed by the Spirit of Truth for the building
up of Christ's Universal Church.

PREFACE

A "ART from the general revolt against authority (to which
reference is made in the General Introduction to this
series), modern criticism, by destroying belief in the infalli-
bility of the Bible, has undermined the traditional doctrine
of its authority. Thus any general re-examination of the
nature and seat of religious authority involves the special
question of the authority of the Bible. I have here tried
to deal with it inductively rather than a priori. We have
before us a literature for which a high degree of authority
has been claimed, and which does clearly exercise authority
over many minds. Of what nature is that authority, and
doe-- it rightly command respect? I assume that the function
of authority is to secure assent to truth; that for us the
measure of any authority which the Bible may possess must
lie in its direct religious value, open to discovery in experi-
ence; and that this value in turn will be related to the ex-
perience out of which the Scriptures came. (Thus the
approach conforms to the maxim laid down in the General
Introduction, "that religious experience is to be taken as the
starting-point of theological reconstruction.")

Without any deeper analysis of the idea of authority as
such, I have set out to study the specific religious value of
the Bible in various aspects, laying emphasis everywhere less
upon the word than upon the life behind the word, and upon
that life as part of an historical context whose meaning is
determined by "the fact of Christ." Such a study may, I
hope, disclose lines of approach to a doctrine of authority
tejhable in the face of rational criticism. The four parts into
which the main body of the work is divided will indicate

viii General Introduction

Naturally, the plan of our series has led us to give the
utmost freedom to the authors of the books to work out
their own lines of thought, and our part has been strictly
confined to the invitation to contribute, and to sugges-
tions concerning the mode of presentation. We hope that
the series will contribute something useful to the great
debate on religion which is proceeding in secret in the mind
of our age, and we humbly pray that their endeavours and
ours may be blessed by the Spirit of Truth for the building
up of Christ's Universal Church.

PREFACE

A~ART from the general revolt against authority (to which
reference is made in the General Introduction to this
series), modern criticism, by destroying belief in the infalli-
bility of the Bible, has undermined the traditional doctrine
of its authority. Thus any general re-examination of the
nature and seat of religious authority involves the special
question of the authority of the Bible. I have here tried
to deal with it inductively rather than a priori. We have
before us a literature for which a high degree of authority
has been claimed, and which does clearly exercise authority
over many minds. Of what nature is that authority, and
doe- it rightly command respect? I assume that the function
of authority is to secure assent to truth; that for us the
measure of any authority which the Bible may possess must
lie in its direct religious value, open to discovery in experi-
ence; and that this value in turn will be related to the ex-
perience out of which the Scriptures came. (Thus the
approach conforms to the maxim laid down in the General
Introduction, "that religious experience is to be taken as the
starting-point of theological reconstruction.")

Without any deeper analysis of the idea of authority as
such, I have set out to study the specific religious value of
the Bible in various aspects, laying emphasis everywhere less
upon the word than upon the life behind the word, and upon
that life as part of an historical context whose meaning is
determined by "the fact of Christ." Such a study may, I
hope, disclose lines of approach to a doctrine of authority
tenable in the face of rational criticism. The four parts into
which the main body of the work is divided will indicate

ix

x Preface

the kind of doctrine to which I intend to point. That it raises
many underlying questions of a philosophical kind I am
aware. I have felt the more free to leave such questions
outside my province since they form part of the subject-
matter of other volumes in the series.

In citing passages from the Bible I have not scrupled to
alter the current versions where they seem mistaken or
obscure, or to make use of good modern translations, whether
of the whole Bible (by Dr. James Moffatt), or of portions of
the Bible (such as the translations of Jeremiah by John
Skinner in his Prophecy and Religion, or of Isaiah, by G. B.
Gray in the I.C.C. and by Principal G. A. Smith in the
Expositor's Bible) . In such cases I have indicated the source
of the translation. Sometimes I have rendered short passages
directly from the original. One liberty I have regularly
allowed myself in citing any translation of the Old Testa-
ment: I have deliberately substituted the form " Jehovah "t
for "the Lord" or "the Eternal" as a rendering of the divire
Name. A vox nihili it may be; but it has a literary tradition
in English long and respectable enough to secure its place in
the language.

I am greatly indebted to Dr. H. Wheeler Robinson, one
of the editors of this series, for advice at various stages of
the work, and for reading and criticizing the proofs with
a friendly interest that went beyond mere editorial duty;
to Professor N. Micklem, of Kingston, Ontario, for reading
the proofs and making many valuable suggestions ; and o
the Rev. L. W. Grensted, of University College, Oxford
(University Lecturer in the Psychology of Religion) . for read-
ing certain portions of the book which I submitted to his
judgment. To these friends I would express my sincere
thanks.

C. H. D. (

OXFOHD, i

July 28, 1928.

* CONTENTS

Page
* GENERAL INTRODUCTION v

* PREFACE .......... is

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER, I

fc

LITERATURE AND AUTHORITY ....... 1-31

The literary value of the Bible is beyond controversy; yet

< it can be fully appreciated as literature only if its religious

content is rightly understood.' The traditional use of the
Bible in public worship and private devotion is disturbed by

! modern criticism; onh r a more complete assimilation of the

*" results of critici.<?m can satisuicLprily restore it. The use of

the Bible as a dogmatic authority is the point at jwhich criti-
cism most radically challenges tradition. The notion of an

h external infallible authority is beset with difficulties. The ul-

timate authority is truth as it reveals itself in experience and
compels ar-sent. In religion such acceptance of authority is a

^ matter of dependence on God, whose Mind is truth. The
Bible as "Word of God." Equivocation of the phrase. In
religion, as in science and art, the personal authority of the

^ master carries weight, for sufficient reasons. Thus the au- ,

thority of the Bible is a question (in the first place) of the

^ authority of men of religious genius who speak in it.

\ PART I

THE AUTHORITY OF INDIVIDUAL INSPIRATION

* CHAPTER II

INSPIRATION AND PROPHECT 35-56

r Useless to discuss inspiration in the abstract or a priori.

The inspiration of the prophets and their N.T. successors
may be taken as a datum. From a study of their writings we
seek an answer to the questions, what inspiration is, and
how it carries authority. This demands a study of the re-

xi

xii Contents

Page

ligious conditions out of which biblical prophecy arose.
Leading traits of the pre-prophetic religion of Israel. The y

nabi or prophet began as an ecstatic (cf. the psychic "me- *

dium" of to-day). How far is the condition of the "medium"
an essential property of inspiration? Moral and religious
influence of the nabis; their success and failure. *

CHAPTER HI *

THE FORMS OF PROPHETIC INSPIRATION . ... 57-85 t

The classical prophets to be distinguished from the ecsta-
tics, whom they often stigmatize as "false prophets," with-
out denying their psychic powers. Thus so far as they *
shared such powers they regarded them as secondary. Ex-
amination of prophetic "vision"; the "word of the Lord." *
' The distinctive gift of most of the classical prophets seems
more closely analogous with poetic imagination than with ?
psychic automatism. No criterion of truth can be found
in the psychological mode of its apprehension or expression.
We cannot therefore assess the authority of the prophets
apart from the content of their teaching. ~*

CHAPTER IV

THE CONTENT OF OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY % 86-117

The prophets radically transformed the religious eoncep- '

tions of their day, particularly (a) in giving an ethical and
rational value to "holiness," (6) in declaring that God is
good in a sense analogous to human goodness, and (e) in j

assigning a universal scope to His concern and activity.
They are thus the founders of ethical monotheism. Taking
this as a whole, we find it so difficult to explain as a mere
growth out of contemporary ideas (however continuous \

with them) that we are prepared to believe the prophets
that it was, "given" to them from a region beyond normal
consciousness from God. ,

CHAPTER V

THE PERSONAL RELIGION OF THE PROPHETS; THEES HISTORICAL
RELATIVITY 118-129

The teaching of the prophets so public and so historically
conditioned that personal religion in the modern sense is
mostly in the background. Yet they founded a distinctive

Contents xiii

Page

type of piety which runs through all subsequent history.
They were individuals, playing a part in particular situations,
and their universality lies in the truth of their response to
those situations (truth being inherently universal) ; the truth
to be apprehended not by abstracting from the particular-
ity of the situations, but in and through it. This involves al-
lowing for manifest error mingled with the truth. Inspiration
, does not carry inerrancy.

PART H

THE AUTHORITY OF CORPORATE EXPERIENCE

CHAPTER VI

THE BIBLE AS A RECORD OF RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE . . 133-153

Much of the Bible not the direct product of religious
genius: wherein does its authority Me? In enlarging and en-
riching for us the area of experience within which truth re-
veals itself (see Chap. I), and so giving us something more
than transient and individual "religious experiences" as the
basis of faith. The Bible reflects the actual life of men in
many stages of development, and shows religion as part of
the stuff of it. This is illustrated from (a) primitive legends, -
(6) passages which illuminate the spiritual side of secular
movements in history, and (c) pictures of common life in
diverse aspects.

CHAPTER VH
THE RELIGION' OF THE PBOPHETS IN THE LIFB OF THE COMMUNITY 154-170

The O.T. as we have it is the religious literature of the
community which resulted from the work of the prophets.
Formation of the Canon in the Jewish community. The Law
represents the institutional framework of its life. In the
Psalter we have the distinctive piety of the prophets made the
possession of a whole society, in Proverbs and other "Wis-
dom" books its everyday morality.

CHAPTER VIII r

*

THE INCONCLXTSIVENESS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT RELIGION 171-190

The varying fortunes of post-exilic Judaism brought to

light certain tensions within the accepted scheme, due partly

to deficiencies in the prophetic religion and partly to its am-

I perfect assimilation. The conflict between cultus and spir-

xiv Contents

Page

itual religions, between universalism and separatism, between
transcendence and immanence. The challenge of wider ex-
perience to the prophetic theodicy, and the rise of apocalyp-
tic as a partial reply.

PART III

THE AUTHORITY OF THE INCARNATION

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW TESTAMENT AS THE LITEBATUKE OP A DECISIVE
MOVEMENT IN RELIGION ...... 193-204

The New Testament represents a fresh outbreak of religious
- genius. Character of the N.T. Canon. Its witness to an ex-
perience which its writers describe in terms of the "New
Age" of apocalyptic a description justified by reference to
history. Spiritual factors in the Hellenistic world. The
Christian Church the centre of a new spiritual movement.
Hellenistic elements in the N.T. and their significance.

CHAPTER X
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS THE "FULFILMENT" OP THE OLD . 2tf5-223

The N.T. estimated in relation to its direct historical ante-
cedents. It meets the problems left open by Judaism out of
a direct experience of spiritual things of which Christ is the
centre. This illustrated with reference to (a) universalism
and nationalism, (b) righteousness and grace, (c) the problem
of suffering, (d) the future life, and (e) transcendence and
immanence.

CHAPTER XI
JESUS CHRIST AND THE GOSPELS 224-241

The Synoptic Gospels a product of the experience of the *
early Church; yet enable us to go behind that experience
to the events which created it. The authority of Je ;us as
' Teacher. Useless to attempt to find in His words the last
refuge of infallible external authority. They come to us
with possibilities of erroneous transmission, and were in any
case historically conditioned, and therefore demand some
spiritual insight for their recognition and interpretation.
Yet the eternal truth in His words makes direct impact on
the mind through its temporal expression. The authority of i
the Personality behind the teaching.

Contents xv

PART IV

THE AUTHORITY OF HISTORY

' CHAPTER XII

Page
" PROGRESS IN RELIGION .. . . . . . . 245-268

We now make explicit what has emerged in the discussion
since Chap. VI. Revelation is inherent in the process as
an historically continuous whole. The continuity is not
merely intellectual (like the development in a philosophical
"school"), but is in the life of a society self-identical in its
various stages. Viewing it as a whole we are bound to report
that it is the field of progress, though not of a uniform evo-
lution.

CHAPTER XIII

7

" PROGRESSIVE REVELATION " 269-285

The idea of " progressive revelation " examined. Revela-
tion and discovery. God as self-revealing under the con-
ditions imposed by human nature and the stages of its
development. The part of illusion in the attainment of
: , truth. God reveals Himself to a man through what the man

\ is; and that he is by grace of God. Both progress and

{ revelation are real. The consummation of the process in

I, Jesus Christ. The interweaving of two factors "in the author-

ity of the Bible inward vision and outward fact.

CONCLUSION
: CHAPTER XTV

THE BIBLE AS " THE WORD OP GOD " 289-300

Jesus Christ is the key to the biblical revelation; ask there-
fore how He revealed God. Not by uttering dogmas to be
accepted without question but by leading men into such an
; attitude to life that they could see that certain things must

; ., t be true by bringing into play a spirit in man whereby God

;' ' is truly known. This is the function of the Bible as a whole :

it is the instrument of a Spirit in creating an experience
{ of divine "things. The " Word of God " is not the " last

I word," but the " seminal word."

, INDEX 301-310

( #>

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE

THE
AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: LITERATURE AND AUTHORITY

NOT long ago a distinguished biblical scholar published a
"New Translation" of the Old Testament. It was not
to be expected that so bold an undertaking should escape
criticism, how far justified is not here the question. Many
of the critics took exception not to this or that particular
rendering, but to the whole attempt to give a precise render-
ing of the Old Testament in current speech. Among them
could be discerned an alliance of forces not commonly found
in the same camp. There were the pious devotees of the
Holy Book, who missed hi the crudity of modern English
those hallowed words that brought their souls a sense of awe.
They were the literary men, who, too emancipated to care
for the religious meaning of Hebrew scriptures, hastened to
the defence of King James's Version, that "well of English
pure and undefiled." jtf a palpable mistranslation, they seemed
to say, makes a piece of fine English, then it should not be
meddled with. Both seemed agreed that the precise meaning
intended by the original writers was not a primary considera-
tion. The assumption made in this book is that this meaning
is of deep and lasting import, and that to understand the

i '1

2 Literature and Authority

<.-

Bible is worth more than, without understanding it, to be
charmed by its beauty or impressed by its sanctity.

All the more it is necessary to say at the outset that the
two judgments mentioned, though they miss the point, have
their basis in standards of valuation which are true and
important. The Bible (or most of it), is great literature,
to be appreciated aesthetically; and the value of its solemn
language for liturgical or devotional purposes is very high.
If modern criticism of its documents ever seems to imperil
its appreciation in either aspect, something is wrong.

The widespread appreciation of the Bible as literature is,
indeed, one of the most salutary results of the general change
of outlook in the last two generations. There was a time
when you either held the Book in superstitious reverence or
repudiated it with scorn. The religious in general would
have felt it trifling if not actually impious to enjoy th^ poetry
of Holy Writ as poetry, or to read its splendid stories with
the pleasure to be derived from consummate narrative prose.
The humanist, on the other hand, rarely thought to look
for literary charm in the book he regarded as the bulwark
of superstition. But to-day the Bible is sufficiently emanci-
pated from dogmatic schemes for the humanist to feel per-
fectly free to claim his rights in it. It causes no astonishment
when a Professor of English Literature at an ancient univer-
sity lectures on the English Bible, 1 or a Poet Laureate includes
extracts from it in an anthology. 2 This is very much to the
gain of the study of the Bible. Only we shall claim that a
truly humanist approach cannot narrowly regard the virtues
of style and form to the neglect of the matter; that as
dramatic literature cannot be estimated without reference
to its value for the theatre, so a religious literature cannot
be finally appreciated, even in an aesthetic sense, without
reference to its value for religion, and therefore to the

1 A. Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Beading; Lectures VIII-X.
* The Spirit of Man, by Robert Bridges.

Liturgical Use of the Bible 3

truth and elevation of its religious content. It is not necessary
to pursue this theme further here, seeing that the aim of this
book is to approach the Bible not as a collection of dogmatic
texts, but as literature in the full humanist sense, in the
belief that such an approach will most surely lead to the
discovery of its unique qualities as religious literature.

Of the use of the Bibleff ojr devotional or liturgical reading
it will be well to speak rktnter more fully at this point.

From the time of Ezra, in 'the fifth century before Christ,
the reading of portions of tfieJsacred Canon has formed part
of public worship in the Jewish and Christian churches. Long
before the Canon of the New Testament was formed, early
Christian congregations read the Old Testament at their most
solemn assemblies. Already its writings had acquired the
dignity of antiquity, and were the centre of sacred associa-
tions. When the books of the New Testament came to be
added to the ancient Canon, they had ceased to be modern.
We still possess a list of books to be read in church, which
was compiled for the Church of Rome hi the second century.
In rejecting the Shepherd of Hennas, it observes slightingly
that Hermas wrote "quite recently, in our own times." * His
work could not serve the whole purpose of a sacred book
because (apart from other defects) it had not yet entered
deeply enough into the corporate experience. The writings
which actually found a place in the Canon were those which
were closely bound up with the creative period of Chris-
tianity. They were laden with suggestion, because those
who heard them read in church were in the succession of
their writers and their first readers, and were keenly con-
scious of sharing with them a corporate life and experience.
To-day we have behind us many centuries during which the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments have been bound
up with the life of the Christian people. Most of us in this

1 Muratorian Canon: Pastorem vero nuperrime temponbus nostris in urbe
Roma Henna conscripsit.

2 Literature and Authority

Bible is worth more than, without understanding it, to be
charmed by its beauty or impressed by its sanctity.

All the more it is necessary to say at the outset that the
two judgments mentioned, though they miss the point, have
their basis in standards of valuation which are true and
important. The Bible (or most of it), is great literature,
to be appreciated aesthetically; and the value of its solemn
language for liturgical or devotional purposes is very high.
If modern criticism of its documents ever seems to imperil
its appreciation in either aspect, something is wrong.

The widespread appreciation of the Bible as literature is,
indeed, one of the most salutary results of the general change
of outlook in the last two generations. There was a time
when you either held the Book in superstitious reverence or
repudiated it with scorn. The religious in general would
have felt it trifling if not actually impious to enjoy th^ poetry
of Holy Writ as poetry, or to read its splendid stories with
the pleasure to be derived from consummate narrative prose.
The humanist, on the other hand, rarely thought to look
for literary charm in the book he regarded as the bulwark
of superstition. But to-day the Bible is sufficiently emanci-
pated from dogmatic schemes for the humanist to feel per-
fectly free to claim his rights in it. It causes no astonishment
when a Professor of English Literature at an ancient univer-
sity lectures on the English Bible, 1 or a Poet Laureate includes
extracts from it in an anthology. 2 This is very much to the
gain of the study of the Bible. Only we shall claim that a
truly humanist approach cannot narrowly regard the virtues
of style and form to the neglect of the matter; that as
dramatic literature cannot be estimated without reference
to its value for the theatre, so a religious literature cannot
be finally appreciated, even in an aesthetic sense, without
reference to its value for religion, and therefore to the

1 A. Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Reading; Lectures VIII-X.
4 The Spirit of Man, by Robert Bridges.

Liturgical Use of the Bible 3

truth and elevation of its religious content. It is not necessary
to pursue this theme further here, seeing that the aim of this
book is to approach the Bible not as a collection of dogmatic
texts, but as literature in the full humanist sense, in the
belief that such an approach will most surely lead to the
discovery of its unique qualities as religious literature.

Of the use of the Bible; for devotional or liturgical reading
it will be well to speak rather more fully at this point.

From the time of Ezra, in the fifth century before Christ,
the reading of portions of the, -sacred Canon has formed part
of public worship in the Jewish and Christian churches. Long
before the Canon of the New Testament was formed, early
Christian congregations read the Old Testament at their most
solemn assemblies. Already its writings had acquired the
dignity of antiquity, and were the centre of sacred associa-
tions. When the books of the New Testament came to be
added to the ancient Canon, they had ceased to be modern.
We still possess a list of books to be read in church, which
was compiled for the Church of Rome in the second century.
In rejecting the Shepherd of Hennas, it observes slightingly
that Hennas wrote "quite recently, in our own times." 1 His
work could not serve the whole purpose of a sacred book
because (apart from other defects) it had not yet entered
deeply enough into the corporate experience. The writings
which actually found a place in the Canon were those which
were closely bound up with the creative period of Chris-
tianity. They were laden with suggestion, because those
who heard them read in church were in the succession of
their writers and their first readers, and were keenly con-
scious of sharing with them a corporate life and experience.
To-day we have behind us many centuries during which the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments have been bound
up with the life of the Christian people. Most of us in this

1 Muratorian Canon: Pastor em vero nuperrime temporibus nostris in urbe
Roma Herma conscripsit.

4 Literature and Authority

country to-day could say that whatever stands for religion
to us has from our earliest days found expression in the speech
of the Bible. No wonder that when we hear it read at the
solemn assembly its words carry "overtones" of association.
Their precise meaning may not be present to us. They stir
half-forgotten things in our subconscious minds, bred there
partly by our explicit experience, partly by that which we
have absorbed from our religious environment and tradition.
Given certain conditions, religious feelings of real value may
be evoked by such a use of the Scriptures even without clear
understanding. In the same way the half-understood words
of a liturgy may be means of grace, like all the symbolic
ornaments, acts and gestures of the service. 1 "If you've niver
had no church," said Dolly Winthrop to Silas Marner, "there's
no telling the good it'll do you. For I feel so set up and
comfortable as niver was, when I've been and heard the
prayers, and the singing to the praise and glory o' God, as
Mr. Macey gives out, and Mr. Crackenthorpe saying good
words." That is genuine religious experience, of an elemen-
tary order. In those forms of Protestant worship where the
liturgical element is relatively small, the "good words" of
Scripture are (along with hymns) the principal vehicle of sug-
gestion. They owe their effect, not in the first place to their
intelligible meaning, but to the "aura" of sacred association
surrounding them.

But the psychological disposition to which such experience
is possible is easily disturbed. When the mind is awakened,
a discomforting sense may arise that the whole mass of sug-
gestion of which the service is the vehicle is not truly related
to reality. The mind then enquires into the meaning of the
"good words," perhaps misses the meaning, or finds it to be
apparently out of harmony with its own accepted attitude, to
life. In the presence of such inward criticism the words and
symbols alike lose their power, or retain it only at the cost

1 Cf. W. B. Selbie, Psychology of Religion, pp. 72-73.

The "Lessons" in Church 5

of intellectual integrity. In our own time this is what happens
to very many awakened minds. All such minds are inevi-
tably affected by the characteristic tendencies of modern
thought. They think in terms of the new universe which
natural science has revealed. Under its influence they come
to think of human nature and history in an evolutionary
scheme. Material and economic factors bulk largely in their
interpretation of life. The genial and humanitarian optimism
of the last age still holds influence over their less deliberate
thinking at least, in spite of the War and its sequel. The
tradition of the Christian Church meanwhile has lost its
unquestioned authority, and the sense of sharing its historic
corporate life grows dun even among people who still "go to
church." In these circumstances the more formal and tradi-
tional sides of the Church's services become less and less real,
and the Bible, to come to that with which we are more
immediately concerned, seems bound up with a scheme of
unreal things. It reads "as if it all happened on Sunday."
Some are content to let religion and all its concerns rest in
a watertight compartment of their minds. They are in grave
danger of superstition. The rest can only regain the power
to be helped religiously by the liturgical use of the Bible after
they have resolutely forgotten for a time that the Bible is
a holy book, and given it a place in their minds alongside all
the things that make up their real world. There is no other
way, and biblical criticism is the discipline of learning to
. read the Bible in that way.

Much the same may be said of what is called the "devo-
tional" reading of the Bible. As commonly practised and
recommended by religious persons it may be described thus.
The reader takes a portion of the Bible, long or short, but
usually short, chosen more or less arbitrarily, and not neces-
sarily related to any context. Bringing himself into a con-
templative frame of mind, he reads the verses at leisure, and
lets his mind dwell meditatively upon them. After a time

6 , Literature and Authority *'

there arises in his mind a sense of truth revealed. He is
warned, judged, comforted, stimulated, guided, blessed. It
may be that the "message" he "received" has but little
relation to the intention of the original writer or the precise
meaning of his words. Of some of the classics of devotional
literature this would be true, such as Bernard's meditations
on the Song of Songs that sequence of amorous lyrics so
strangely alien in intention from the spiritual raptures of an
ascetic. This is an extreme example, explained by a long-
established exegetical tradition. But something of the kind
occurs very frequently. The words of the Bible are in fact
again serving not so much to convey a clear intellectual con-
tent as to awaken suggestions largely due to association.

What happens is probably something like this. The reader
is familiar with the Bible. He has it, as we say, at his fingers'
ends. To read one verse calls into his memory without de-
liberate effort other passages which provide a context not
always the context given by the writer, but one supplied by
links of association in the reader's mind. Behind all this is
the extensive background of experience and tradition. Here
again the Bible is serving as the organ of a religious life lived
by a continuous community in its various historical forms. Its
words are laden with power to recall that which has passed
out of this corporate life into the subconscious mind of the
reader. That the Divine Spirit is at work in this psychological
process we may not deny. Under proper conditions it is a
valuable function of the religious life. But again those
conditions are not easily secured and they are very easily
upset. If a person has but a slender stock of religious experi-
ence of his own, and if he is in no vital touch with the tradition
of the Christian people, he is not likely to find much profit
in reading the Bible thus. The words awake no echoes in
his mind, and if he has not sufficient knowledge to be sure
of their actual meaning in their own context, he will not make
much of his reading. Certainly if his mind is awake and

'* Difficulties of Devotional Reading 7

enquiring he will resent being expected to be moved by "holy"
words whose meaning is quite uncertain to him, and may, he
suspects, be untrue. It is fatal to make a separation between
religious feeling and the sense of truth, as truth is understood
in other departments of life. In this respect our reading
of the Bible must be on the same footing with all our reading.
Suppose, for example, I read a leading article in The Times,
a new work on biology, a novel by Galsworthy, or a poem by
John Masefield. In each case the relation between the written
word and my ultimate estimate of its truth is different. But
in all cases I ask, naturally, what the author meant to say,
and how this stands to my general experience of the world.
The same questions must be asked of any biblical writer. To
answer the first question is difficult because of the gulf that
separates us in history from these ancient writers. Biblical
criticism is there to help us over the gulf. To answer the
second question leads us into the depths, and all manner
of factors enter in which are not there when we are reading
books of lesser import. But the question must be asked with
the same frankness and realism.

It is upon this basis of frank clarity that our devotional use
of the Bible must be reconstructed. This is not to be taken
as a prosaic insistence on the face value of every passage in
its historical setting. We start with the original writer, what
he said, what he had in mind, and what his contemporaries
understood him to mean. But to stop there is the part of a
pedant. No great literature will stand such treatment. All
great writers meant more than they knew. They all welcome
the imagination of their readers. But it must be instructed
imagination, not fantasy. The imagination of the Christian
reader of the Bible should be controlled by intelligent study,
and it may then safely be inspired by the rich experience of
the Christian centuries in their use of the sacred Canon. We
stand at a point where the actual outlook of religious people
has changed more than the expressed beliefs and practices of

8 Literature and Authority

the Christian communions explicitly admit. Some things that
are no longer real must go. New aspects of life and thought
must be admitted. Among other things, the new knowledge
of the Bible must be assimilated and given its rightful place.
Then we shall be more free to open our minds again to all
influences of the Christian tradition, and the Bible, more
reasonably understood, will once again serve as the organ of
a profound corporate experience.

Traditionally, however, the Bible has been regarded in
the Christian Church as a great deal more than a collection
of religious literature or of liturgical matter. It has been
regarded as the supreme doctrinal authority in faith and
morals, divine in origin and consequently infallible. Historic
Christianity has been a religion of revelation. This has been
held to mean that the ultimate truths of religion are not dis-
coverable by the unaided faculties of the human mind, but
must have been directly communicated by God in a "super-
natural" way, and that the Bible is the "Word of God" in
this unique sense. The change of outlook over the whole
field of thought which began with the "Illumination" of the
eighteenth century and was completed by the scientific move-
ment of the nineteenth, raised difficulties about the idea of
authority as such. Again the critical study of the Bible
itself on scientific and historical principles has made the
traditional doctrine of its authority untenable for those who
are not willing to keep their religious beliefs isolated from
the rest of their thinking. It is here that our problem arises.
No one wishes to deny that the Bible contains literature of
the highest order. All Christians, and many who would not
so describe themselves, acknowledge what we may call its
devotional value. The question is whether we can still regard
it as possessing religious authority in any sense whatever.

The use of the Bible as an exclusive dogmatic authority is
specially characteristic of those Christian communions which

I

The Bible and the Reformation 9

accepted more or less completely the Reformation of the
sixteenth century. The authority of the Church in its councils
and its hierarchy had scarcely been effectively questioned in
the Middle Ages. The Renaissance brought the questioning
spirit into play, and all authority stood on its trial. The
Protestant movement appealed to the right of private judg-
ment, but its leaders shrank from the full consequences of
that appeal. They went behind the Church to the classical
documents of Christianity in the Scriptures, and found a final
authority in them. All doctrines necessary to salvation were
held to be found there, and all dogmatic statements were pre-
sumed either to be derived from the Bible, or at least to be
proved from the Bible, so that it constituted the final court
of appeal. The infallibility denied to the Pope and the
Councils was attributed to the Bible in all its parts. The
view taken of the Scriptures themselves did not differ widely
from that of the Catholic Church in its unreformed branches,
but a documentary authority is in its effect something quite
different from an institutional authority. Prophets and apos-
tles may have written the final truth, but in their writings
are "some things hard to be understood", as the latest of the
canonical writers confesses. 1 Who is to say what they meant?
The Church through its hierarchy, said the Catholics; the rea-
son and conscience of the Christian man, guided by the Holy

Spirit within, said the Protestants. The result for the reformed

.
communions was on the one hand greatly to enhance the

importance of the documents, and on the other hand to leave
the way open to free discussion of their meaning, and conse-
quent variety of interpretation.

In its extreme form the dogma of the Infallibility of Scrip-
ture should mean that all parts of the Canon are directly and
equally inspired by God, so that its every statement, whether
concerning the mysteries of the divine Being, the processes
of nature, or the facts of history, past or future, should be

2 Peter iii. 16.

10 Literature and Authority

exactly and literally true. Many people think they believe
this; no balanced mind has ever really tried to carry it through
with complete logic. There is always an instinctive or arbi-
trary process of selection and distribution of emphasis, and
it is always possible to reconcile contradictions and smooth
away difficulties by allegorical or non-natural exegesis. Nor
have instructed Christians in the great historic communions
ever bound themselves in practice to a mechanical concep-
tion of inspiration which would make the genealogies of
Chronicles as vital a divine revelation as the Gospel accord-
ing to John. The most determined "Fundamentalists" do not
show any strong desire to force into general acceptance every
statement of Scripture. They are rather concerned either to
maintain the dogma of infallibility for its own sake, because it
seems to them a part of Christianity, or to protect certain
cherished beliefs which they would not leave at the mercy of
an irreligious criticism. The latter motive is the more for-
midable.

All religious readers in fact go to the Bible with some sort
of presupposition. However firmly they may believe that
they accept "the Word of God" without question, they have
certain prior beliefs which determine their interpretation. The
orthodox believer has accepted from the tradition of his
Church a scheme of belief, or a "plan of salvation", which in
a measure satisfactory to himself he has tested in experience.
It is a part of this belief that God has revealed Himself in
the Bible. He therefore goes to the Bible convinced that the
"plan of salvation" is given there. Passages of uncertain
meaning he understands in the light of his accepted beliefs.
Passages which seem to bear no relation to them he tacitly
ignores, assuming that if he could understand them they would
agree with what he holds as truth. If, however, a statement
of Scripture is challenged, he is troubled and feels bound
to protest; for if the Bible can be wrong in a matter of fact,
who knows but it may be wrong on a matter affecting his

J,

The Dogmq of Biblical Infallibility 11

eternal salvation? And if the Bible is wrong here, to what
authority can he trust?

We shall come back to this difficulty. Meanwhile we observe
that in spite of his dogmatic belief that the biblical writers
infallibly set forth the truth, the reader has not in fact let .
them speak for themselves. He has assumed that they must
be saying the thing he has been taught to believe. Now there
is indeed so large a measure of continuity between all vital
Christian belief and the main stream of biblical teaching
that within limits his assumption justifies itself. But as a
matter of fact the biblical writers have lost incalculably
because their writings have been forced into a dogmatic
scheme alien from their thought.

The prophets, for example, were pioneers in a radical refor-
mation of religion, belonging to a particular period of history.
In Christian tradition they came to be regarded as men who
had "foretold the Messiah", and without knowing it gave
testimony in advance to the truth of Christian doctrine. How-
ever much that view has been shaken, the tendency still
remains in wide circles for those parts only of the prophets to
be read with attention which can without much difficulty be
given a dogmatic interpretation, and this means that whole
reaches of their writings are passed over with no appreciation
of their immense and independent religious import. Worst
of all, under the influence of the prejudice that the main
business of prophecy was to give a forecast of the future,
they have often been studied as though they were only con-
cerned to write "reversed history". Where that is so, those
portions of prophecy which seem to offer most precise data
bulk most largely. 1 But such portions are usually quite
definitely second-rate in their religious value; while the great
epoch-making utterances of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah take only
a minor place in the scheme. Again, the methodof reading
the Pauline epistles as a set of documentary proofs for a

1 Such as the more prosaic portions of Daniel and Revelation.

1

12 Literature and Authority

fixed scheme of theology has resulted in giving a quite
erroneous idea of Paul's real thought, and still more in effectu-
ally concealing Paul the man behind a theological lay-figure.
In consequence, the present generation, disliking what passed
for Pauline theology, misses the guidance and inspiration of
one of the greatest religious teachers. As a matter of fact
much teaching for which the authority of Paul is claimed has
simply been read into his writings by a method which does
scant justice to his striking individuality. Not least have the
Synoptic Gospels suffered from the dogmatic approach to the
Bible. The fresh, arresting presentation of the words and
works of Jesus in these early writings becomes strangely dulled
by a method which seeks in them simply the authentication
of a doctrinal scheme. Indeed, it may fairly be said to be
the strongest condemnation of the traditional attitude to the
Scriptures that it is so much at a loss to know what to do
with the Synoptic Gospels.

Thus our quarrel with the traditional way of reading the
Bible is that actually it does less than justice to the Bible
itself, in the interests of a theory about the Bible. That the
Bible contains within it the materials for a well-articulated
philosophy of life is certainly true, and its value in this
respect will be examined in what follows. But in order that
it may make its rightful contribution we need to find a
truer method of approach than that of the old dogmatism.
It will be a method which gives attention to the personal and
the historical element in the Scriptures. By this I mean that
they should be read as the utterances of real individual jaen,
who wrote out of their own intensely personal experience;
and they should be read as the record of an historic process
of discovery or revelation, in which the cumulative experience
of individuals through many generations built up a firm struc-
ture of faith and knowledge of God. But if they are so
read, then all sorts of difficulties come to light, which the older
method of Bible-reading covered up, and these must be recog-

I

A Danger to Religion and Morals 13

nized and dealt with before the true value of the Scriptures
can be discerned.

It is unnecessary to enlarge on the process by which the
old view of the infallibility of the Bible broke down under
the successive attacks of scientific discovery and of historical
criticism. It long ago became clear that in claiming for the
Bible accuracy in matters of science and history its apologists
had chosen a hopeless position to defend. Much more im-
portant is the fact that in matters of faith and morals an
unprejudiced mind must needs recognize many things in the
Bible which could not possibly be accepted by Christian
people in anything approaching their clear and natural mean-
ing. The harm that has been done to the general conscience
by allowing the outworn morality of parts of the Old Testa-
ment to stand as authoritative declarations was startlingly
revealed during the War. The military representative who
quoted "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" as a moral
principle obviously binding on religious people, because it
was "in the Bible", provided a glaring instance. Many people
found that the imprecatory psalms so perfectly expressed what
they felt about the enemy that they could join in the services
for certain days of the month with a fervour and reality they
had never known. Yet as they look back upon that state of
mind they probably do not regard it as the high-water mark
I of their religious life. It is high time to assert unambiguously
that the Bible contains a good deal which if it is taken out
of a temporary historical context and given general and
permanent validity is simply pernicious. The old dogmatic
view of the Bible therefore is not only open to attack from
the standpoint of science and historical criticism, but if
taken seriously it becomes a danger to religion and public
morals. A revision of this view is therefore an imperative
necessity.

The whole conception of an infallible external authority in
any field of thought is open to criticism on the ground that it

14 Literature and Authority

is difficult to state it without introducing two ultimate stan-
dards of truth. If his own observation or reasoning leads a
man to one conclusion, while the external authority he recog-
nizes points to another, which is he to trust? If the latter,
there would seem to be an end of intellectual adventure and
discovery, to say nothing of moral responsibility. The
advance of knowledge in modern times has come because
thinkers in most fields have refused to allow absolute
authority to any existing system of doctrine, and have taken
observation and reason as their guides to truth. It may be
held that religious knowledge is concerned with matters so
inaccessible to observation and so transcending reason that
in this field, if in no other, there is room for an absolute
authority external to the mind. This raises large philosoph-
ical issues beyond our scope. But since we are dealing with
one particular claimant to absolute authority it is relevant to
ask the question, on what grounds does a man decide to trust
such an outside authority; especially in a conflict of claims,
on what grounds does he choose his allegiance? There must
be some judgment of his own involved. Apparently in the
last resort he must trust his own reason, or intuition, or mere
inclination, in choosing to be guided by this authority rather
than by that. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a
man must accept responsibility for his choice. Yet in that
case the external authority is no longer in the strict sense
absolute.

Protestants in general accept such arguments when the
authority of the Church is in question, but seek to find some
way of maintaining analogous authority for Scripture. Yet
a book is as external as a church, or rather it is much more so.
The act of faith which accepts the authority of the Bible is
as purely individual a judgment as that which accepts the
authority of the Church. What is the ground of it? The
Bible itself does not make any claim to infallible authority

Grounds of Belief in Authority 15

for all its parts. 1 On the contrary, some of its greatest writers
contemplate the possibility that they may be mistaken, or
even confess that in some points they have been mistaken.
Isaiah corrected his first sweeping predictions of complete dis-
aster in favour of a faithful "remnant". 2 Jeremiah found
his expectations in several points falsified, and at one time
wondered if he had really been deceived. 3 Ezekiel withdrew
his forecast of the fall of Tyre. 4 Paul sometimes claims to
speak the word of the Lord, but at other times "gives his
opinion" quite tentatively. 5 The Protestant who believes in
the infallibility of the whole does so on some other grounds,
such as the declaration of his own Church, which in this
point he accepts as infallible, though he would reject the
Roman doctrine of infallibility, or something personal to
himself. Really may we not say? he believes the Bible to
be authoritative because of the effect it produces upon his own
mind and spirit. For this as for all his beliefs he must accept
personal responsibility.

It is often claimed that the Bible must be an infallible
external authority, because it is "the Word of God". God

1 The most downright claims to infallibility are made by the apocalyptists,
as for example in the New Testament Revelation (see xxii. 6, 16, 18-19), a book
which some of the wisest thinkers of the early Church wished to exclude from
the Canon, and which as a whole is sub-Christian in tone and outlook. The
oft-quoted passage 2 Tun. iii. 16 is probably to be rendered "Every inspired
Scripture is also profitable . . .", but whether this or the A.V. rendering is
taken, the passage leaves open the question whether inspired Scripture is in-
fallible; that it is profitable, no one would deny. The other passage commonly
quoted in this connection, 2 Peter i. 21, does seem to deny the human element
in prophecy, and so perhaps by implication claims infallibility for it, though
not necessarily for the entire Canon. Neither passage claims the rank of
inspired Scripture for the writing in which it occurs, or defines the works to
which it attributes inspiration.

' * Isa. vi. 11 (about 740 B.C.), xxx, 19, xxxi. 4-9 (about 702 B.O.).

a Jer. xx. 7. He had apparently predicted that the Scythian raid of about
626 B.O. would bring disaster upon Judah (iv.), and "it is certain that Jeremiah
was left in the end with a considerable margin of unfulfilled prediction on hia
hands" (J. Skinner, Prophecy and Religion, p. 45). He also seems to have
changed his mind about Josiah's Reformation between xi. 1-8 and (the later)
viii. 7-8.

* Ezek. xxvi.-xxviii. (586 B.C.), xxix. 18 (568 B.C.).

* 1 Cor. vii. 8, 10, 12, 25.

16 Literature and Authority

certainly is the Author of truth; if He has spoken, His Word
must possess absolute authority. Let us hold to that maxim:
authority belongs to God, and what He says, and that alone,
infallibly compels assent. But in the expression "the Word
of God" lurks an equivocation. A word is properly a means
of communicating thought, through vibrations of the vocal
cords, peculiar to the human species. The Eternal has neither
breath nor vocal cords; how should He speak words? Clearly
enough the term "Word of God" is a metaphorical expression.
We mean by it, a means whereby the "thought" of God, which
is the truth, is mediated to the human mind. That the Bible
as a whole is such a means will be maintained throughout this
book. But in the literal sense the Bible consists of the "words"
of men or rather of their visible symbols in writing. It is
not the utterance of God in the same sense in which it is the
utterance of men. Not God but Paul is the author of the
Epistle to the Romans, though in a transferred sense we may
describe the Epistle to the Romans as a "Word of God", mean-
ing that in some way it mediates to the reader the truth which
is the thought of God. God is the Author not of the Bible,
but of the life in which the authors of the Bible partake, and
of which they tell in such imperfect human words as they
could command. 1 The importance of this fairly obvious and
elementary distinction is that it exposes the fallacy of arguing
from an admission that the Bible is "the Word of God" to the
conclusion that it must possess God's own infallibility. The
words of a man, assuming that they are the deliberate expres-
sion of his meaning, command just that measure of authority
which we recognize in the man himself. Thus the words of
the Epistle to the Romans carry just as much weight as we
are prepared to allow to Paul as a religious teacher. But the
question, how far and in what way God "speaks" through

1 Cf . H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit,
p. 170.

The Word of God 17

Paul, is quite another question, which is in no sense answered
by asserting that the Epistle to the Romans is "the Word
of God." The mystery of revelation is not to be so lightly
disposed of. It is the mystery of the way in which God uses
the imperfect thoughts and feelings, words and deeds, of
fallible men, to convey eternal truth, both to the men them-
selves and through them to others.

I do not propose here to attempt to set forth a philosophy
of revelation. In so far as this book is to make any con-
tribution to such a philosophy, it must be by way of studying
the character of the biblical writings themselves, without any
prior assumption other than the manifest fact that readers
of these writings have actually found themselves brought
nearer to God. My present purpose is simply to clear out of
the way of the argument the chimerical idea that we may
seek in the Bible, or indeed anywhere else, an expression of
the mind of God so direct and so independent of human media-
tion that it could claim infallible authority over against
all other means of apprehending truth. There is nothing in
what we can know or surmise of the ways of God which would
lead us to expect that in any field of experience we should be
dispensed from the task of proving all things for ourselves
that we may hold fast that which is good. No unprejudiced
mind could fail to recognize in the Bible manifest signs of
the limitation and imperfection of the human authors which
call for such critical approach. Only in the interest of a
theory could they have been denied. If the Bible has authority
as a revelation of truth it is in some sense which is not incom-
patible with its human imperfection.

The reluctance to assert full private judgment and to aban-
don all appeal to external authority is by no means ill-
grounded. Are we then to say that "man is the measure of
all things", as the ancient sophists said? Are we to say there
is no standard of truth beyond what an individual thinks to

18 Literature and Authority

be true or more precisely what he thinks to be true to-day,
though to-morrow he may think differently?

We do right to distrust such pure "subjectivism" in religion.
Suppose we consider the problem in another sphere of enquiry,
that of natural science. Here no one supposes that truth is
established by appeal to authority. The days are long past
when what Ptolemy said on astronomy or Galen on medicine
passed for the incontrovertible basis of all knowledge of those
subjects. The enquirer proceeds by observation and experi-
ment. Yet in natural science no one supposes that the aban-
donment of the appeal to external authority means that there
is no standard beyond the opinion of individuals. "The vil-
lage that voted the earth was flat" made a fool of itself. It
set itself up not against authoritative declarations, but against
facts of the real world. You cannot make sense of our experi-
ence of the world, at the stage at which we have arrived,
on the hypothesis that the earth is flat. This is not to say
that any scientific dogma is final. Some doctrines which in
the school-days of many of us seemed most absolute, such as
the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the ultimacy of the
atom, are to-day no longer believed. Any and every scientific
statement is subject to the principle of relativity. Neverthe-
less, the man of science is aware that there is something in
the real world that compels him to certain conclusions. It is
there and he must accept it. He may never be perfectly sure
that he is fully in touch with this reality; it still evades him.
But it is solid enough for him never to cherish the illusion
that he may think as he pleases, and that if he is but sincere
his opinion is as good as any other opinion.

Now with many differences there is a real analogy here to
our knowledge of spiritual things. The spiritual world is real.
Like the world that science studies, it is there: we do not
make it by our desires or opinions. We are more intimately
involved in it and yet it is more elusive than the world of

The Analogy of Science 19

the scientist. It is as much more recalcitrant to experiment
as the subject-matter of biology is more recalcitrant than
that of chemistry. It is even more obviously the field of the
principle of relativity. Yet withal we know it is there. What
we believe, we believe in the end not because august authority
bids us so believe, but, like the men of science, because there
is something that compels us so to believe something in the
world of our experience.

All that is implied in the expression, "the world of our ex-
perience" is a matter to which we shall need to return. 1 But
for the moment we are concerned to put on record this simi-
larity between science and faith. In each sphere a man be-
lieves because he can do no other. He may hold a great deal
more as hypothesis in science or pious opinion in religion;
but there is a point at which compulsion comes in. The point
is that at which it becomes impossible to make sense of the
world of his experience unless a certain proposition is accepted
as true (within the limits of the principle of relativity). Thus
the point comes in biology at which you cannot make sense
of the known facts of organic existence without believing that
species have evolved in conformity with certain laws. Darwin
never supposed (though some of his more ignorant followers
seemed to claim) that his precise formulation of these laws
was infallible. But evolution is a term that stands for some-
thing real, embedded in the nature of things, and however the
formulation of it may need to be revised (as it is being
revised to-day), we shall never go back on it. We have not
gone back upon the discoveries of Newton because of Einstein.
We find his formulation inadequate, but we know he called
our attention to something real.

Similarly the point comes in our investigation of the spir-
itual world at which we are bound to say that we cannot
make sense of the facts of experience as a whole without taking
the view that there is a righteous God who stands behind all

Seech. VI.

20 Literature and Authority

life and calls men into relations with Himself. The religious
man does not hold that belief, any more than the man of
science holds his beliefs, because it is so written. There is
something in the nature of things that compels him to it. His
belief is not any more "subjective" than that of the man of
science. It is indeed even more than scientific propositions
subject to relativity. The religious man, like the man of
science, should be aware that the best statement he can make
to himself is nothing more than a very inadequate and remote
symbol of ultimate reality. Yet what it means is real, is in
the nature of things. There is here no appeal to external
authority; yet we are far from "man the measure of all
things". Truth in religion is not what John Smith chooses
to think, however sincere John Smith may be. It is the truth
of things as they are, in a scheme of things, which puts John
Smith in his place.

In drawing this parallel between science and faith I do not
mean to suggest that their processes are identical, but only
that there is an analogy between them in so far that in both
j- fields belief is grounded neither on absolute authority nor on
< individual opinion, but upon something in the very nature
i of that with which we are dealing, which leaves the individual
no choice, if he is to make sense of the world of his experience.
In both fields complete scepticism is a theoretically possible
attitude, but in both the assumption that things do make sense
is the nobler hypothesis, if it be nothing more, and it is cer-
tainly the hypothesis on which all science proceeds.

Here we have authority in its primary form the authority
. of the truth itself, compelling and subduing. The freedom to
' investigate passes into a bondservice to truth which is more
perfect freedom. There are those to whom it will appear
meaningless sublety to distinguish between having your own
opinion and submitting to the truth as it comes to you. But
somewhere thereabouts lies the difference between an irre-
ligious and a religious attitude to life and men of science

Primary and Secondary Authority 21

are often in this sense more religious than theologians. For
it is fundamental to religion to make a distinction between
the self and God, and to acknowledge the complete dependence
of the self upon God. And since God is the source or ground
of truth, as of all value, we can know the truth only in
dependence on Him.

There is, however, a secondary sense of the term "authority"
which we must distinguish. Granted that the primary author-
ity is that of truth itself, is there not such a thing as the
authority of persons who being presumed to know the truth
communicate it to others? In speaking of the man of science
we have had mainly in view one who pursues research and
adds to the sum of knowledge. But for the ordinary student
of natural science the range of original research is strictly
limited, and human authority comes into play in a very
definite way. Even the original investigator cannot safely
ignore the weight .which must attach to the conclusions of
acknowledged experts in his science. Still more must the
ordinary student follow- the experts, recognizing that their
knowledge claims respect from his ignorance. He accepts
what they say, on the understanding t^at if he had oppor-
tunity he could verify their results, but knowing also that he
will never become competent to do so in any exhaustive way.
He is therefore content to be guided by them in his practice,
verifying what they say as occasion offers. This process of
acceptance and verification is carried on unthinkingly by us
all in a "scientific" age. I accept on authority, for instance,
the abstruse laws which lie behind the wireless transmission
of sound; but every time I "listen in" with success I am help-
ing to verify those laws for myself. Because by obeying pre-
cepts founded upon the investigations of experts I find that
the real world responds to my demands upon it, I am content
to believe. Authority, therefore, not in the sense of dictation,
but in a sense nearer to that of the original Latin auctoritas,

22 Literature and Authority

has after all a considerable place in science. We respect the
experts and are willing to be guided by them beyond the limits
of our experience, on the constantly tested assumption that
they know what they are talking about.

We may recognize a somewhat similar kind of authority
in the arts. Artists are constantly experimenting in new
forms, and those who do not create but appreciate are also
exploring new ways. Art can never be bound to the past
without becoming barren. Yet no person of sense despises*,
the "authority" of Pheidias in sculpture or of Shakespeare
in drama or of Beethoven in music. Their works represent
permanent achievements of the human spirit. They revealed
new possibilities in their various arts, and set a standard
or norm for others who work in those fields. The creative
artist, who would scorn slavish imitation, yet finds inspiration
and direction in the masters. The layman to whom the arts

45

bring enjoyment and understanding of beauty does not feel
obliged to confine his appreciation in the strait bounds of
classical precedent; but his taste is informed, tested and cor-
rected by reference to the classics. In contemplating a work
of art the judgment he forms is his own: he believes it to be
beautiful or significant because he "feels in his bones" that
it is so, and not because he has been told so. He is aware at
the same time that if his judgment were simply an individual
whim he would deserve the name of Philistine. He is trying
to apprehend for himself something which is real beyond him-
self, and he is willing to accept the guidance, though not the
dictation, of those who have seen farther than he can see;
believing that as his own vision becomes wider and deeper
he will be able to take up the experience of the masters into
his own experience.

It will conduce to clearness if we say at this point that when
we speak of the place of authority in science we are not think-
ing of the purely mechanical communication of facts, or in
art, of the communication of technique. It goes without say-

Authority of the Expert 23

ing that for these things every beginner must be dependent
on someone else; and no doubt in so far as religious education
involves the imparting of facts of history, or training in the
technique of worship and devotion, there must be similar
dependence. But for the question of authority in religion this
is of small importance. In scientific and artistic education
something more than facts or technique must be conveyed
an outlook, a point of view, a method, none of which the
Beginner can attain wholly independently. And the field
within which authority in religion is a matter of importance
finds its analogy here. In religion few of us would deny that
we are in statu pupillari, and have need of guidance, how-
ever strongly we should repudiate dictation in spiritual
affairs. 1 We may therefore usefully observe that in science
and in art authority has a definite place which is not incon-
sistent with the responsibility of the individual for his own
judgments. In religion there is similarly a place for the
authority of the expert, not as a dictatorial or coercive
authority, but by way of stimulus, support and direction. The
expert in religion is the saint or the prophet the man of
inspired character or the man of inspired vision.

Clearly the way in which authority works in science and
in art respectively is only roughly the same. Their aims are
different. Yet not after all so different as appears. The man
of science may seem to be concerned solely with recording
that such and such a thing is so. But the greater scientists
give us imaginative generalizations which are in some sort
works of art. Again, though the artist may seem to be doing
no more than bring into being a particular concrete thing
which is beautiful, yet in doing so he is telling us something

1 The idea that in religion the individual soul is making a solitary adven-
ture into unexplored regions, in which there is something contemptible about
accepting help or guidance, is popular at present, but will not, if it is regarded
as the whole truth, bear investigation in the light of history or of psychology.
The element of originality, of adventure, is of course present in any religious
experience worth the name, but the element of continuity or solidarity with
the spiritual life of others is equally a part of it.

24 Literature and Authority

about what is. For amid all the fluctuations of taste which
often seem to rule out anything like objectivity in aesthetic
judgments, we cannot but believe that there is a real and
objective worth which all art is seeking to express. Thus in
each case there is an appeal to something in the nature of
things, and we respect authority in so far as it seems to rep-
resent independent insight into that nature of things. But
when we come to compare these fields of human experience
with religion it is instructive to observe certain differences
between them in which religious experience has closer analogy
with art than with science. Thus while it is characteristic of
science to describe and explain, though not without an element
of imaginative construction, art is characteristically creative;
and the saint, like the artist, creates something which expresses
what he sees of reality: he creates a religious life, which is
a work of art and something more. Rather, as he would say,
such a life is created in him by the Reality he apprehends.
Here therefore as in art authority authenticates ifeelf in power
to create. Further, whereas the ordinary man in his daily
life can profit by the discoveries of science without sharing
in the scientific experience to any appreciable degree, it is
impossible so to separate the most elementary sense of beauty
in daily things from the artistic experience. So in religion
the attainment of truth imperatively calls for the sharing of
a personal experience.

In this sense we find a religious authority in the Bible
the authority of experts in the knowledge of God, masters in
the art of living; the authority of religious genius. Through
its pages saints and prophets speak to us with convincing
plainness of the things they have seen and_^bard with the
senses of the spirit. All that they say would fe[e so much
gibberish to us if we did not in some measure share their
experience. We know that they are dealing with a real inner
world whose landmarks we recognize from afar, though its

Science, Art and Religion 25

intimate features may be dim to us. This implies that there
are men who by reason of some innate spiritual faculty, and
by reason of the faithfulness with which they have followed
its impulse, have attained experience of divine things fuller,
deeper and more compelling than comes to the ordinary run of
men. In religion, as in science, there is the sciolism that
refuses to learn. In religion, as in art, there is the Philistinism
that confuses originality with "impertinence and independence
with vulgarity. Democracy is perhaps loth to admit that
there are fundamental differences in spiritual capacity. Yet
such differences are undeniable. We cannot by taking thought
add one cubit to our spiritual stature, though we may become
as serviceable as little men can be. The truly religious man
knows his betters when he meets them. What they say he
will hold worthy of respect, and he will follow on to see if it
can be verified in his own experience. He will not submit to
them blindly, or expect them to be infallible. But he will
expect to find himself in a world of growing experience where
what they say is more and more relevant to him as it becomes
more and more clear that they and he are moving among the
same realities, and dealing with the same truth or rather
being dealt with by the one living Truth that is greater than
he or they.

The emergence of genius in any sphere is an incalculable
phenomenon. It appears at various stages of historical devel-
opment, among primitive communities and in advanced civili-
zations alike. The forms in which it expresses itself naturally
depend on the thought-forms current at the time, but there
is something behind the forms which seems to be independent
of such limitations. A sudden outcrop of men of genius may
appear "like a root out of a dry ground". They may glorify
a single period of history, and then disappear, leavingno
successors. It is of course always possible to be wise after

26 Literature and Authority

the event, and to point to certain discoverable factors which
may have been favourable to this sudden outcrop, but it is
difficult to show why these conditions and no others should
have had this effect, or why apparently similar conditions
at other times have had no such result.

This is true of religious genius, in the saint or prophet. We
may study the antecedents and environment of the prophet,
and account for the direction his genius took; but just that
unique quality that makes him a prophet evades our defini-
tion. Akhnaton, Zarathustra, Gautama, are in no intelligible
sense merely the product of their age, though no one of them
would have done and said the particular things recorded of
him in any other age. Each is an individual, with the in-
calculable originality which is the inseparable mark of genius.

The dominant personalities of the Bible are of this order.
That is not to say that all its writers are on the level of the
highest genius. There is, indeed, very little in the Canon
which does not possess distinction. It is in the fullest sense
a classical literature. But as the Greek classics include a
Hesiod as well as a Homer, a Xenophon as well as a Thucy-
dides, so the quality of the Bible is on different levels, and
not only on different literary levels, but on different levels
of religious significance. Within the range of the biblical
writings there are three epochs at which the highest type
of religious genius appears. First, there is the almost pre-
historic period of Moses. We have no literature which can
with any probability be attributed to that period. Moses has
left us no writings, and we know little of him with certainty.
But it is scarcely questionable that the Hebrew religion,
before the time when its literature begins, had felt the im-
pulse of some tremendous personality. Tradition calls him
Moses, and so may we. We are not, however, in direct touch
with him, but only with men who drew their inspiration from
the impulse he communicated. Next we have the period

Religious Genius 27

from the eighth to the sixth centuries before Christ, which
threw up religious genius in a succession probably without
parallel hi the history of the world. To this age belong Amos,
Hosea, Isaiah, 1 Jeremiah, and the anonymous author who
for convenience is called the "Second Isaiah 2 ", as well as
some men of the second rank who would have adorned a duller
age Mieah, Zephaniah, Ezekiel and a few others, some of
whose names are no longer known to us because their writ-
ings came to pass current under greater names. 3 Lastly,
the first century of our .era was distinguished by the ap-
pearance of the Founder of Christianity, in whom religious
genius reached its highest point and passed into something
greater still. We know Him only in the writings of His fol-
lowers. He dominates the whole New Testament in a unique
way, making all else in it appear only derivative. Yet in
Paul and the unknown author of the Fourth Gospel we rec-
ognize types of religious genius of the same high order as
the prophets themselves.

These three widely separated epochs provide the person-
alities whose influence made the Bible what it is. They were
flowering times of the spirit, when genius in the sphere of
religion asserted itself after its own incalculable fashion. So
far as the actual writers are concerned, we have to take
into account here only the prophets of the great age, with
Paul and John. No other writers reach quite their level,
unless we should add the author of the Book of Job, who
for sheer literary quality perhaps surpasses every other bibli-
cal writer.

1 Isaiah of Jerusalem, who lived in the latter half of the eighth century,
is the author of the nucleus of that collection of prophecies which forms chaps.
i.-xxxix. of our Book of Isaiah.

2 This name is given to the prophecies preserved in chaps. xL-Iv. of the
Book of Isaiah, most if not all of which are attributed to an anonymous prophet
of the sixth century.

The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and others have been enlarged by
the incorporation of material not originating with the prophets whose namea
they bear, but often belonging to the classical period.

28 Literature and Authority

We may distinguish from these major lights of the firma-
ment those other writers whose main significance lies not in
individual originality, but in the way in which they reflect
and record the influence of greater personalities or of his-
torical movements. In them we recognize something short
of religious genius, but none the less something personal
which makes its own impression upon us. They exhibit sin-
cerity, insight, personal devotion, sensitiveness to spiritual
values in short, all the faculties necessary to make them the
vehicles of a religious influence which did not originate in
them.

Thus the narrators of the ancient stories of the Pentateuch
and of the historical books of the Old Testament not only
show high literary skill, but often reveal a sensitiveness to
the religious significance of what they relate, which clearly
arises from a personal religious life. Particularly when they
have to describe the religious experience of a Moses or an
Elijah they convince the reader that they are writing of
that which they know for themselves. Yet we cannot at-
tribute to them "inspiration" in the same sense as to the
great prophets.

In the New Testament we have the first three evangelists,
who come before us not as independent religious teachers, but
as witnesses to the life and words of Jesus Christ. Their
sincerity, their devotion to the Lord of whom they write, and
their personal experience of the religious effects of faith in
Him, are patent. One of them, the third, is, besides, a con-
summate literary artist. But they suppress their own per-
sonalities so successfully that it is a task of considerable
delicacy to recover the "personal equation" in the record.
The early Church in forming the Canon of the New Tes-
tament, rightly distinguished between writings whose author-
ity was that of the authors themselves, as "spiritual men",
and those whose authority resided in the contents of their

The Authors of the Bible 29

works 1 . It is not "inspiration" in any specific sense that
we seek in the latter class. It is fidelity and essential truth-
fulness.

This distinction is not without importance. It has some-
times been obscured by apologists for the "inspiration of
the Scriptures". The story of Joseph and his Brethren is
splendid narrative, with essential truth in its representation
of human life, and a deep religious meaning inherent in it;
but to call it "inspired" is to leave no term adequate to
describe the altogether distinct quality that one perceives
in Isaiah or Paul. Again to ask whether the Synoptic Gos- .
pels are "inspired" is to ask the wrong question; we want
to know whether they are veracious. That the words
which they report from the Master are inspired is another
matter.

What the "inspiration" of the prophets meant as a mat-
ter of experience we shall enquire presently. Its patent
effect is a quality in their writings which can be felt rather
than defined. Perhaps we might describe it as the quality of
being "first-hand" of being in some immeasurably more
direct touch with the sources of truth than most of us achieve.
The "inspired" writer produces a masterpiece in the field
of religious utterance, to be recognized as such by all
who have the sense for such things. The reader who does
not see that Amos or Isaiah is a master in the religious life,
is as little to be considered as the person who cannot see
that the Parthenon or King Lear is a masterpiece. The
prophets have the timeliness which belongs to genius. Their
age was rude, their knowledge of the world severely lim-
ited, their modes of expression and even their perceptions in
a measure bound by contemporary forms of thought. Yet
what they said has the quality of permanence. Age does
not stale it. Our wider knowledge in many fields does not
antiquate it, any more than Dante is antiquated because it

^arnaek, Entstehung des N. T.'a, pp. 7-9, 15. '

30 Literature and Authority

has been discovered that there is no Mount Purgatory at
the Antipodes to Jerusalem.

Whatever else we may have to say of their "inspiration",
it is clear that it is something intensely personal in them-
selves. It is not their words that are inspired as one might
say perhaps of "automatic writing" it is the men who are
inspired. Their powers of mind, heart and will are height-
ened beyond the common measure. They dwell on austere
heights of communion with God, and habitually subject
themselves to,the awful discipline of such communion. Mor-
ally they stand far above their contemporaries. They are
men great in character as in spiritual insight. They have
passed through experiences which make life for them some-
thing vastly more significant than it is for most of us. Thus
they will best make their effect upon us if our study of them
has something of personal communion. A mathematical trea-
tise convinces by the pure logic of its argument. It is not
in that way that we appreciate the Divine Comedy. There
the personal element is all important. So with the prophets.
Their words convey a personal experience of reality, and
our aim is to participate in it, rather than merely to as-
sess the logic of their arguments. If they can make us do
that in any measure, then their authority has established
itself. It is the only sort of authority they need claim.

The first stage, then, of our enquiry leads to the proposi-
tion that in the Bible we must acknowledge the authority
which belongs intrinsically to genius. Such genius is un-
questionably before us in the outstanding personalities who
give to the whole literature its distinctive character^ though
not all of its writers fall themselves within that category.
What authority, if any, can be recognized in the literature
as a whole, even where it cannot rank as the direct mani-
festation of religious genius, is a question which must oc-
cupy us at a later stage. 1 For the present we shall fix our

1 See chaps. VI-VIIL

Genius and Inspiration 31

attention upon certain outstanding portions of it, where the
marks of genius are undeniable, and consider them more nar-
rowly, having in mind particularly the question in what sense
such scriptures may be regarded as "revelation", that is, as
mediating through their personal quality that thought of God
which is eternal truth.

PABT I
THE AUTHORITY OF INDIVIDUAL INSPIRATION

CHAPTER II
INSPIRATION AND PROPHECY

WHAVE already used the term "inspiration." This
concept has had so prominent a place in the tradi-
tional doctrine of the Scriptures that we must now examine
it with some care. The authority of the Bible is in fact often
treated as the simple correlate of its inspiration. The
question "whether the Bible is inspired" figured largely
in the controversies of the last generation. For us, it is dif-
ficult to give any precise meaning to the question, so vague
and fluctuating is the usage of the word "inspiration" itself,
and so uncertain its implications. The theory which is com-
monly described as that of "verbal inspiration" is fairly pre-
cise. It maintains that the entire corpus of Scripture con-
sists of writings every word of which (presumably in the
original autographs, for ever inaccessible to us) was directly
"dictated" by the Deity, in a sense not applicable to any
other known writings. They consequently convey absolute
truth with no trace of error or relativity. What such a
process of "dictation" might be, it is naturally impossible
to say, since ex hypothesi no living man has experience of
it, though some advocates of the theory have incautiously
adduced as a parallel the phenomena of "control" in the
practice of spiritualists. Any attempt to confront this theory
of inspiration with the actual facts which meet us in the
study of the biblical documents leads at once to such pat-
ent confusions and contradictions that it is unprofitable to
discuss it.

No attempt will here be made to formulate an alternative

35

36 Inspiration and Prophecy

definition of inspiration and then to enquire whether in the
light of such definition the Bible is to be regarded as in-
spired. That I believe to be a false method. There is in-
deed no question about the original implications of the term:
for primitive religions thought the "inspired" person was under

|,-the control of a supernatural influence which inhibited the
use of his normal faculties. The phenomena which led to
such a belief are now studied for their bearing on abnor-
mal psychology. But when people to-day speak of "inspi-
ration" in literature and the arts, they are not thinking of
the mechanism of artistic production, but of a quality in
the product which has a certain effect upon those who ap-
preciate it. It is in a similar sense that the term has been
used in the preceding chapter with reference to the biblical
writings. If the term "inspiration" is to retain any place
in our vocabulary, then it is certain that the Bible contains
inspired writings. That is the starting point; it is not a
proposition that needs discussion. The question "Is the Bible
inspired?" is the wrong question to ask. We want to ask,
granted that these writings are inspired, what is the spe-
cific value of their inspiration for religion? .Is there in fact
for us any sense in speaking of these writings, because they
are inspired, as "the Word of God"? The only way to ap-
proach such questions is to look at the writings themselves
and ask what it is they give us.

We have seen that there are two groups of writings in^the
Bible which exhibit the marks of religious genius at its high-
est, the writings of the classical Hebrew prophets, and cer-

* tain books of the New Testament. It is in these writings
that we should naturally seek materials for the study of in-
spiration. In the New Testament, however, there are cer-
tain factors which complicate the question, notably the unique
influence of Jesus Christ upon all its writers. This influence
seems to have been exerted partly through the abiding effect
of personal intercourse with a supreme Teacher, partly

Inspiration: the Biblical Data 37

through a tradition in the community He founded, and partly
through what we can only describe as mystical experience.
Thus the operations of religious genius in such a man as
Paul, at once intensely original and consciously derivative,
are far from simple. The Old Testament prophets present
less difficulty, and it will be convenient to make them the
principal object of our study, though there are points at
which a comparison with the "prophets" of the New Testa-
ment may prove illuminating.

We have before us, then, the writings of the Hebrew
prophets of the eighth to sixth centuries before Christ. We
must take their texts in the form in whicE the most scientific
criticism has restored it to us. For the prophetic books as
they stand in the Canon are the result of an extensive process
of editing at a period long after the classical prophets lived,
when prophecy had died out or profoundly changed its char-
acter, and much of the material they contain originated at
this late period. To determine with precision the limits of
the original prophecies and of later supplements is a task
of great difficulty, in which few critics would claim to be able
to attain complete certainty. Indeed there are wide differ-
ences of opinion .in many cases. I shall attempt here to
make use primarily of such passages as seem to command
a fairly wide consensus of moderate opinion as belonging
to known authors or at least to authors of the classical pe-
riod, leaving aside passages where great uncertainty exists.

We are considering therefore a definite body of literature,
with an unmistakable character of its own, having known
historical relations, and attributable for the most part to
known authors. If we can form some precise estimate of the
"inspiration" of the classical prophets, then we may hope
to see the whole question of inspiration in an illuminating
perspective. But the prophets cannot be studied in inde-
pendence of their historical context. Prophecy represents
a phase of the religious history of Israel, and for its under-

38 Inspiration and Prophecy

standing it is necessary to have in view its spiritual ante-
cedents and the circumstances in which it occurred. Our
study, therefore, of prophetic inspiration must be introduced
by some short discussion of the distinctive character of the
religion within which it arose.

All religion seems to carry within it a certain rhythm of
movement between two poles of feeling the feeling of the
utter remoteness and strangeness of God, and the feeling
of His nearness to men. He is the unknown, the mysterious,
the "completely other" than man; and man must "fear" Him.
Yet there is an irresistible impulse to "seek God" to experi-
ence His power, to come into communion with Him. Re-
ligious rites both impress upon the mind the unapproachable-
ness of the Deity, and offer a way of approach to Him. Some
appreciation of the form which this twofold rhythm took in
the historic religion of Israel is necessary to an understanding
of the prophetic experience.

Professor Rudolf Otto 1 has recently offered to us a term
to describe that element in religion- (according to him the
most essential and universal element) which is related to the
"otherness" of God namely, the "numinous". This word was
invented to denote a unique mode of feeling, which cannot
be described in term's of other feelings without the loss of
some of its content. In its crudest form this feeling is sim-
ply a sense of the uncanny. It has, like other instinctive
feelings, a characteristic physical symptom. As anger is ac-
companied by a flow of blood to the face, and fear by its
ebb, so the "numinous" feeling in its crudest form is accom-
panied by "gooseflesh". There must be many of us not yet
too civilized to feel a "grue" among the gaunt triliths of
Stonehenge or by the gloomy shores of Llyn Idwal. We say
they are "haunted". To us that is metaphor; to the primi-
tive it is stark truth, though who or what "haunts" or what

In his book Das Heiliga (Eng. trans. The Idea of tha Holy).

The Numinous 39

"haunting" may mean he cannot tell. The feeling is akin
to fear; yet it is not fear of that which reason knows to
be dangerous. It is a shuddering dread of something alto-
gether unknown and unknowable. A child was terrified in
the dark. Questioned, he said he was afraid of a great
bear. The questioner tried to comfort him by the assur-
ance that it was not a real bear. "I know", replied the
child; "that's why I am afraid of it". There is a classi-
cal description in a well-known passage of Wordsworth's
Prelude.

\

"I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen.
That spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like^ living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."

In this experience we can trace most of the various features
which Otto records as marks of the "numinous". There is
the sense of mystery "a dim and undetermined sense of

40 Inspiration and Prophecy

unknown modes of being". There is the feeling of the power
or energy of the unknown object, and of its "complete other-
ness". There is the haunting terror, with its universal sym-
bols of darkness and solitude. There is the fascination that
keeps the boy looking at the black peak and afterwards keeps
him thinking about it to the exclusion of all else. This
childish experience is, in fact, very close to primitive religious
experience, and Otto seems to be right in holding that as re-
ligion advances it still retains features corresponding to these
characteristic remarks of the numinous, transformed and subli-
mated. "Religion within the bounds of mere reason" (in the
Kantian phrase) is a chimera. There is no real religion
without "awe" in the presence of the "completely other"
than ourselves the mysterium tremendum el jascinans. Such
awe is not rational in its origin, though capable of being
rationalized. The "development" of religion is partly a deep-
ening of the numinous feeling itself from a mere "grue" to
a moral obeisance of the spirit in the presence of the High-
est. It is partly a re-interpretation of the Object of that
feeling, in which rational and moral processes play a large
part, so that what is at first merely uncanny becomes in the
fullest sense "holy", as Christianity uses that word. For
"holiness" is never merely goodness; it is the moral absolute
as the object of awe.

The Bible is, as Otto recognizes, rich in the numinous ele-
ment, throughout almost the whole range of its varied mani-
festation, from the crudest to the most elevated. The folk-
tales of ancient Israel are full of it, in crude forms, hardly
disguised by the prophetic writers who gave these narratives
. their literary shape. Jacob, waking terror-stricken from a
) dream amid the desolate uplands of central Palestine, cries
"How awe-inspiring this place is! It is a dwelling of Elo-
him!" 1 At the haunted ford, alone and in the dark, he meets
a nameless Being in desperate conflict. Dawn comes, when

1 Gen. xxviii. 17.

The Primitive Numinous in the Bible 41

all ghosts and goblins flee, and Jacob, surprised at finding
himself alive after that night of terror, names the place
Peniel presence of El?- To the writers of the narratives
as we have them, El and Elohim no doubt meant "God",
in something like our own sense of the word, but in the old
tales they used we are at a more primitive level. When
Laban and Jacob take mutual pledges before the Elohim of
their fathers, Jacob swears by "The Fear of his father Isaac". 2
These men are aware of an undefined Somewhat, belong-
ing to a different order of being from themselves, before
which they shudder in dread. Nor is this confined to the
patriarchal narratives. In the days of the Judges a stranger
came to Manoah. Manoah asked his name. He replied,
"Why do you ask after my name? It is mystery," and pres-
ently he vanished in flames. "We are doomed to die",
cried the terrified Manoah: "because we have seen Elo-
him!"*

At the stage where the numinous Object is no longer a
vague El, but the definite personality of Jehovah, the same
sense of mystery and dread is there. Sinai flamed and thun-
dered with the Presence. Fascination drew the people to
"break through unto Jehovah to gaze", but terror held them
back "lest he break forth upon them". 4 A mysterious, in-
calculable, immensely powerful Being, one perceives, quite
(different from ourselves. Out of this sheer terror the faith
of Moses soars. Longing to see God, he stands in a cleft
of the Sinai crags. The glory of Jehovah passes, by, but
the cleft is wrapped in darkness. Jehovah's face may not

i Gen. xxrii. 24-32.

1 Gen. YXXI. 53. Cf . also that usage of the word El in which it means simply
"strength," "power," e.g. Gen. xxxi. 29 (E), "it is according to the El of my
hand," Deut. xxviii. 32. This looks like a reduced survival of a primitive use
of the term for supernatural power or mama.

8 Judges xiii. 22. The story as we have it describes the Elohim as "the
angel of Jehovah": the author of Judges belongs to a more advanced age than
the primitive tale he used.

Exod. xix. 21-22.

42 Inspiration and Prophecy

be seen, even by the "man of God". But as the darkness
disperses, he catches a glimpse of Jehovah's retreating glory. 1
Whether this classical description be a record transmitted
in some strange way from the almost prehistoric leader
himself, or a transcript from the experience of a prophetic
writer of later days, it bears its essential authenticity on
its face. Scarcely anything even of the symbolism needs
to be "written off" in order to make it immediately in-
telligible to ourselves as an actual experience. So Goethe
writes:

"Wenn der uralte
heilige Vater
mit gelassener Hand
ana rollenden Wolken
Begnende Blitze
iiber die Erde saet,
kites' ich den letzen
Saum seines Kleides,
kindliche Schauer
treu in der Brust."

The essential being of the Godhead remains a mystery, for
which the only symbol is the "numinous" darkness. But
something of God can be "seen", without diminishing the
awe He must command. The half-seen "glory" is the "good-
ness" of Jehovah and if this is not to be read in a fully
ethical sense, at least it means that an element of rational
valuation has entered into the "numinous" feeling. The
growth of this element is reflected in the development of
meaning of the Hebrew term which is nearly the equiva-
lent of "numinous" the word qadhosh. In the story of
Sinai to which we have just alluded Moses is directed to
make the mountain of the Presence qadhosh, so that no one
may approach it. 2 At this level the word connotes merely
that which is uncanny, haunted, tabu, as the South Sea Island-

* Exod. xxxiii. 20-23. Exod. xix. 23.

i[

Communion With God 43

ers say. When Isaiah 1 heard the word sung thrice by Jeho-
vah's unearthly attendants, it certainly carried with it the
sense of awful and unapproachable majesty, for Isaiah
groaned, "Alas! I am undone I My eyes have seen the
King!" But equally certainly it has a deeply ethical mean-
ing. The majesty is not that of mere mystery or terror; it
is the majesty of sheer goodness compelling the reverence
of sinful man. Here is the first note of the prophetic experi-
ence an overwhelming sense of God's majesty as the su-
premely ethical Being.

But while religion may start with sheer awe before the

"completely other" than ourselves, it carries within it the

I necessity for finding some ground of communion with the

Mystery. Indeed we might say that the whole practice of

religion means the overcoming of the sense of separation

1 from the God before whom we bow in awe, for its end is

r

"to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever". It is charac-
teristic of biblical religion that it always assumes that the
. bridging of the gulf of separation must begin from the side
of God. It is He who reveals himself at first in manifesta-
tions of crude power in nature, in thunder and fire, in the
giving of rain and of water-springs, in the increase of cattle
and flocks, or in more mysterious psychical effects upon the
mind of man in dream or ecstasy, or the "berserk" fury of
battle. The primitive Israelite, like his contemporaries
among other peoples, went to "seek the face of God" at places
where His power had been manifested the sacred well, the
holy tree, or the high place, or best of all, the awe-inspiring
highlands of Sinai. How far the "El" or "Baal" of the
spot had for him distinct "personality", as we say; how
far he felt a plurality of Elohim or Baalim, or how far he
thought of the "powers" inhabiting the sacred sites as vary-
ing manifestations of a vague Divine, it would be hard to
say, nor indeed is it really profitable to enquire. At a later

* Isa. vi. 3-5.

44 Inspiration and Prophecy

stage it became a matter of intense conflict, and a conflict
with decisive results for human history, whether or no the
local baals might be worshipped alongside of the great God,
but at first such a distinction is hardly present. Yet in the
patriarchal narratives we seem to discern the emergence
of belief in a God whose true "personality" is symbolized
in a certain naive anthropomorphism. Abraham entertains
three strangers and one of them is the God whom he wor-
ships. "Behold", he cries, "I have taken upon me to speak
unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes". No words
could more clearly express the sense of "complete otherness";
and yet by grace of God Himself Abraham has held converse
with Hun as man to man. 1

It is yet an open question how far the piety distinctive
of the patriarchal narratives represents a genuinely pre-
Mosaic phase of religion, and how far it is an ideal construc-
tion of early prophetic teachers projecting upon a golden
age in the past a conception of religion higher than that
which was common in their own day. In any case there is
no doubt that the narratives have been much worked over
at an advanced stage of religious thought; yet there are fea-
tures in the relations of the patriarchs to their God which
do not appear in the earlier stages of the religion of Jeho-
vah; and the very names by which the patriarchs know the
Object of their worship El Elyon, El Shaddai, and so forth
are of a different type from the titles of Jehovah or of
His rivals the Baals. The northern or Ephraimite tradition
that the God of the patriarchs was later revealed as Jehovah
may have some historical basis. 2

With the emergence under Moses of the religion of Jehovah
we come to more clear-cut conceptions of the approach of
the divine Mystery to man. Jehovah, the stormy God of
Sinai, is conceived in strongly personal terms. Though He
may carry over some of the features of a nature God, yet

1 Gen. xviii. 2 Exod. iii. 15-15. '

Moses the Man of God 45

He is very distinctly a Person, a "Man of war" 1 on the
grand scale. He is essentially a "living God", who of His
own will revealed himself hi mighty acts to the Hebrew
clans because he loved them, and chose them for his people.
He arrested Moses by a powerful experience of His majesty
and "holiness". 2 He made of him the heaven-sent leader
at whose command the serfs of the Egyptian Pharaoh rose
and left their habitual servile duties and burdens and went
out into the desert to seek the face of God. They recognized
in him a "man of God" 3 a man possessed of something
of the "numinous" quality, of something of the mysterious
power mana, to use the term which the comparative study
of religion has adopted from the South Sea Islanders which
is the mark of Deity. In and through him the power of the
great God of Sinai was at work. He was a magician, a medi-
cine-man, whose magic wand wrought wonders of deliverance
and destruction. 4 That was how the people regarded him.
To separate history from legend in the stories of his career
is impossible, and the attempt is not very profitable. What
is certainly historical is the commanding sense of divine
power and authority he aroused and the unshakable con-
viction he was able to implant in the minds of the Israelites
that Jehovah Himself had taken control of their tribal life
and was shaping it to his own mighty ends. It was a signal
experience of the divine initiative in history. "I am Jeho-
vah thy God, who brought thee up out of the land of Egypt". 5
No Israelite ever really doubted the truth of that watch-
word. Jehovah by His own mighty acts had made Himself

Exod. xv. 3. * Exod. iii. 1-6.

The phrase "man of God" has acquired such a conventional meaning
that it needs an effort of imagination to "feel" its original significance. A
mountain or hill of El or Elohim is a "haunted mountain" (Exod. xviii. 5,
1 Sam. x. 5, Ps. xxxvi. 6). Cedars of El (Ps. Ixxx. 10) are originally trees that
give the "numinous" feeling. So an "Elohim man" is a "Shaman." The
ghost of Samuel is Elohim, 1 Sam. xxviii. 13. Manoah's wife (see above) took
the Elohim who appeared to her for an "Elohim man.'*

Exod. iv. 1-9 (J), vii. 20 (E), ix. 22-34 (JE).

8 Exod. xx 2.

46 Inspiration and Prophecy

the God of Israel, had made Israel His people. Hencefor-
ward an inseparable bond linked the people to their deliverer.
The Mystery had declared Itself in acts having a human, a
moral significance. In that lies already the germ of the faith
of the prophets.

Crude enough indeed is the early conception of the charac-
ter of this mighty God of Israel. Yet it is a great thing that
He has a character, in a true sense. He is not just power,
or holiness ("numinousness"), not just a presence or a "haunt-
ing". He feels, chooses, wills. He loves His people, and
His love knows jealousy, He can be terribly angry, and He
can forgive. He chooses to act this way and not that, and
He is free to alter His mind. Crudely anthropomorphic; and
yet it is upon such a conception of the Deity that a truly
ethical monotheism can be built, and not upon a remote
heavenly "Creator-god" (Urheber-gott) like the Chinese
Shang-ti, or a metaphysical abstraction like Brahma, beyond
good and evil. And withal even the most ancient worship-
pers of Jehovah were well aware that at bottom He was
"completely other" than man. He could not even be repre-
sented in an image. When all was said and done, He was
God and not man, Spirit and not flesh. 1 Yet they knew from
the way He dealt with them that He had character and
demanded character in them.

His character was indeed implied in the nature of the call
He had given to His people through Moses. That call had
made them a free people, with an ideal of solidarity that
overrode the instinctive selfishness of individual and clan,
with an ideal of self-sacrificing courage and heroic endur-
ance in battle. This ideal developed itself through the aus-
tere, ascetic virtues of desert life. Jehovah hated the soft,
licentious, self-indulgent ways of the worshippers of the
fertility-gods, the Baalim whom Israel found in Canaan and
tried to fit into the religion of the desert-God. However

1 Cf. Isa. zzzi. 3.

Jehovah the Mighty God 47

widespread might be the influence of these enervating cults
upon the social and moral life of the people, there was always
in the background a more austere ideal to appeal to. At
times of crisis the emotional appeal for loyalty to Jehovah,
the Lord of the Hosts of Israel, could express itself in poetry
like the Song of Deborah, 1 and be sure of response. There
at least was something about which a higher ethic could be
built.

In fact, in the primitive revelation of Jehovah as the El
Gibbor, 2 the "mighty God" of Israel Leader, Deliverer, Law-
giver we have a creative force set free to work among men,
the faith and experience of a God whose awful majesty is
brought near to men in qualities of a personal and moral
sort, operating in the development of a social ethic.

Into the obscure question of the beginnings of prophecy
in the religion of Jehovah it is not necessary to enquire,
nor to decide whether it belonged to the earliest stages of
that religion or was the result of Canaanite influence.
"Prophets" come into the clear light of history about the
time of the beginning of the monarchy. They are then de-
scribed in terms which set before us a perfectly recogniz-
able religious type, common to many different cultures. All
religions have their devotees, their "men of God", and so
had the religion of Jehovah. Such personages are. felt by
the common man in more or less primitive communities to
partake in some degree of that supernatural, "uncanny" or
"holy" quality which he associates with divinity. The man

J

of God may be the official priest of a tribe, and his divine
character then derives from the "holiness" of the shrine at
which he ministers. He wears the vestments of the God; he
knows the sacred words and gestures by which divine mana
is liberated, and the rites by which its dangers may be averted.

1 Judges v. 8 Deut. z. 17, Isa. z. 21, Jer. zzzii 18.

48 Inspiration and Prophecy

Such priests formed in early Israel a kind of guild, tracing
their descent from Levi, as in later Greece the guild of (
physicians professed themselves the sons of Asklepios. |
They knew, better than priests outside the guild, the
words of power; they could manipulate the sacred lots,
Urim and Thummim; they could wear the sacred ephod and
speak with the voice of God; at their shrines they gave ;'
Torah, authoritative divine decisions on points of ritual and
tabu. A

But beside the official priest may stand the "man of God"
whose divine character derives from some mysterious per-
sonal endowment. Perhaps originally the priest was such
a man who contrived to hand on to his successors or de-
scendants the sacred character he had won. But the priest ^
does not displace the psychic adept. He is clairvoyant (a ( !
"seer") or he is liable to trance and ecstasy in which he speaks
strange things, more clearly "divine" even than the priest's
spells. He behaves, without any conscious intent, so dif-
ferently from the general run of men that no one can doubt
that he is "possessed" by some supernatural influence. The
"strong breath" (ruach, "spirit") of the God is upon him.
Here we meet the original sense of the term "inspiration."
Among such "men of God" were the persons whom the He-
brews called nabi, a word whose original and etymological
sense is not quite certain, but is probably derived from the
incoherent babblings of the ecstatic. It is translated
"prophet", but the latter term has acquired such an entirely
different meaning that it will be well for our present purpose
to retain the Hebrew word for these prototypes of the dervish
of to-day. 1 They wandered about the country in bands,
worked themselves up into frenzy with music and danc-

x The use of the terms "nabi" for the more primitive and "prophet" for
the more developed type may offend purists in the Hebrew language, but we
need to make a distinction which the Hebrews did not make. I owe the sug-
gestion to Hans Duhm, Verkehr Gottes mil dem Menschen im Alien Testament.

Primitive Prophecy 49

ing, and were regarded by the populace with that
mingled awe and contempt which is often the lot of their
kind. 1 Among them were doubtless idle vagabonds, who
gladly lived upon the reluctant alms of the superstitious. 2
But many, perhaps most, of them must have been accord-
ing to their lights genuine and ardent devotees of Jehovah.
Certainly we find the body of nabis standing with fanatical
fervour for the worship of the national God in times of wide-
spread surrender to "strange gods". If, to the vulgar, "crazy"
and "inspired" were scarcely distinguishable ideas, 3 yet psy-
chology prepares us to find that this peculiar psychic type,
with its exceptional suggestibility, is capable under the
right conditions of grasping ideas with exceptional force,
and of acting in the moral sphere with a decision and an
emotional intensity beyond the reach of common men. What
the conditions are it is difficult to say. Partly they depend
on the original spiritual endowment of the individual "as
God made him", partly upon the ideas and ideals accepted
as dominant by his reason, and partly upon elements in the
environment.

The age was not given to carefuLdiscrimination of spiritual
'states, and so it is not surprising that men are grouped ac-
cording to striking similarities in outward behaviour with-
out much regard to differences in the more inward aspects
of personality. While we hear of nabis who are no more
than strolling dervishes, we hear also of other nabis who
display outstanding moral and intellectual qualities. It is
true that our records come to us in a form extensively
edited and revised at a late period, and that we must allow
for a tendency to idealize earlier nabis in the light of what
prophecy had become in the Deuteronomic age. Yet it

1 Sam. x. 5-6, 10-13; xhe. 23-24.

J Such is the implication of passages like Micah iii. 5, 11; Amos vii. 12;
2 Kings v. 22,

2 Kings ix. 4, 11.

50 Inspiration and Prophecy

seems impossible to deny that from the beginning of the
Monarchy, that is, from the time at which authentic records
of prophecy begin, the order included personalities, like Sam-
uel and Nathan, of elevated character and great intellectual or
executive power, who were natural leaders and reformers.

Samuel is represented in the oldest stories of his time as
attached to the "high place" at Ramah, where we find him
in his natural position as "man of God" presiding at a local
religious festival. 1 He associates with the bands of nabis,
and himself enjoys great repute as a "seer", or clairvoyant
so great that after his death he is invoked by necroman-
cers to foretell the future. 2 He would "find" lost property
for a quarter-shekel fee. Yet it is certain that his abili-
ties qualified him to play an important though obscure role
in the foundation of the monarchy. The story of his
part in the important work of this epoch has been so com-
pletely rewritten by later prophetic authors that it is difficult
to arrive at the truth. But the varying traditions that gath-
ered about him can be accounted for only if he really
was a man of outstanding character and influence. We are
given to understand that it was in the interests of the re-
ligion of Jehovah, as he understood them, that he carried
the prophetic order with him from the side of Saul to
that of the rebel David. If so, the first dynastic revolu-
tion in Hebrew history was a religious revolution, and it was
led by a nabi.

To Nathan is attributed a more definitely ethical witness
to the character and claims of Jehovah. David was a "man
after God's own heart" in that he embodied in a captivating
way the heroic if savage purpose of the God of Armies. This
purpose we can recognize not only in such ancient literature
as the Song of Deborah, but equally in David's own Song
of the Bow. 3 But it fell to Nathan to make him aware of

* 1 Sam. ix. 2 1 Sam. xxviii. 11-20.

2 Sam. i. 19-27, probably an authentic composition of the poet-king.

Samuel, Nathan, Micaiah ben Imlah 51

a whole range of moral demands of Jehovah which he had
ignored in his practice. 1 Perhaps the abnormal endowments
of the nabi gave Nathan the certainty and confidence without
which he might not have dared to beard the king, and they
may have clothed him with a majesty, as "man of God",
which commanded the king's respect. Yet in reality the truth
he declared stands on its own bottom, and in the narrative
as we have it the nabi puts the case for a higher ethic with
perfect simplicity and reasonableness.

In the next age we are already on surer historical ground
in marking the likeness and the difference between the gi-
gantic figure of Elijah and the general order of nabis. The
kind of men they were at this time we can gather from the
curious story of Micaiah ben Imlah. 2 From this it appears
that Ahab kept a band of nabis as a sort of court soothsayers.
They still experienced the "fine frenzy" of the ecstatic,
though, knowing on which side their bread was buttered, they
readily accepted as the "word of Jehovah" unconscious "auto-
suggestions" in accord with the royal wishes. The gro-
tesque antics of Zedekiah ben Chenaanah, with his iron
horns, were not deliberate play-acting; he was doubtless pow-
erfully "inspired"; but there was no sort of moral ballast
to it all. On the other hand Micaiah ben Imlah is a good
type of the genuine and thoroughly honest clairvoyant. He
is no religious genius, but his "inspiration" is of a kind
which drives him to tell the truth as he sees it without fear
or favour. "What Jehovah says to me, that will I speak".
It is illuminating to observe that he can explain the con-
trary utterance of his iellow-nabis only by the assumption,
which presents itself to him in the form of a visual halluci-
nation, that Jehovah sent a "spirit" to put lying words in
their mouths.

We may take it that there were many like Micaiah among
those "sons of the prophets" whom Elijah visited at such

1 2 Sam. xii. 1-9. * 1 Kings xxii. 1-28.

52 Inspiration and Prophecy

popular shrines as Jericho, Bethel and Gilgal. Their simple
honesty and fidelity to the plain moral demands of the service
of their God kept alive a sound religious influence in the
minds of an order sadly exposed to corruption just because
of its exceptional psychic gifts. Their ideal of the prophetic
character is admirably set forth in the legendary figure of
Balaam, created by prophetic authors of about this time.
In the story of the blessing of Israel he plays the part of
Micaiah to Balak's Ahab. He is a true clairvoyant: he sees
the vision and hears the word: *

"The oracle of Balaam son of Beor,
the oracle of the seer, 7 1-2

the oracle of him who hears God speak,
who knows what the Most High knows,
who sees a vision of the Almighty,
sleeping but awake in soul!
I see them in the future far,
I mark them in the days to come;
a star of a king has come from Jacob,
a mace has risen from Israel,
crushing in Moab's head,
the skull of these proud creatures!"

He is naturally reluctant to utter a vision so little likely
to please his royal patron; but a divine compulsion is upon
him, and despising the wrath of the king he tells what he has
seen and heard.

There is, of course, nothing in the content of such proph-
ecies of any profound religious import; they are merely fore-
casts of weal or woe unrelated to moral conditions. But the
ideal of the prophetic character which such stories convey
is an elevated one. The nabi must be without personal bias
or prepossession, open to the impact of truth as it comes
to him in his moments of "inspiration." And he may not
pervert or suppress the message. When a man arises in such
an order who really has something of importance to say, he
may well be a power among his fellows.

1 Num. xxiv. 15-17 (Moffatt).

Elijah

Here Elijah emerges. Through the mists of his legend he
looms as the greatest of the nabis. On one side he is a "man
of God" of a very primitive type. He is "possessed"; he can
see visions, hear voices, and read the thoughts of the heart,
and when the ruach is on him he can perform feats of
abnormal endurance. 1 He is driven by influences entirely
beyond his own control, and seems to appear and disap-
pear like a wraith. 2 He is in great repute as a medicine-man
and rain-maker. 3 Yet this man faces Ahab and Jezebel with
the sanity of one who sees directly into the moral issues
of things, 4 and his stand for the clear, straightforward logic
of Jehovah-worship in an age of muddled syncretism marks
him out as one of the great pioneers of rational and ethical
religion.

The description of his vision on Horeb 5 seems to preserve
an authentic piece of religious experience. Behind the zeal
of the reformer lay this intense and immediate sense of the
majestic Presence of God a deeply "numinous" Something
revealed in silence, which remains after the obvious terrors
of wind, earthquake, and fire have passed. Whatever ele-
ments of abnormal psychology are here, clearly they are but
the outer shell of an experience of God which authenticates
itself in the attitude to life and its problems which it forces
the man to take. Jehovah is such and such, and His will
cannot be otherwise. It is the immediacy of this conviction,
and its tremendous urgency for Elijah himself, that give him
his real power, rather than the abnormal phenomena of "pos-
session".

The nabis then of the eleventh to ninth centuries have as
a class little in common beyond their abnormal psychic dis-
position and their attachment to the cult of the national

* 1 Kings xviii. 46. * 1 Kings xviii. 12; 2 Kings ii. 16.

1 Kings xvii. 1, xviii. 32-35, 41-45. 4 1 Kings xxi.
1 Kings xix. 8-18.

54 Inspiration and Prophecy

God. In personal character as in religious insight they differ
widely. Amid all corruptions the order must have included
throughout the period a sound nucleus of men in whom the
abnormal powers of the ecstatic were at the service of a
religious life of some depth and richness, and from time to
time it threw up men of real religious genius. These men,
in whom the psychic mechanism of ecstasy, clairvoyance,
and the rest became the vehicle of an exceptionally fine re-
ligious insight, based on a personal communion with God,
were able down to the time of Elijah to keep the order of
nabis in the main a force on the side of true and ethical re-
ligion. They believed profoundly in the power of Jehovah,
in His special providence over the life of Israel from earliest
times, and in His purpose for His people in the present and
the future. They were entirely indifferent to the other
deities whose cults from time to time allured their country-
men. They fought the Baalim tooth and nail, as devotees
of the stern God of Sinai. They stood by the belief that
their God demanded a certain austere, disciplined, heroic
standard of conduct, and they sought to keep the social life
of their people true to that standard, against self-indul-
gence, greed, dishonesty, cowardice, and injustice in king
or commoner. In an age of material "progress" they were
conservative, even to preserving old desert customs in dress
and food. Their attitude to advancing civilization, secular
and religious, was almost entirely negative. Being frequently
in opposition to the ruling tendencies, they had no overween-
ing respect for the throne, and were always ready at a crisis
to be champions of the ancient rights and liberties of the
free Israelite. Their religious outlook has deeply coloured
the two narratives which in the northern and the southern
kingdoms respectively embodied old traditions of the early
history of Israel. These narratives can still be partially iso-
lated in the composite writings of the Pentateuch. Taken

Elisha 55

as a whole they represent no mean achievement in religion,
and it is the achievement of the nabis. 1

In spite, however, of all that they contributed to the re-
ligious life of Israel, the order held within it from the be-
ginning dangerous possibilities of corruption. Even in what
we may regard as its best days, such a story as that of Mi-
caiah ben Imlah reflects the dubious repute into which the
order might easily fall. Perhaps that repute was not ulti-
mately improved by the part which the nabis, led by Elijah's
successor Elisha, played in the dynastic revolution which
dethroned the house of Ahab. 2 Elisha appears in his legend
as a type much nearer the ordinary nabi than his master.
Nothing is related of him which suggests any deep religious
experience or any outstanding ethical insight. On the other
hand he captured the vulgar imagination by his flamboyant
wonder-working. 3 A patriot he certainly was. His religion
was chiefly a fanatical and unscrupulous zeal for the ex-
clusive cult of the national God, combined with a very lim-
ited appreciation of His ethical demands. He was popularly
credited with having instigated the disreputable measures
by which Jehu in Israel and Hazael in Syria 4 obtained their
thrones, and the political ascendancy he clearly enjoyed
under the dynasty of Jehu implicates him at least as an
accessory in the atrocities with which the reign commenced
atrocities which a generation later called forth the indignant
condemnation of Hosea. 5 In fact he has much of the charac-
ter of a Court prophet arrogant, imperious, vindictive when
his dignity is touched. In one sense the triumph of Jehu
by Elisha's support was the success for which the nabis had
been fighting against odds for a century or more, for it was

1 Opinion is still divided as to the extent to which even the JE narrative
has been affected by the influence of the earlier classical prophets. In the
main, however, this narrative, and particularly its J component, seem to be
prior to the work of Amos and Hosea.

2 Kings ix.-x. 2 Kings iv. 32-37, 38-M; vi. 1-7, 18-20.

2 Kings viii. 7-15. Hosea i. 4.

56 Inspiration and Prophecy

the triumph of a party fiercely nationalist, and committed to
the exclusive worship of the national God. But in a deeper
sense it marks the fall of prophecy from its best ideals. It
had done its work of consolidating Israel's formal allegiance
to Jehovah, but it now found itself largely bankrupt of spirit-
ual energy and ethical ideals. It was not an Elisha who
could give life and reality to the now established national re-
ligion. From this time onwards the nabis as a body appear
rather as a degrading than an elevating influence. They
become the "false prophets" of the time of Isaiah and Jere-
miah. Their "inspiration", in the formal sense, never fails;
they see visions and dream dreams, but the word of the
Lord has departed from them.

Our survey of the early history of prophecy suffices to
show that the psychological phenomena which the people
of the Bible identified with divine inspiration had no neces-
sary connection with those moral and spiritual qualities which
mark true religious genius. Where any of the early nabis
became a real religious force it was by virtue of something
in him which directed his abnormal gifts into fruitful ways.
If therefore inspiration is to be considered as in any way
a condition of the authority of the biblical writers it must
be something more than a function of abnormal psychology
as we meet it in the primitive ecstatic (or his modern ana-
logue the psychic "medium").

CHAPTER III
THE FORMS OF PROPHETIC INSPIRATION

THE great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries
are a very different breed from their predecessors.
They no doubt displayed certain characteristics which asso-
ciated them in the general mind with the order of nabis,
but clearly they did not like their company. Amos repudiates
any connection with the professional prophets. "I was no
prophet", says he, "neither was I a prophet's son (that is,
a member of the 'order'); but I was a herdman." 1 Amos,
according to the note at the beginning of his book, was a naked
a sheep-farmer, like Mesha, King of Moab 2 and so a
person of some substance. He resents Amaziah's imputation
that he is prophesying for a living. Just as little, evidently,
would Micah care to be classed with the nabis of his time,
"prophets divining for money." 3

"As for the prophets, Jehovah says,
Who lead my folk astray,
Who cry, 'All's well!' if they get food to eat,
And open war on any who refuse them,
It shall be night for you, devoid of vision,
So dark that you cannot divine."

Isaiah, though he does not repudiate the title nabi, and shows
more positive appreciation of the ideal value of the order, is
scarcely less trenchant in criticism of its contemporary rep-
resentatives. 4

"Prophets and priests are reeling drunk,

Fuddled with liquor;
They reel amid their revelations;
They stumble as they give their charges."

Amos vii. 14. Amos i. 1. Cf. 2 Kings iii. 4.

Micah iii. 5 sqq. (Moffatt). < Isa. xxviii. 7 (Moffatt).

57

58 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

In the next century Jeremiah finds in the nabis the most
bitter and constant opponents of everything for which he
stands. He has not a good word to say for them. 1

"In Samaria's prophets I saw unseemliness;

They prophesied by Baal and misled my people.
In Jerusalem's prophets I have seen a horror,

Adultery, walking in lies, and strengthening the hands of ill-doers.
They are all to me like Sodom,

As the inhabitants of Gomorrah."

Jeremiah's contemporary, Zephaniah, denounces the prophets
as "light and treacherous persons." 2 Ezekiel is as emphatic
in his condemnation: 3

"Woe to the fools of prophets who only prophesy from what they
feel, without a real vision. . . . You give 'the word of Jehovah/
and Jehovah never sent you!"

We are not here so much concerned with the particular
charges that these great religious teachers bring against the
nabis of their day charges of self-indulgence and immoral
conduct, of venality, covetousness, and base flattery for
gain, charges of misrepresentation and perversion of the
truth of God. But what we observe is the cold and de-
tached way in which they speak of "the prophets" as a body
certainly not in the tone of men who took a pride in be-
longing to that body, hardly in the" tone of members of a
profession jealous for its honour impugned by unworthy
representatives. Some of them at least allowed themselves
to bear the name of nabi, yet they were far more conscious
of the differences between themselves and the professional
bearers of the name than of what they had in common with
them. It is of a piece with this attitude that the great
prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries have little to say
of the ruach or "spirit" which had seemed the distinguishing
mark of the nabi. They use by preference expressions which

i Jer. xxiii. 13, 14 (Skinner). Zeph. iii. 4 (R.V.).

8 Ezek. xiii. 3, 6 (Moffatt).

Psychical Abnormality in Prophets 59

imply a more personal kind of relation to God. They feel
themselves to be an altogether new kind of "prophet", chan-
nels of a new religious impulse and a revolutionary mes-
sage. This fact is of more real importance than any
affinities they may have had with the "dervish" type of
prophet. 1

To what extent they are to be classed in a psychological
sense with the ecstatic it is difficult to define. Ezekiel, who
except Jeremiah himself is most bitter in his denunciations
of the nabis, nevertheless displays traits which we can hardly
help regarding as those of psychic abnormality. In him the
"spirit" once again has a dominant part. He appears subject
to trance and catalepsy. 2 He feels himself, like a psychic
"medium", lifted into the air and transported to distant
places. 3 He records at least one clear case of "telepathy",
when he was aware in Babylonia of the beginning of the siege
of Jerusalem on the day on which it occurred. 4 The strange
episode of the death of Pelatiah may perhaps be interpreted
as a case of clairvoyance, 5 and the "vision" of pagan worship
in the Temple at Jerusalem is conceivably of the same
kind. 6

No other of the greater prophets appears to display such
definite symptoms of abnormality. Isaiah, Amos, and others
describe "visions" which may well be what psychology de-
scribes as "visual hallucinations". That is, when Isaiah says:
"I saw Jehovah sitting on a throne", 7 or Amos says: "Be-
hold the Lord stood beside a wall", 8 we must probably
think not that they deliberately set to work to form a men-
tal picture of their God out of their stock of intellectual

1 The extent to which the classical prophets exhibit the abnormal psychology
of the ecstatic is much discussed in recent literature. Two books representing
the opposite extremes of opinion are T. H. Robinson's Prophecy and the Prophets,
and N. Micklem's Prophecy and Eschatology.

* Ezek. iii. 23-27, iv. 4-8, viii. 1-2.

1 Ezek. viii. 3, xi. 1, xxxvii. 1, xl. 1-2.

* Ezek. xxiv. 1-5. Ezek. xi. 1-13. Ezek. viii. 3-18.
1 1sa. vi. 1. s Amos vii. 7.

60 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

ideas about Him, but that at the time they had an imme-
diate conviction that they actually saw Him before their
eyes. Similarly there are expressions which seem natu-
rally to imply that such prophets experienced "audi-
tions", that is, they were convinced that they actually heard
sounds which conveyed intelligible meaning to them,
though no man spoke. Thus Amos compares the "speak-
ing" of Jehovah to the roaring of a lion. 1 Isaiah says:
"Jehovah spoke to me with a strong hand"; 2 and
again: "I have heard the Lord of Hosts decree doom fixed
and final for the world". 3 Indeed, the very phrase, "Thus
saith the Lord" more properly, "Thus said Jehovah"
implies at least in form that the oracle which follows was
"heard" by the prophet as an utterance of a divine
voice.

Yet in all this we must bear in mind the limitations of
language, and the influence of preconceived ideas not only
upon the expression given to an experience but upon the
actual form of the experience itself. Terms describing psy-
chological processes necessarily conform to the general work-
ing theories assumed consciously or unconsciously by the sub-
ject, and the psychological theories of "the prophets were not
ours. Jeremiah seems to be wrestling with language for a
clear expression of the difference he felt to exist between
the nabis and himself. That they "saw" visions and "heard"
voices, much as he did himself, he never thinks of denying.
Yet he is aware of something in his own experience which
stands over against the purely ecstatic and criticizes it, and
in virtue of that something he gives the lie to the "inspired"
vaticinations of his rivals. 4

"The prophet that has a dream
Let him relate a dream;

* Amos iii. 8.

*Isa. viii. 11 ("with overwhelming force," Moffatt).

* Isa. xxviii. 22 (Moffatt).

':Jer. xxiii. 28 sqq. (Skinner. See his Prophecy and Religion, chap. x.).

Jeremiah and Paul 61

And he that has My word,

Let him declare My word in truth.

What has the chaff to do with the wheat?

Is Jehovah's oracle.
Is not My word like fire,
Like a hammer that shatters the rock?"

It is true that he does not succeed in establishing any psy-
chological criterion of the difference between true and false
prophecy, but we cannot doubt that he is aware of a pro-
found contrast between the ecstasies of the nabis and his own
inspiration. And Jeremiah speaks for his compeers. Their
experience had more or less similarity to that of the popular
nabis of the day, but the similarity was accidental, the dif-
ference essential. So they themselves were convinced, and
no treatment of their experience which leaves this conviction
out of account can do justice to them.

If we are to follow Jeremiah's lead we shall refuse to find
the test of inspiration in the psychological mechanism by
which it is mediated; we shall seek it in the value of the in-
spired utterance itself. That in the last resort is the only test
he can apply. But where value is concerned appeal must
be made to the reason and to the moral interests of human
society. Here the analysis which Jeremiah had attempted
is carried further by Paul. He, like the Old Testament
prophets, had experience of ecstatic conditions, and of the
irrational utterance which was often its form of expression.
Paul's "speaking with tongues" is the equivalent of the prim-
itive "hith-nabbe" or "prophesying" at its lower level. He
did not deny its "inspired" quality, in some sense; one and
the same Spirit produced it and the higher form of utter-
ance for which he would reserve the honourable name of
"prophecy". 1 But "speaking with tongues" has small value,
for two reasons: first, it has no intelligible content; and,
secondly, it makes no contribution to the moral develop-
ment of a community: it does not "edify" in the fine Pauline

1 1 Cor. xii. 10-11.

62 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

sense of the word. 1 Prophecy in the true sense has rational
content, and it edifies.

Yet we should not therefore be justified in concluding that
prophecy in the Pauline sense is no more than the result
of a highly intelligent process of conscious reasoning. In-
his own writings we can distinguish various modes of think-
ing. Sometimes he is a Rabbi, drawing conclusions from
accepted traditional authority, whether that of the Old Tes-
tament or that of Jesus and His apostles. Sometimes he is
a philosopher, reasoning with more or less cogency, deducing
from first principles or making an induction from experience.
At other times he casts aside tradition and argument, and
declares with an ardour of immediate conviction what he,
no less than Isaiah or Jeremiah, holds to be the "word of
the Lord": he speaks as a prophet, declaring "all mysteries
and all knowledge". 2 What we do not find in him is any
exploiting of his mystical experiences, or any attempt to inter-
pret the "unutterable words" he "heard" in ecstasy, as spe-
cially authoritative divine messages. 3 We may here instruc-
tively contrast the attitude of Ignatius of Antioch, who will
add weight to his arguments for the monarchical authority of
the bishop by recalling words he uttered in ecstasy. "I shouted
out when I was in your midst; I spoke with a great voice
the voice of God 'Give heed to the bishop, the presbyters,
and the deacons!' Some suspected that I was speaking thus
because I had previous knowledge of the dissensions of
certain persons; but He in whom I am bound prisoner is my
witness that I did not know it from any human or fleshly
source. But it was the Spirit that proclaimed: 'Do noth-
ing without the bishop'". 4 Here Ignatius appeals to an
entirely automatic utterance, displaying apparently super-
natural knowledge of things of which he was not informed,
and claims that, just because it was an utterance of that

1 1 Cor. xiv. * 1 Thess. iv. 15; 1 Cor. ii. 4r-6, xiii. 2; 2 Cor. xui. 3

* 2 Cor. xii. 1-6. Ign. ad Phil. vii. 1-2.

Prophecy and Automatism 63

kind, it is the voice of God. The more impersonal the ut-
terance, the more divine. This is a view foreign to Paul, and
in essence to the greater prophets of the eighth and seventh
centuries B.C. Quite otherwise is it with the Apocalyptists,
who definitely exploit ecstatic visions of a wholly non-ra-
tional kind, and value them in proportion as they are out-
side the normal control of their human faculties. The Apoca-
lypses are impersonal, and that is why they are generally
anonymous, or pseudonymous. They stand or fall by the
objectivity of the trance-dreams upon which they are based.
The findings of modern psychology, it is hardly necessary to
say, support Jeremiah and Paul against Ignatius and the
Apocalyptists.

We may, perhaps, estimate the difference between the
prophet and the mere ecstatic by considering the relation be-
tween inspiration in the arts and the automatism of quasi-
hypnotic states. I have been shown by a psycho-analyst a
series of drawings done by one of his patients under such con-
ditions. As the patient had some technical skill the drawings
are striking products, but they express nothing but the morbid
confusions and conflicts of the patient's mind. Their value for
their immediate purpose indeed lay in the fact that they
gave a picture of that region of the mind which in a fully
waking condition was repressed into the subconscious. The
guidance and control of the higher centres of consciousness
were removed. One has seen pictures exhibited in galleries
which made much the same impression on the beholder, but
though such pictures may enjoy some vogue they are not
likely to survive among the masterpieces of art. Yet in the
very highest ranges of art there is a sense of something re-
ceived from beyond the limits of conscious thought. It
is indeed just this that seems to distinguish genius from tal-
ent. Two very well-known painters of the last generation,
I have been told, met at a dinner party in their old age.
Said the first: "As one grows old, the difficulty is to think

64: The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

of fresh subjects. Don't you find it so?" "Yes, we're grow-
ing old", replied the other; then, turning to his neighbour,
he added in a low voice: "They crowd upon me!"
The speakers were Millais and Burne-Jones. Most peo-
ple probably would feel that the difference is characteristic
of the artists. Yet the work of an artist of genius who
feels that his subjects "come to" him is not on the same
level as the automatic drawings of the psycho-analyst's pa-
tient.

In literature, again, we do not look to automatism for the
most truly "inspired" work. Kubla Khan indeed is a no-
torious example of fine poetry written under conditions in-
hibiting the exercise of conscious control, and apparently some
of the work of other great poets has been produced under
somewhat similar psychological conditions. But in these
cases we are dealing with men whose whole range of thought
and imagination is of a high order, and the quality of the
man comes out even where the higher centres of conscious-
ness are asleep. It is at least clear that their inspiration
does not consist in the mode in which it is conveyed. The
value of automatism as such may better be tested by the
mass of "scripts" recently given to the world as the product
of the trances of spiritualist "mediums". They would not
appear to have added greatly to the literary heritage of our
race^ Yet the poet has his "fine frenzy" (like the lunatic
and the lover), in which imagination "bodies forth the forms
of things unknown". Doubtless they stream from the sub-
conscious region into the field of consciousness. They are,
however, subject to some process of selection and control
which is absent in the trance of the "medium". To speak
of control and selection is not to suggest that the writing
of poetry is chiefly a matter of "workmanship", or that genius
is in this sphere merely a "capacity for taking pains". We
receive from the Press yearly many volumes of "thoughtful
verse", which any person of education and taste, with some

Prophet, Poet and Ecstatic 65

facility in language, could produce, but which no one could
mistake for the real thing. The element of inspiration
is essential to poetry, and it is recognizable however
difficult it may be to define. But if we compare the poet
with the "medium" we must say that the sources of im-
agination in the subconscious are in the former richer and
in some way worthier than in common men, however psychi-
cally gifted they may be. The poet and the artist draw
from deeper springs.

Now the poetic quality of the utterances of the great proph-
ets is manifest. 1 Not only do they fall into the rhythmical
form natural to poetry, but the processes of thought and
imagination they embody recall those of the great poets.
We may take as a first example Ezekiel's dirge over Tyre.
The dirge was indeed somewhat "previous", for Tyre was a
flourishing city, and it continued to flourish for centuries
after the prophet had predicted its doom. But the form
which the prediction takes is splendidly imaginative. The
mercantile city is depicted as a gallant ship:

"Thou, O Tyre, hast said, I am perfect in beauty!

In the heart of the seas is thy domain.
Thy builders have perfected thy beauty.
Of fir-trees from Senir have they made all thy planks;
Cedars from Lebanon have they taken to make a mast for thee;
Of the oaks of Bashan have they made thine oars;
Thy deck they have made of ivory inlaid with boxwood from the
isles of Kittim.

*

Thou wast replenished and made very glorious

In the heart of the seas.
Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters;

The east wind hath broken thee,

In the heart of the seas.
Thy riches and thy wares,

Thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots,
Thy calkers and the exchangers of thy merchandise,

And all thy men of war that are in thee,

With all thy company which is in the midst of thee,

1 Cf. N. MicMem, Prophecy and Eschatology, ch. I.

66 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

Shall sink into the heart of the seas,
In the day of thy ruin.

At the sound of the cry of thy pilots

The coastlands shall shake.
And all that handle the oar shall come down from their ships;

The mariners and all the pilots of the sea shall stand upon the land.
And they shall cause then* voice to be heard over thee,
And shall cry bitterly and cast dust upon their heads;
They shall wallow themselves in the ashes.
And they shall make themselves bald for thee and gird them with

sackcloth ;

And they shall weep for thee in bitterness of soul with bitter
mourning.

And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee
And lament over thee, saying, Who is there like Tyre?

Like her that is brought to silence in the midst of the sea?
When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou filledst many

peoples;
Thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy

riches and of thy merchandise.

But now thou art broken by the seas in the depths of the waters;
Thy merchandise and all thy company are sunken in the midst of
thee." 1

There is nothing more abnormal about EzekiePs mental
processes here than there is about ^Eschylus singing the down-
fall of Persia or Virgil calling the roll of the Latin cities
before their overthrow by the Trojans. There is apprecia-
tion of the beauty of ships and the pathos of a wreck; there
is the sense of the romance of names; and behind the song
lies deep and intense patriotic feeling, a longing for the down-
fall of an implacable enemy, which finds in the picture of
disaster a "wish-fulfilment". There is nothing dream-like,
ecstatic, or hypnoidal about it. It is pure imagination. In
the comparisons suggested above the Hebrew must no
doubt yield the palm to the Greek and the Roman. Ezekiel
is not a poet of the very first rank. But I have chosen this
particular prophecy because it can be judged simply aa

1 Ezek. xxvii. 3-6, 25-34 (E.V. altered).

t

'

Poetry of Ezekiel and Jeremiah 67

secular poetry, without any complication of religious mo-
tive or aim. But it is the same quality of imagination that
informs EzekieFs definitely religious utterances. If among
his prophecies there appear some bearing the marks of trance
or automatism, this element is accidental, and no more
relevant to a general estimate of his work than is the fact
that Mr. Masefield once published a poem, certainly not
one of his best, which had come to him in a dream. 1 As a
matter of fact, Ezekiel is least poetical, least inspired in
the true sense, where he shows most marks of the
ecstatic.

On a higher level of inspiration stand the poems in which
Jeremiah embodied his early forebodings of disaster: 2

"Hark! a runner from Dan!

A herald of evil from Ephraim's hills:
Warn the people: Behold they come!

Let Jerusalem hear!
From a far land leopards are coming,

Against Judah's townships they roar;
Like sleepless field-Watchers they prowl around.

I looked to the earth and behold a chaos!

To the heavens and their light was gone.
I looked to the hills and lo! they quivered,

And all the mountains shook.
I looked and behold no man was there,

And all the birds of heaven were flown.
I looked to the cornland and lo, a desert,

And all its cities were razed away.

From the noise of horsemen and bowmen

All the land is in flight:
They crawl into caverns, hide in the thickets,

And scale the crags.
Every town is deserted,

None dwell therein.

Hark! a shriek like a travailing woman's,
With her first child!

1 The Woman Speaks; in the volume King Cole and Other Poems, 1923
* Jer. iv. 15-17, 23-26, 29. 31 (Skinner).

68 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

Tis the voice of the daughter of Zion, gasping,

Stretching her hands, and crying
'Woe is me! for my soul faints away

At the feet of the slayers.'"

It is little worth while to enquire whether or no the prophet
is here reproducing a series of "visual hallucinations".
Whatever the psychological mechanism employed, the
result is imaginative writing of a high order. In part its ma-
terial is remembered experiences in war-time, possibly dur-
ing a Scythian raid into Palestine. But the whole is dom-
inated by an idea made incandescent by intense feeling. The
idea is that of the certain doom of a people rotten with
social evils, and the feeling is compounded of the misery,
fear, indignation, pity, which are aroused within (as
psychologists would say) the "sentiment" of love of
country by the thought of disaster to that which one loves.
When we have said that, we have not, of course, explained
the specific quality which makes these songs great poetry,
their "inspiration", but we have recorded the fact that
whatever that quality may be it is not dependent on any
ecstatic element in the prophecy. It is somewhere inherent
in the elevation of the idea and the emotional strength of the
sentiment as they exist in a mind essentially noble.

We recognize, then, in the prophets the truly poetic power
of apprehending an idea imaginatively not bit by bit, dis-
cursively, but synthetically, .in a vivid picture. That which
distinguishes them from other poets is not the manner
of apprehension but the nature of the ideas which they so
apprehend. They are religious ideas of remarkable sublim-
ity and originality. They do not coldly assert such
ideas as true, and they do not argue about them. They
grasp them intuitively and hold them suffused with emotion,
until the emotion breaks into lyric utterance. As Ezekiel ap-
prehends with the intense primitive emotions of patriot-
ism the idea of an enemy's downfall, until he sees it

Prophetic Vision 69

as the wreck of a gallant ship; as Jeremiah grasps the idea
of national disaster with an intensity of feeling which makes
him see the havoc of war so they and their compeers appre-
hend such ideas as the holiness, power, righteousness, and
grace of God, or the immutable moral principles of human life,
or the spiritual possibilities of a situation, with the same
imaginative directness and the same strength and simplicity
of feeling.

We may select for the study of the imaginative expression
of religious ideas a remarkable poem of Amos whose four
stanzas (the last separated from the rest, probably by a later
editor) describe four "visions" referring to Jehovah's dealings
with Israel. Amos is contemplating the forbearance and the
ultimate inexorableness of divine justice, and his thought
comes out in these visionary pictures. 1

"Then the Lord Jehovah showed me this,
showed me Himself forming a brood of locusts,
just as the spring crops were coming up,
when the royal crop had been mowed.
As they devoured all the green growth, I cried,
'Have mercy, Lord, have mercy!
How can Jacob recover? he has so little I'
Then Jehovah did relent,
Jehovah said, 'This shall not be.'

The Lord Jehovah showed me this,
showed me Himself calling down fire
to burn up the great deep,
to bum up the tilled land.
'Cease, Lord, oh cease,' I cried.
'How can Jacob recover? he has so little.'
Then Jehovah did relent,
Jehovah said, 'This shall not be.'

The Lord Jehovah showed me this,
showed me Himself standing beside a wall,
a plumb-line in His hand.
Jehovah said to me,
'Amos, what do you see?'

1 Amos vii. 1-9; viii, 1-2 (Moffatt).

70 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

'A plumb-line,' I replied.

Jehovah said, 'With a plumb-line I test my people;

Never again will I pardon them,

but Isaac's heights shall be laid waste,

the shrines of Israel shall be ruined,

and I will attack Jeroboam's house with the sword.'

The Lord Jehovah showed me this,
a basket of ripe fruit.
Then said He,
'Amos, what do you see?'
'A basket of ripe fruit,' said I;
and Jehovah said to me,
'So is the doom ripe for my people Israel;
never again will I pardon them.' "

How these pictures came to Amos is a question on which
it would be unwise to dogmatize. The vision of fire and
the vision of the plumb-line may plausibly be regarded as
instances of creative imagination become vivid to the point
of visual hallucination, though in both cases it is possible
or likely that things actually seen (in the real world) have
helped to determine the form of the vision. Of these two
more presently. The basket of fruit certainly may well
have been an actual object which met the prophet's eye in
contemplative mood and took significance from his thoughts.
The ravages of locusts were an all too familiar sight, and
Amos may well have experienced the horror of a specially
devastating attack. But we must beware of the prosaic in-
terpretation, into which commentators are easily betrayed,
which assumes that Amos literally believed that this par-
ticular attack of locusts was destined to be the means of
the final destruction of Israel, but for his intercession. Rather
we must suppose that for reasons belonging to the state of
the man's mind more than to the external world, this par-
ticular sight kindled emotion and clothed itself with symbolic
meaning.

An old Oxfordshire villager, well known to me many years
ago, told how in his youth he was much affected by appre-

Prophetic Imagination 71

hensions of the imminent "end of the world" which were
stirred about that time. Standing in the fields at the close
of a working day, he saw a cloud of rooks black against
the sunset sky, flying into the west. It "came to him" that
these birds were heralds of the Lord's coming. But there-
upon a voice called him by name, and told him it was not
the Lord's will that he should meddle with such matters; he
must serve in his appointed place and the Lord would come
in His own time. Peace fell upon him, and from that time
he had never again been perturbed by eschatological fancies.
The psychological process is closely similar in the Oxford-
shire peasant and the Hebrew sheep-farmer. The differences
between them are in the richness and coherence of the sym-
bolism and in the universal import of the meaning divined.
Amos' vision is imaginative, the other merely fanciful, with
some resemblance to a dream.

All poets have something of this faculty of seizing symbolic
meaning in common things, and the philosophic poet is aware
that it is something inward and personal that gives, or at
least releases, the meaning.

"The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from the eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Now for the prophets all things take their "colouring" from
an eye that has kept watch over God's ways with man. The
predominant religious interest asserts itself in the prophetic
apprehension even of common things, and clothes them with
its own meanings.

We meet this symbolizing power in the prophets in differ-
ing degrees of intensity. Take Jeremiah's account of his
visit to the potter's shop literary ancestor of a numerous

72 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

posterity, from Paul to Omar Khayyam. 1 The poetical ele-
ment here is small. We have a plain story, whose truth to
actual fact we need not question. "He found himself" (writes
Skinner 2 ) "one day in a potter's workshop in the lower
quarter of Jerusalem, intently watching the process by which
he deftly fashioned on the wheel out of one clay different
vessels just as he chose. He saw that the potter was not
always immediately successful. Something would go wrong,
and then he would squeeze the clay into a shapeless lump
and start afresh, till he attained the result he sought. The
prophet's thoughts were at this time occupied with the problem
of his people's fate; and a sudden inspiration revealed to
him the analogy between the work of the potter and Yahwe's
dealings with Israel. He realized that it was no chance im-
pulse that had moved him to go down to the potter's house
that day; he had been led thither by the hand of God that
he might receive the message enunciated: 'Can I not like
this potter do with you, house of Israel? Behold, like pot-
ter's clay are ye in my hand' ". What we have here is the
simple observation of an object, followed by the "sudden
inspiration" which seizes the meaning of it. But the process
is slower and more reflective than in the cases we have been
considering. We are at a lower level of intensity. The per-
ception of the object and the perception of the meaning are
not yet fused into a simultaneous experience which deserves
the name of vision.

On occasion Jeremiah too saw things and their meaning
in that same rapid flash of vision. He saw a branch of almond
and who can see its lovely blossom clothing the bare boughs
at the end of winter without some lightening of heart? The
Hebrews called it shdked "the waker", probably as the first
tree to wake in the spring. This is how the prophet tells
of it. 3 "The word of Jehovah came unto me, saying, 'Jere-

1 Jer. xviii. 1-4. * Prophecy and Religion, p. 162.

* Jer. i. 11-12 (R.V. altered).

The Shaping of the Vision 73

miah, what seest thou?' And I said, 'I see the rod of an
almond-tree (shaked).' Then said Jehovah unto me, 'Thou
hast well seen, for I am wakeful (shoked) over my word to
perform it' ". Again, when the Scythian terror was on the
horizon the prophet chanced to be watching a boiling pot.
"The word of Jehovah came unto me the second time, say-
ing, 'What seest thou?' And I said, 'I see a seething caul-
dron, and the face thereof is from the north.' Then Jeho-
vah said unto me, 'Out of the north evil shall come upon all
the inhabitants of the land. For lo, I will call all the fami-
lies of the Kingdoms of the North. . . . And I will utter
my judgments against them (the Jews), touching all their
wickedness' ".

In all these cases what has happened is essentially the same:
a religious idea has projected itself upon things seen and
made them symbolic of a meaning. The difference lies in the
intensity of the emotion with which the idea is suffused and
the consequent measure of imagination evoked.

We now turn to the remaining two of Amos' visions, those
of the fire and of the plumb-line, in which the element of
sensible perception is at any rate much smaller, and the
imagination is working more freely. It is, indeed, by no
means impossible that while the mind of the prophet was
concentrated on religious ideas, his eye subconsciously caught
sight of a builder with a plumb-line a most irrelevant ob-
ject, one might have supposed but the poetic imagination
immediately worked it into the material of a vision sub-
stantially produced from within by the projection of ideas
in a symbolic form. The mental process is familiar enough.
Francis Thompson describes in a passage of rich imagery his
dereliction in London, how he

"Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me:
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

In night's slow-wheeled car;

74 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels."

His biographer 1 has shown with much probability how the
details of these images were supplied hardly consciously
by the experiences of nights on the streets, amid "the heavy
traffic of Covent Garden harassing the straggler in the gut-
ter". Even the arrow-like hand of a neighbouring clock may
have helped to mould the vision of Time the Archer. In
some such way the imagination of Amos may have turned
to account some accidental observation. But the spring of
the whole vision is the inward thought. The prophet is
brooding upon God and His inexorable righteousness. In-
stead of being moved to express his thoughts in arguments
or theological propositions, he "sees" the Lord with his plumb-
line, testing by His unerring judgment the ways of His sinful
people.

A more notable example of this kind of imagination is
Isaiah's inaugural vision, perhaps the most perfect expression
in all literature of the idea of "holiness". 2 The young prophet
is worshipping in the court of the Temple. Before his wak-
ing eyes are the smoking altar and the figures of winged ser-
pents (seraphim) placed, as such symbolic figures are placed
in Babylonian temples known to us, as guardians of the
approach to the divine Presence. All this he sees with the
bodily eye, but his mind is so possessed with the sense of
God's majesty that it projects a vision in which the sensible
objects before him are taken up into an imaginative picture
(probably amounting to a visual hallucination) of Jehovah
Himself enthroned in His temple and adored by supernatu-
ral beings. The idea creates the vision, but it does so only
because it is powerfully suffused with "numinous" emo-
tion.

1 F. Meynell, Life of Francis Thompson, p. 91. He speaks of Thompson's
"habitual appropriation of things seen for his poetic images," and gives another
example.

2 Isa. vi. 1-8.

Predictive Vision 75

There is no difference in principle between a vision of this
type and one in which the mind works in complete inde-
pendence of any immediate sense-stimulus, and creates its
own picture out of its own store of imagery. Such image-
material is of course ultimately derived from sensible experi-
ence, but it can be used by the imagination with perfect free-
dom, as we all know from our dreams. This is indeed the
most common form of prophetic vision, and it has many va-
rieties. The freedom gained by detachment from any present
outward stimulus makes it possible for the idea to develop
itself in a sustained dramatic scene rather than a momen-
tary picture. Hosea's representation of the history of Is-
rael as the story of an unfaithful wife is in essence a visionary
drama of this kind. 1 The creative idea is that of Jeho-
vah's well-nigh incredible love for a sinful people, and
the emotion with which it is entertained is sharpened by the
prophet's own experience of his broken marriage. Ezekiel
similarly, though with less deep feeling and obviously inferior
imagination in its laboured detail, tells the story of Jeho-
vah's relations with Jerusalem in a sustained narrative of
a foundling child who proved ungrateful to her benefac-
tor. 2

As the past dealings of God are thus dramatically con-
ceived, so His future dealings may be, and then we get the
very characteristic predictive vision. The poems of Jere-
miah and Ezekiel, from which this discussion started, are of
this kind. An earlier example is the finely imaginative poem
(or series of poems) in Isaiah ii. 10 iii. 15. The whole is
dominated by Isaiah's characteristic conception of God
the idea of His majesty, His holiness, His righteousness, in
necessary and eternal reaction against human arrogance and
presumptuous wickedness. We may compare the repeated
theme of the Greek tragedians the divine "jealousy" which
breaks out against insolent pride (S/3pts).

i Hoaea ii. 2-23. a Ezek. xvi.

76 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

This is, indeed, the true character of predictive prophecy
in its classical exponents. The nabi had a reputation as a
"seer" of future events, 1 and this was inherited from him
by the prophets. It is, indeed, possible that some of them
possessed "second sight", whatever that may be the ap-
parent power of foreseeing in hallucinatory form that which
will shortly happen. But supposing this to be possible, it
obviously has no more value than a vivid recollection of
what has already happened, unless it be derived from some
deeper insight into the tendencies of things and into the spir-
itual principles which govern them. 2 Jeremiah's count against
the nabis to whom he was opposed was that they foresaw
victory and prosperity for Israel apart from any moral or
spiritual basis. 3 They were the successors of those whom
Amos knew, who promised a "Day of Jehovah" bring-
ing "light" and triumph over enemies to a people unashamed
and unrepentant in their sin. 4 Jeremiah would have had
to include in his condemnation many of those un-
known writers who have interpolated among the sombre ut-
terances of the great prophets optimistic promises of uncon-
ditioned bliss. Jeremiah's own visions of ultimate bliss
(in chapters xxx-xxxi 5 ) are as strictly the expression
of moral principle as his earlier denunciations of woe.
They are imaginative presentations of what God must do
because of what He is, righteous and gracious, loving His
own to the end.

The predictions of the great prophets then we must regard
neither as mere "second-sight" nor as a deliberate presenta-
tion in mythical form of their logical inferences about the
future from the present after the manner of Mr. H. G.
Wells' romances of the future. They are an imaginative
and poetical form of apprehending certain ideas about God

1 Cf . 1 Sam. ix. 6. * Cf . N. Micklem, Prophecy and Eschatology, p. 146.

1 Jer. xxiii. 16-18. * Amoa v. 18.

5 Some critics regard these chapters as the work of a later prophet, but
probably without sufficient reason.

Imaginative Dialogue 77

in relation to the movement of history. It is only in later
apocalyptic that the predictive vision develops into a kind
of pious fortune-telling, where a quasi-scientific method of
dream-interpretation is made to yield precise data of time
and place for future happenings.

We have so far considered the prophetic form of experi-
ence chiefly as visual imagination. But many of the examples
we have already studied include things "heard" as well as
things "seen". Thus in Isaiah's inaugural vision the voices
of Jehovah and His attendants, and the prophet's own re-
sponses, are essential to the drama. Similarly, in Ezekiel's
vision of the Valley of Bones the "word of Jehovah" spoken
at His bidding by the prophet, sets the whole scene in action. 1
Sometimes the whole drama falls into dialogue form, as in a
fine anonymous fragment placed among the prophecies of
the "Third Isaiah", full of the power, majesty, and terror of
God: 2

"Who is this that cometh from Edom,
With dyed garments from Bozrah?
This that is glorious in his apparel,
Marching in the greatness of his strength?

'/ that speak in righteousness,
Mighty to save'.

Wherefore art thou red in thine apparei,

And thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?

'I have trodden the winepress alone.
And of the peoples there was no man with me;

Yea, I trod them in my anger,
And trampled them in my fury ;

And their lifeblood is sprinkled on my garments,
And I have stained all my raiment.'"

1 Ezek. xxxvii.

J Isa. Ixiii. 1-3 (R.V.). Duhm and others emend the proper names, and
read, "Who is this that cometh stained red; redder in garments than a grape-
gatherer?".

78 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

or in this sixth-century oracle on Edom: 1

"One ecalleth unto me out of Seir;
'Watchman, what of the night?
Watchman, what of the night?'
The watchman said;

'The morning hath come
And the night too;
Would ye enquire, enquire,
Come back again!'"

Hallucination or not, the dialogue is clearly imaginative ex-
perience and not literary artifice. 2

In Jeremiah's story of his call there is still less of imagery
or dramatic setting. We have little but the pure colloquy
of the soul with God: 3

"Now the word of Jehovah came to me, saying,
"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee,

And before thou earnest out of the womb I sanctified thee;
I have appointed thee a prophet to the nations'

Then said I,
'Oh, Lord Jehovah! Behold I cannot speak; I am too young.'

But Jehovah said unto me,
'Say not, I am too young;
For to whomsoever I send thee thou shalt go,

And whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.
Be not afraid because of them;
For I am with thee to deliver thee,
Saith Jehovah'

Then Jehovah put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and

Jehovah said to me,
"Behold I have put my words in thy mouth:

1 Isa. xxi. 11-12 (R.V. corrected after G. B. Gray).

2 There is something curiously dream-like about this second passage in its
combination of emotional vividness and intellectual mconclusivenesa. It may
or may not be, as the commentators suggest, that the seer had been consulted
by a deputation of Edomites and had to put them off, but I refuse to accept
the oracle as a mere extract from the day-book of any enquiry bureau. We
may contrast with these the frigid conversations with the "angdus interpretana".
in any apocalypse.

8 Jer. i, 4^10 (R.V. slightly altered).

The Vision and the World 79

See, / have this day set thee over the nations,

And over the kingdoms:
To pluck up and to break down,

To destroy and to overthrow;
To build and to plant'".

That this is direct imaginative experience does not admit
of question. We may readily suppose that the words and
the touch on the lips were actual hallucinations. The crea-
tive idea is simply the intense conviction of vocation, strug-
gling against inhibitions in the prophet's mind. The struggle
itself raises the accompanying emotion to a greater heat, and
the conflict dramatizes itself in the imagination. The crisis
takes the form of a vividly felt "touch" upon the lips the
touch of God himself. Parallels for such solution of a con-
flict could readily be supplied from dream-psychology; but
here all that is fantastic or dream-like is refined away; the
whole experience is rational and coherent. We must bear
in mind that the expre$jbn "I have put my words in thy
mouth" pure metaphor to us is in Hebrew psychology a
realistic expression of fact. 1 For the Hebrew, man is not
a compound of body and soul (as for the Greek), but an
animated body, and each member may be separately ani-
mated and controlled. Thus an intense feeling of obliga-
tion to speak for God naturally enters consciousness as
a sense of divine control of the lips, and this in turn
takes the imaginative form of a supernatural touch upon
that organ. Exactly in the same way, Isaiah's inward ten-
sion between the overwhelming sense of God's holiness and
the sense of his own uncleanness is resolved by a touch of
the holy fire upon his lips. 2 In each case, however, as with
the prophets in general, the actual content of that which the
prophet has to proclaim is given in the form of "hearing"
God speak.

1 See H. Wheeler Robinson in The People and the Book (ed. by A. S. Peake),
p. 365.

" Isa. vi. 7.

80 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

A simple and instructive passage where a "word" alone
resolves the tension in the prophet's mind may be found in
the sixth-century Habakkuk: 1

"On my watchtower I will stand,

at my post on the turret,
watching to see what he will say to me,
what answer he will offer to my plea.

Then answered Jehovah,
'Take this down on your tablets
plainly, that one may read it at a glance,
the vision has its own appointed hour;
it is ripening, it will flower;
if it be long, then wait,
for it is sure and it will not be late.'"

It is no deliberate artifice but direct imagination that
dramatizes the prophet's questioning and expectant atti-
tude of mind, before he is sure that the Lord has spoken,
and then reports the oracular voice that brings assurance and
counsels patience. The contemporary "Second Isaiah" sim-
ilarly tells how he "heard" the message he was to
proclaim: 2

"Hark, one saying, 'Call!'

-^

And I said.

'What can I calif
All flesh is grass,

And all its beauty like a wild-flower!
Withers grass, fades flower,
When the breath of Jehovah blows on it.
Surely grass is the people'

[The voice replies]

'Withers grass, fades flower,

But the word of our God endureth for ever.' "

The foregoing study should have prepared us to raise the
question, What exactly lies behind the prophetic formula,
"Thus saith the Lord"? More correctly it should be ren-
dered "thus spoke Jehovah". In the classical prophets at
least it means that the prophet had had an actual personal

1 Hab. ii. 1-3 (Moffatt). * Isa. a. 6-8 (G. A. Smith).

"Thus Saith the Lord" 81

experience in which he "heard" the words he proclaims ut-
tered by a divine voice, whether we are prepared to sup-
pose that the hearing took the form of an hallucination
under trance conditions, or whether we find it more closely
parallel to the creative imagination of the poet. The prob-
ability is that it covered a wide range of psychological form.
What is essential to it is that an inward conviction accom-
panied by pure and intense emotion dramatized itself in the
prophet's consciousness. He was persuaded of the truth,
not by discursive reasoning, but intuitively. As the prophet
emotionally possessed by the thought of God "saw"
Him in forms created by his imagination, so also he "heard"
God's voice, in forms of speech supplied from the like
source.

It might seem that in bringing the prophets' apprehension
of the "word of the Lord" under the category of "imagina-
tion", we are somehow emptying it of that immediate reality
which alone, it might be thought, could guarantee the truth
of what they say. It will be well to make it clear, first, that
the word "imagination" is here used in the sense which
Wordsworth has fixed upon it, in which it is sharply distin-
guished from mere fancy. The word, he admits, has to be
used only "through sad incompetence of human speech"; it
is in truth

"But another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood."

It is interesting to recall that Wordsworth himself names
"the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and
the works of Milton" as "the grand storehouses of enthusi-
astic and meditative imagination". 1 We should wish to add
some of his own works to the list. When he speaks of im-
agination he speaks of that which he knows "from the in-
side". To the poet and the prophet the Philistine's contrast

1 Preface to the 1815 edition of his poems.

82 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

of matter-of-fact and "mere imagination" is simply ab-
surd. They are assured that only through imagination can
the highest truth be made subject to human compre-
hension. When, however, we ask whether what any par-
ticular poet or prophet says is true, we cannot find a cri-
terion in the imaginative form in which he speaks. In the
end we do not believe the prophet because he says, "Thus
saith the Lord", with however great conviction and sincerity
he says it, but for other reasons, to which we shall presently
come.

We may, however, properly raise here the question, whether
we are to consider it an advantage that the principal writers
of the Bible are of this poetic cast, that they write not log-
ically but imaginatively, that they think not discursively
but intuitively. The question is part of the larger .and more
fundamental question of truth in religion. It was said
above, in passing, that the truth of religion is more
akin to that of art than of science. This point must here
be made more definite. We are accustomed in these days
to think of truth primarily in terms of scientific statement,
with its logical precision and its reliance upon facts directly
subject to test by experiment. \ But this way of knowledge
is not the only way. It depends upon measurement of quan-
tity. But reality has not only quantity but quality, or value.
If science gives a representation of Reality in terms of quan-
tity, religion, like art, gives it in terms of quality or value|

Now while discursive reasoning is supreme in the quan-
titative representation of Reality, intuition and imagination
play a larger part in the qualitative representation. That
is not to say that religion is irrational, for imagination it-
self is a function of the Reason. It is not even to say that
the strictest kind of logical ratiocination is out of place
in theology. But the theologian would have nothing to rea-
son about it if it were not for the prophet unless indeed

1 See B. H. Streeter, Reality, Chap. II.

Reason and Imagination 83

he had himself something of the prophet's gift. The very
ideas which we must reason about are in this sphere given
and appropriated only in imaginative experience. 1 More-
over, religious ideas are to be communicated to any effect
only if the person who has grasped them can make us share
his own experience. But only the poet (or the artist in
other fields) can make us sharers in his experience. This,
indeed, is precisely what he can do. The famous complaint
of the Cambridge mathematician who was induced to read
Keats' Ode to Autumn is strictly true "It doesn't prove
anything". It would be equally true even of a "theological"

^ poem like Paradise Lost. Few of Milton's admirers would
have the hardihood to maintain that he reached his osten-
sible aim, "to justify the ways of God to men". But the
poem makes the reader free of a world of the spirit, where
power and wonder, beauty and terror abide, beyond the range
of all our definitions. He who has lived with Milton awhile
in that world knows that he has been on the heights where

' truth dwells. He may not be able to express in propositions
what he has learned, but there is something new in his own
experience which must enter into any account he is to give
to himself of the ultimate Reality. In like manner we must
say that Isaiah's vision of the . holiness of God "does not

> prove anything". But it can make us sharers in an experience
of awe which challenges all our workaday assumptions and
denials.

The rudimentary psychological analysis here attempted
shows that in the prophetic experience we have an elevated
idea, suffused with intense emotion, entering consciousness

1 Cf. J. MacMurray in Adventure, by B. H. Streeter and others, p. 29.
"In itself the mystic's experience is not knowledge, but rather a vision of
what there is to be known. The vision itself is conditioned in many ways by
the social influences, the traditions of thought and activity, the institutions
and habits which press continuously upon the mystic's life and mould his
consciousness. And if the vision is to issue in knowledge it must find expression
and definition in thought and language."

84 The Forms of Prophetic Inspiration

in dramatic forms created by imagination, and uttering itself
in poetical language. Because of a certain capacity for asso-
ciation in the mind, the language has power to kindle in the
hearer or reader the original emotion felt by the prophet, and
so to recreate in some measure the whole experience in which
the central idea became real and urgent for him. 1 Thus a
channel is made through which that idea may enter the reader's
mind with something of its original force. Where the idea
came from is another question, and the reasons why it be-
came the centre of emotions and stirred imagination to work
in just these ways, could only be known if the "subconscious"
mind of the prophet himself could be made to yield its se-
crets. In conscious experience the idea has no history until
it emerges in its imaginative form, full-armed like Athena
from the head of Zeus.

Psychology, then, can help us up to a point to understand
the facts of inspiration. But if we ask how far the experi-
ences it recognizes, and up to a point explains, provide a
valid representation of Reality, we are out of the domain of
psychology. Indeed, the explanation which psychology of-
fers is at one important point so limited that it leaves us with
an open question. It has to introduce the concept of the
"subconscious" (or "subliminal consciousness", or "uncon-
scious", or "co-conscious", according to the varying nomen-
clature of different schools). But there is no agreement on
the true meaning of this enigmatic concept. The only thing ^
which is clear and agreed is that there is an element in
many kinds of imaginative experience which is not fully
explicable within the limits of the field of conscious thought
at the time of the experience. Some psychologists hold that
given sufficient knowledge of all that the subject has passed
through from (or even before) birth, it could be shown that

1 See Lascelles Abercrombie, The Idea of (heat Poetry, especially lectures I
and III, where the analysis of what makes poetry, and great poetry, can in
many points be directly and illuminatingly applied to the prophetic writings.

Inspiration and the Subconscious 85

everything in the subconscious is a memory (in some sense)
of former experience. Others find it necessary to bring in
the experience of other minds, mediated through "telepathy"
(another mere name for a process recognized but not under-
stood). Others again speak of a "racial unconscious" upon
which the individual draws. There is nothing here to rule
out the religious hypothesis that the ultimate source is a
Mind beyond the world, communicating with man through
imagination, as It also communicates with him through sen-
sible experience in the world of things. The psychologist
as such may quite rightly not feel free to adopt any such
hypothesis unless and until every other possible one has mani-
festly failed, since entia non sunt multiplicanda praet&r ne-
cessitatem. But if on general grounds we are driven to hold
that our experience as a whole best makes sense on the as-
sumption that there is such a Mind beyond the world, then
the simplest interpretation of imaginative experience is to
suppose that its awareness of something "received" is not
delusive. ,

But this does not lead to the conclusion that because
imaginative experience involves an appeal to the unexplained
"subconscious", therefore it has greater validity than
other forms of experience. It only guards against the false
conclusion that because such experience can be, up to a
point, explained psychologically, therefore it is not to be
accepted as being just as valid in its own sphere as the data
of science in their sphere. The true conclusion is that our
ultimate beliefs must express that which makes sense of our
whole experience, and that the prophets make us sharers in
an experience so pure and so elevated, with so urgent a sense
of immediate reality in it, that it has the strongest claim to
be heard before the court of Reason. But when it comes to
be so heard, it is the ideas it embodies, not any longer the
mere mode of apprehending them, that must engage our
attention.

CHAPTER IV

t

THE CONTENT OF OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY *

THE idea of the "holy" (qadhosh), as we have seen, is
in the early religion of Israel, as elsewhere, a non-
rational idea. It is the idea of a Mystery, completely other *
than ourselves, which arouses a "numinous" feeling. Re-
ligious cultus is the natural outgrowth of this feeling, ^
and the early cultus of the Hebrews bears clearly the marks
of its originating impulse. Man expresses his sense of awe
instinctively in solemn words and gestures, associated with
places and objects which stimulate the numinous feeling.
They constitute a ritual which, if the worshipper has con- ^
fidence that it is rightly performed, may give to the feel- j
ing a joyous, serene, or enthusiastic colour. Thus the ancient "
Hebrews had their joyous festivals at "holy" sites, such
as hill-tops ("high places"), spreading trees, and copious
springs.

But the Mystery possesses enormous power (mana), in-
calculable in its incidence and its effects. It may be terri-
bly hurtful; it may be marvellously beneficial. It is there-
fore very necessary to find out and practise such operations
as will avert the hostile and promote the friendly activ-
ity of the Power. The Hebrews lived in terror that Jehovah
might "break forth upon them". They handed down many
stories showing how His "holiness" reacted in "wrath".
For example, they related how once upon a time one Uzzah
had, with the best intentions in the world, thought-
lessly touched the sacred box in which was the presence
of Jehovah. The "holiness" in it had so powerfully "broken

Ritual and Tabu 87

forth upon Uzzah" that he there and then fell dead: the
name of the place "Breaking of Uzzah" stands "to witness
if I lie". 1 That put the fear of the Lord into King
David, and he was mightily cautious thereafter in all his
dealings with the sacred box to do all the right and proper
things. "When they that bore the ark of Jehovah had gone
six paces he sacrificed an ox and a fatling; and David
danced before Jehovah with all his might; and David was
girded with a linen vestment . . . and they brought in the
ark of Jehovah, and set it in its place inside the tent that
David had pitched for it; and David sacrificed burnt-
offerings and peace-offerings before Jehovah". 2 All in
proper form, one sees; there must be no more playing with
fire!

It behooved men therefore to know the rules of "holiness",
so far as they could be known, and those were benefactors of
the race, to whom was revealed what was "clean" and "un-
clean", and how to avert the "wrath" which was the reaction
of "holiness" against a breach of the rules. Early Hebrew
religion had a fairly elaborate system of rules of tabu and
expiatory rites, whose origin was attributed to Moses, though
many of them doubtless were much older than he, while others
had grown up later, or had been learned from neighbouring
peoples or from the priesthoods of shrines taken from earlier
occupants.

It is interesting to observe that the earliest "Ten Com-
mandments" known to us, a code which was authoritative
in the southern kingdom at the beginning of the prophetic
period, are almost entirely concerned with religious festivals
and with rules of tabu.

I. Thou shalt worship no other god, for Jehovah, whose name is
Jealous, is a jealous god.

II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

III. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep.

i 2 Sam. vi. 6-9. 2 2 Sam. vi. 13-15, 17 (R.V. slightly altered).

88 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

IV. All that openeth the womb is mine.

V. Thou shalt observe the Feast of Weeks.

VI. Thou shalt observe the Feast of Ingathering at the year's
end.

VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened
bread.

VIII. The fat of my feast shall not be left over until morning.

IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy ground shalt thou bring into
the house of Jehovah thy God.

X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk. 1

This is in fact the code which according to the ancient
Judaean narrative of the Pentateuch was inscribed by Moses
on sacred stones at the dictation of Jehovah Himself. 2 Its
relative simplicity suggests that it is very old, though it can
scarcely antedate the beginnings of agricultural life in Pales-
tine. It is wholly a ritual code, with no ethical element in it.
This was, however, only the traditional nucleus of a highly
developed cult actually practised at this period. From the
writings of the prophets, and from the ritual regulations
preserved by the meticulous antiquarianism of the later
Priestly Code, we can form an idea of the elaborate, costly,
and impressive ceremonial which for the eighth-century Is-
raelite expressed the awful holiness of his God. Imposing
buildings, symbolic imagery, troops of priests and devotees,
solemn processions and dances, music and liturgical speech,
but above all the perpetual spectacle of ritual slaughter
with its thrilling horror of newly shed blood (sometimes hu-
man blood) 3 , a nurtured all highly emotional "fear of Je-
hovah" devoid of any necessary rational or ethical element.
More and more religion came to mean the impressive ritual

1 Exod. xxxiv. 14-26. In the text as it stands there are more than ten com-
mandments, the original list having been expanded by commentary and by
interpolation from other codes. The above reconstruction is Wellhausen's.

2 Exod. xxxiv. 27-28.

3 Judges xi. 30-40; 2 Kings xvi. 3, xxiii. 10; Micah vi. 7; Jer. vii. 31; Ezek.
xx. 26. The prophets discountenance the practice, but their claim that it had
not been part of the early religion of Jehovah seems to be disproved by Exod.
xxii. 29. An animal substitute is allowed in Exod. xxxiv. 20 (cf. Gen. xxii. 13),
and human sacrifice is forbidden in Deut. xviii. 10.

Amos at Bethel 89

celebrated at the "carved stones" of Gilgal, the sacred well
of Beersheba, or, later, the awful splendour of Solomon's
lordly fane at Jerusalem, or the bull-temples of Bethel and
Dan. There the majesty of Jehovah was shown forth, and
thither in times of popular excitement or danger the wor-
shippers thronged to avert the wrath or to celebrate the fa-
vour of the national God.

Then Amos came to Bethel. Priests and worshippers heard
him with incredulous astonishment. 1

"Here is Jehovah's message for the house of Israel :

"Seek me and you shall live.
Seek not Bethel,
go not to Gilgal,
cross not to Beersheba. . . .
Seek Jehovah and live,
lest he set Joseph's house ablaze with fire
that none can quench in Israel.

Your sacred festivals? I hate them, scorn them;
your sacrifices? I will not smell their smoke;
you offer me your gifts? I will not take them ;
you offer fatted cattle? I will not look at them.
No more of your 'hymns for me I
I will not listen to your lutes.

Go to Bethel, go on with your sins!

Pile sin on sin at Gilgal 1

Aye, sacrifice in the morning,

and every third day pay your tithes,

burn your dough as a thankoffering,

announce your freewill gifts

oh, make them public,

for you love all that, you Israelites 1

I saw the Lord standing beside the altar;

'Strike the pillars on the top,' said he,

'that the ceiling may be shaken,

break them on the heads of all the worshippers . . .

My eye will be upon them

for evil, not for good'".

i Amos v. 4-6, 21-23; iv. 4r-5; x. 1, 4 (Moffatt).

90 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

In thus attacking the cult Amos believed himself to be
harking back to an older and purer form of the religion of
Jehovah 1 . He was probably justified in his belief, at least
in a measure, and the tradition of the simpler worship of
an earlier day was doubtless sufficiently alive for his de-
nunciations to find some response in the popular conscience.
But in relation to the religion officially practised at the time,
his criticism was radical, and it is no wonder that Amaziah",
the priest of the "royal chapel", sent him packing for a
dangerous agitator. 2 Yet Amos was far from being the
fanatical nihilist he appeared to the priest. Certainly he
had no less keen a sense than Amaziah himself of the awful
holiness of God. The true "numinous" note is heard all
through his prophecies. But it is a holiness that reacts not
against breaches of irrational tabu, but against definite and
intelligible moral and social wrongs. 8

"They trample down the poor like dust,

and humble souls they harry;
father and son go in to the same girl

a profanation of my holy shrine!
They loll on garments seized in pledge

by every altar;
they drink the money taken in fines

in the temple of their God.

Listen to this, you men who crush the humble

and oppress the poor,
muttering, 'When will the new-moon be over,

that we may sell our grain?
When will the sabbath be done,

that our corn may be on sale?'
Small you make your measures,

large your weights,

you cheat by tampering with the scales
and all to buy up innocent folk,
to buy the needy for a pair of shoes,
to sell the very refuse of your grain.
Jehovah has sworn by the pride of Jacob,
'Never will I forget what you have done.' "

1 Amos v. 25. 2 Amos vii. 10-13. 8 Amos ii. 7-8; viii. 4-7 (Moffatt).

Holiness and Righteousness 91

While this sort of thing goes on, in fact, the most gorgeous
solemnities and the most appalling rites of expiation do noth-
ing to protect men from the "wrath" of an outraged holiness.
Jehovah demands not ritual, but simple justice: 1

"Let justice well up like fresh water,
let honesty roll in full tide."

Like Amos in the north, Isaiah in the south scourged the
futility of the sacred rites the sacrifices of bulls and goats,
the fasts and festivals, the solemn prayers, and all the weary
"temple-tramping". 2 Certainly there was never a man more
possessed by the sense of "holiness". His most habitual name
for God is "the Holy One", and his highest ideal for his peo-
ple is that

"They shall sanctify the Holy One of Jacob,
and shall stand in awe of the God of Israel ". a

But the only true way to "sanctify" God is to yield Him moral
obedience; for

"The Lord of Hosts is exalted in judgment,
and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness."*

The trivialities of an artificial cult are irrelevant to the awful
reality of such holiness, which demands a life of righteousness
in men. "Profanity" (that is, the reverse of holiness) is not
breach of tabu, but moral iniquity. 5

This is the theme of all the great prophets. Hosea crystal-
lizes the matter in a verse: 6

"I desire mercy and not sacrifice,
And the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings",

and a century later an anonymous prophet of the south finds
for the idea perfect and final expression: 7

1 Amos v. 24 (Moffatt). ! Isa. i. 10-15 et passim. * Id. xxix. 23.
' Id. v. 16. Id. ix. 17. Hosea vi. 6. 7 Micah vi. 6-8.

92 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah?

and bow myself before the high God?
Shall I come before him with offerings,

with calves of a year old?
Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams,

or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He hath shewed bhee, man, what is good,

and what doth Jehovah require of thee,
But to do justly and to love mercy,

and to walk humbly with thy God?"

With that great utterance religion has taken a decisive turn.
There is no going back on that.

It is to us so much a commonplace that religion involves
morality that we can scarcely feel the force of this tremendous
discovery. Ancient religion indeed regularly provides sanction
for tribal custom, as it is the fullest expression of the cor-
porate life of the tribe. And the religion of Jehovah, as we
have seen, early formed a rallying centre for the more heroic
and austere side of Hebrew life. But always in this religion
as in other religions the centre lay elsewhere in the myste-
rious, the irrational, the unethical. In classical Greece the
moralists found religion their enemy. In India to-day no
one looks to the temples as the strongholds of public morals.
Confucius made "virtue" (Te) a power in China by disso-
ciating his teaching from the superstitious religion of his time.
It is the Hebrew prophets who most clearly and uncompro-
misingly asserted that the holy is the righteous, and worship
itself a sham apart from the intention to be and to do good.

It is indeed not quite clear how far the denunciations of
the cult are to be understood as a root-and-branch condemna-
tion of any ritual whatever. It is certainly difficult to dis-
cover any kind of sympathy for ritual worship in Amos,
Isaiah, Micah, or Jeremiah. .Amos and Jeremiah even take

The Prophets and the Cultus 93

the view that sacrifice was no part of the original worship
of Jehovah. 1 Hosea on the other hand sometimes speaks
(with doubtful consistency) as though the abolition of sacri-
fice, sacred pillar, oracular "ephod", and household images
were a punishment for the abuse of what might have been
good things, and perhaps may be restored when Israel has
learnt the true essence of religion. 2 The Deuteronomists,
here as elsewhere more closely affiliated to Hosea than to any
other prophet, believed themselves to be applying the main
principles of prophetic teaching in a reformation which in-
cluded the purifying of the cult from abuses. Not till Ezekiel,
however, do we find a prophet whole-heartedly accepting a
purified cult as an integral part of religion.
"But even if we should allow that the greater prophets in
general did not contemplate a purely spiritual worship di-
vorced from any outward form, yet it remains true that they
took the momentous step of making holiness a moral ideal.
Once that was established, there was room for indefinite
advance; for it brought the fundamental religious idea within
the field of reason and judgment. If religion means the stimu-
lation and satisfaction of "numinous" emotion by thrilling
ceremonial, or the averting of hostile mana by apotropaic
rites, then it is something outside reason, not subject to value-
judgment, and alien from the ordered life of human society. It
can develop only by becoming ever more fantastic and ap-
palling, ever less in touch with social and rational values,
till we arrive at the level of Aztec religion or some of the
Indian cults. But if the "numinous" feeling can be redirected
or "sublimated" so that the most profound awe is felt for that
which is morally perfect, then though the Object of worship
remains in Its perfection beyond the reach of our apprehen-
sion, yet the social life of man, as ethically valued and guided,
becomes the true field of religion, because it is "of one sub-

1 Amos v. 25; Jer. vii. 22-23. * Hosea ii. 11, iii. 4.

94 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

stance" with that which is most truly divine. We are then
dealing with that which we can understand, criticize, and
control by the orderly processes of reason. Religious emotion
becomes a moral and social force, while it is itself elevated
and deepened by being associated with man's noblest part.
The more realistically and concretely the religious mind can
envisage the ethical stuff of life, the more powerful is the
ameliorating effect upon religion itself and upon social morals.
The prophets are realist and concrete to the utmost in their
religious valuation of the life of their time. Their descrip-
tions enable us to form a vivid picture of their world, and
their criticisms build up an intensely concrete and definite
social ideal. What they condemn as an affront to God's
holiness is inhumanity, arrogance, dishonesty, falsehood, self-
indulgence, greed, disloyalty, and the like. What they demand
as God's rightful service is kindness, justice, chivalry towards
the weak and suffering, integrity in business and social rela-
tions, incorruptibility in the administration of the law, honour
in politics, and such simple, reasonable, practical virtues as
are the basis of a sound society.

Very striking is their insistence on fundamental truth and
clear-sightedness in matters of morals. The virtue of a ritual
religion is scrupulosity; the virtues of ethical religion are
intelligence and sincerity. Isaiah accuses his contemporaries
of calling evil good and good evil. 1 They have made lies their
refuge, and under falsehood they have hid themselves. 2 Hosea
complains that Ephraim is like a silly dove, without under-
standing; liquor and lust have deprived the people of their
wits. 3 In "lack of knowledge" both these prophets find the
cause of national downfall. 4 The knowledge they desiderate
is, of course, quite other than that technique of ritual ob-
servance which Isaiah says the people had learned by rote. 5

1 Isa. v. 20. 2 Isa. xxviii. 15. 3 Hos. viii. 11, iv. 11.

* Isa. v. 13; Hos. iv. 6. 8 Isa. xxix. 13 (R.V. mg.).

The Virtue of Intelligence 95

It is knowledge of God in terms of His moral and spiritual
demands. Such knowledge, they hold, is natural to man if
he is sincere and open-minded: ignorance of God is against
nature. 1

"The ox knoweth his owner

and the ass his master's crib;
Israel doth not know,

my people doth not consider."

Jeremiah pronounces this ethical understanding of God's
nature the most precious of all attainments: 2

"Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,

neither let the mighty man glory in his might;
let not the rich man glory in his riches,
but let him that glorieth glory in this,
that he understandeth and knoweth me
that I am Jehovah,
which exercises lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the

earth;
*. for in these things I delight, saith Jehovah."

When once men begin to think of God in terms of their own

K highest values, superstition is vanquished.

Enough has been said to suggest how tremendous a step hi
human development was taken by the prophets who reinter-

* preted the holy in terms of the morally excellent. It was a
new, a creative idea. It must be repeated that the idea of
holiness in itself could not have brought forth this conception.
' In itself it is more apt to develop a religion like that of ancient
Mexico a religion of blood, terror, and slavery. Nor again
do the prophets come to it by argument from step to step.
Indeed it is hard to see how so fundamental an idea could be
reached by argument (that it can be defended by argument
is another matter). The prophets themselves say that they
saw that Jehovah, the Holy One, is a God of righteousness;

* Isa. i. 3 (R.V.). * Jer. ix. 23-24 (R.V.)

96 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

that they heard Him say that He desires mercy and not sac-
rifice. It isolear that the idea came to them; and if we believe
in God at all, we may well accept their conviction that it came
to them from God, not because of the imaginative form in
which so lofty an idea could not but come, but because of
its inherent truth and worthiness.

We have seen that the prophetic reinterpretation of religion
called for insight into the moral demands of God, and this
opened the way for an understanding of God Himself in terms
of moral values. This leads to the second of the great ideas
by which the prophets were inspired a new and worthier
idea of the character of God Himself.

It may perhaps be thought that in following this order of
thought we are putting the cart before the horse. Is it not
true that men's ideas of the demands of religion depend on
their conception of the character of God? In a broad way,
yes; but perhaps not so directly as is commonly supposed.
On the one hand many backward peoples believe in a remote
Supreme Being who is vaguely good, while their actual re-
ligious practice is full of abominations. On the other hand
it is quite possible for the moral standards of a people, sup-
ported up to a point by religious sanctions, to be in advance
of the character of the God to whom they appeal. If God,
/ as the object of the "numinous" feeling, is Mystery, "com-
pletely other" than ourselves, it may be precisely in this that
He is other that He may act in ways which human morality
would repudiate. It is thus that the moral standards of
Homer's heroes are an improvement on those of Olympus,
and that there must be thousands of worshippers of Krishna
who would never stoop to the conduct they attribute to him.
Is there not a story of a Calvinist preacher who explained
that "the Almighty is compelled to do many things in his
official capacity which He would scorn in His private capac-

The Character of God 97

ity"? Indeed the question might be raised whether at the
present time the next step in human morals is not being hin-
dered, particularly in regard to the penal system and to war,
by a lingering belief among Christians that God treats His
enemies in ways in which we are already ashamed of treating
our own? 1 The necessary condition of wholesome develop-
ment in religion and ethics is that the idea of God which is
central to worship should be kept in close and constant touch
with rational morals.

It may often be that a higher conception of God comes by
following out the implications of moral demands of which the
conscience has already become aware. It was partly so in
Israel. Jehovah, as we have seen, started with the inesti-
mable advantage of having a decided character of his own.
The naive anthropomorphism of early ideas about Him was
of great value and significance for subsequent development.
Though He had the "numinous" qualities of mystery and
terror in a high degree, yet Jehovah the God of Armies was
always personal enough, individual enough, to challenge com-
parison between His ways and the ways of men. In early
nomadic days the conception of Jehovah as a heroic warrior
gave sanction to the martial virtues of desert tribes. In
Canaan He all but lost His personal identity. He inherited
cults quite alien from the spirit of His religion. He was
identified or confused with local Els and Baals whose "per-
sonality" was a fluctuating quantity, till no one knew whether
there was one Jehovah among a multitude of Baals, or a
multitude of Jehovahs who were also Baals. (That is why

^

the Deuteronomic reformers laid down the fundamental article
of belief in the form, "Jehovah thy God is one Jehovah". 2 )
In the midst of such disintegration His faithful devotees could
only hold on with obstinate conservatism to the antique ideas

1 See Lily Dougall, God's Way ivith Man, Essay IV.

2 Deut. vi. 4.

98 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

of the desert. Nabis, Nazirites, 1 Rechabites 2 all have reac-
tionary or atavistic traits, and the Jehovah whom they pitted
against the more civilized deities of farm, market, and city
has something of the uncouth look of a fighting squire from
an older time, scorning the softness of courtiers and the wili-
ness of prosperous hucksters, yet a little awkward and self-
conscious in their presence. Civilization was divorced from
the traditional religion, and religion suffered as well as civili-
zation. That is one reason why the conception of the char-
acter of Jehovah in the ninth-century prophets shows so little
advance on that of the period of the Judges, if it does not
show actual decline. In the ninth century Jehovah is still
cruel, capricious, irritable, unjust (by human standards of
justice), and untruthful. In early days such faults might
pass in the character of a superhuman tribal chief, magnificent
in courage and might, loyal to his clansmen, royally generous
in his gifts, stern in discipline and crafty in counsel. Civilized
times and a settled social order demanded something more.
Melkart of Tyre no more than the Baals of Canaan could
hold out any hope of a higher morality.

The prophets of the classical period brought the overdue
advance in ideas of Jehovah's character. As they led religion
out of the twilight of fantasy into the wholesome light of
rational values, it was clear to them that God must Himself be
at least as good as they saw He expected men to be, how-
ever difficult it might be to recognize human standards of
conduct in a superhuman person.

The prophets' remoulding of the idea of God is indeed, as
we must frankly confess, partial. There is more perhaps in
their conception of the divine character which we should wish
to correct than in their ethical ideals for human society. Yet (_
certain dominant conceptions they did once for all establish.

1 Amoa ii. 11-12; Judges xiii. 5, xvi. 17: the regulations in Num. vi. are
a perpetuation of ancient custom in modern ritual forms.
* Jer. xxxv. 2-11 ; 2 Kings x. 15-17.

The Consistency of God 99

First, the prophets tell us that God is not capricious but
consistent in His actions. It seems to have been extremely
difficult for men to conceive of a really consistent divine
character. We can partly understand why. If the divine is
simply the "completely other", we may give up the attempt
to find any principle in its actions. If it represents mere
power raised to a high degree ancient peoples are familiar
with power in their chiefs, asserting itself characteristically
by way of irresponsible and arbitrary action. The literature
which antedates the great prophets is full of examples of
divine caprice. Thus Jehovah accepted Abel's sacrifice and
rejected Cain's, just because He so chose. 1 He called Moses
in the desert, and gave him the most signal tokens of His
favour and confidence, and then before he reached Egypt,
"Jehovah met him and sought to kill him". 2 David was puz-
zled to account for Saul's malignity towards him. "If it be
Jehovah", he said, "that hath stirred thee up against me,
let him smell an offering, but if it be the children of men,
cursed be they before Jehovah!" 3 Elijah had to reproach
his God 3 for causelessly killing the son of the good widow to
whom He had sent him, and by mingled expostulations, ap-
peals, and "symbolic" practice induced Him to reverse His
action. 4 In the pre-prophetic literature such non-moral traits
appear alongside of those higher conceptions of the character
of Jehovah which were present from an early stage of the
religion of Israel. 5

In contrast to all this the prophets make the sublime as-
sumption that God does act on principle. It may be difficult
to discover and define the principle of His action in particular
cases, but He is never merely capricious, and never incon-
sistent with Himself. He has a settled purpose, and will not
be moved from it. "He also is wise," says Isaiah, "and will
not call back His words". The idea is finely expressed in a

1 Gen. iv. 4-5 (J). Exod. iv. 24. * 1 Sam. xxvi. 19.

* 1 Kings xvii. 20-22. e See chap. II, p. 54.

100 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy
phrase put into the mouth of Samuel by his seventh-century
biographer: "The Strength of Israel is not a man that He
should repent". 1 The "otherness" of God is here invoked
in a remarkable way. Contrary to general belief at the time,
God is unlike man, not in exercising a royally irresponsible
power, but in being perfectly self-consistent. He is too far
above human variableness to be moved from His course by
"smelling an offering". So averse are the great prophets from
the idea of mollifying an offended Deity and persuading Him
to change His plans, that they sometimes speak as though
prayer and intercession were in vain. 2 In fact there is an
unresolved tension between the thought of the unchangeable-
ness of God and the reality of repentance and forgiveness.
Yet on this consistency of the divine character is ultimately
built up that conception of His trustworthiness or "faithful-
ness" which is the only sure ground of intelligent faith. 3

Next, if Jehovah is consistent in His action, there must
be some discoverable ground for the "wrath" which He was
believed to express in the infliction of misfortune. The idea
of the "wrath of God" plays an important part in all religions
at a certain stage of development. Behind it lies the primitive
conception of the terrible or awe-inspiring manifestation of
the "holy" the mysterium tremendum. It is neither personal,
rational, nor moral. At the anthropomorphic stage this reac-
tion of the "holy" is conceived as the devastating anger of a
tremendously powerful Being, who is naturally prone to just
such unreasonable tantrums as one knows in one's tribal chief.
One hastens to propitiate Him.

The prophets never think of questioning the general belief
that misfortune is the result of the wrath of Jehovah. But
they cannot allow that He is ever angry without reason.

1 1 Sam. rv. 29.

3 Isa. i. 15, xxxi. 2; Micah iii. 4; Jer. vii. 16, adv. 11-12, rv. 1-2.
3 The faithfulness of God is one of the recurrent themes of the Psalms;
cf. also 1 Cor. i. 9, x. 13; 2 Tim. ii. 13.

The Wrath of God 101

No good man is so. There is a principle in His wrath the
principle of retributive justice. This is the central theme of
prophecy in the eighth and seventh centuries. It arouses the
most intense emotion in the prophets, and spurs their imagina-
tion to its boldest flights. Writing at a period when the out-
look was increasingly gloomy, they proclaimed the misfortunes
they saw around them to be Jehovah's just punishment for the
sin of men for sin not in the sense of any breach of tabu, but
in the sense of such well-defined moral wrongs as inhumanity,
injustice, and falsehood. Thus Amos reviews a series of
recent misfortunes famine, drought, vegetation-pests, plague,
and earthquake. Other observers no doubt agreed with him
in attributing them to the wrath of God and they redoubled
their devotion to the sacrificial ritual. Amos announces that
Jehovah sent these troubles to warn Israel of His disapproval
of their wrong-doing, and that since the warning has brought
no improvement things will grow worse until utter destruction
comes. 1 Isaiah perhaps had this prophecy of Amos in mind
in writing that sombre poem 2 which celebrates present and
imminent disasters, with the recurrent refrain,

"For all this His anger is not turned away,
But His hand is stretched out still".

Here is the basis of the "eschatology of woe" as we find it in
the great prophets. Those may well be right who think that a
certain shuddering dread of some ultimate disaster was an
element in Hebrew religion from a very early date, 3 though
our extant sources do not justify us in saying so definitely. But
if it was so, it was no more than a mythological form of
recording the "numinous" terror of God's irrational "holi-
ness". For the classical prophets it is a "fearful looking for
of judgment" the inevitable issue of a just God's resentment

1 Amos iv. 6-12. 2 Isa. ix. 8-x. 4.

* So H. Gressmann: Ursprung derisraditisch-judischen Eschatologie. I 61 Teil.

102 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

of continued wrong-doing. Their visions of appalling catas-
trophes are an imaginative apprehension of what to them
is intuitively certain that God will visit sin with exact re-
tribution. For their powerful and elemental thinking the issue
is as simple as it well can be. Since God is just do good and

all will be well; do evil and destruction will follow. 1

i

"If ye be willing and obedient,

ye shall eat the good of the land;
But if ye refuse and rebel,
ye shall be devoured by the sword
for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it".

It has been said above that the prophetic imagination, like
that of all true poets, is not fantasy, but a function of reason
in its widest sense. And here we see that some of the most
highly emotional and most imaginatively wrought passages
in prophet after prophet are controlled by a central idea which,
if we grant their premises, is simple "horse-sense".

The relentless following out of this idea led some of the
prophets into almost unrelieved pessimism, which seemed only
too fully justified by their nation's fate. Yet the pain of exile
raised questions whether the correspondence of desert and
punishment were really so exact as the prophetic theology
assumed. Moreover, the development of the idea of indi-
vidual moral responsibility made the doctrine of exact retribu-
tion still more difficult to square with facts. 2 Isaiah had
stated the principle of retribution very simply and quite gen-
erally, having in view the destinies of peoples as corporate
wholes. In that sphere it is not difficult to see a broad rhythm
of historic movement, which does exhibit something of that
inherent justice of things. Ezekiel applies the principle with
characteristic rigidity to the fate of individuals: 3

1 Isa. i. 19-20. 2 See especially Ezek. xviii.

8 Ezek. xviii. 26-30. Compare here the Hindu doctrine of Karma, which
is the result of a perfectly logical application of the doctrine of retribution,
protected from any interference by ideas of the "grace" of God and extended
to an infinite series of lives instead of being confined to one.

The Doctrine of Retribution 103

"When the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness
and committeth iniquity, he shall die because of it; ... Again
when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he
hath committed and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall
save his soul alive. . . .Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of
the Lord is not equal. house of Israel, are not my ways equal?
are not your ways unequal? Therefore will I judge you, house
of Israel, every one according to his ways."

In the next age, thinkers like the author of Job and some of
the Psalmists felt with increasing force the difficulty of justi-
fying that position by the facts of this life and of course
no other life is as yet in view. Indeed, Jeremiah, a clearer
though a less rigid thinker than Ezekiel, had himself con-
fessed the difficulty: "Wherefore", he asks, "doth the way
of the wicked prosper?" 1 But apart from that painful prob-
lem, the religious spirit can never rest content with a bleak
"Pelagianism" like EzekiePs. Even when it cannot see its
way to consistency, it insists that God does something more
than recognize and duly recompense the goodness or badness
of men. It is to the credit of the prophets that they did not
let a logical insistence on the justice of God obscure the wit-
ness of experience to other sides of His character. To these
we shall turn immediately. Yet let us place on record the
epoch-making importance (in the strict sense of that abused
epithet) of the discovery that a principle of justice is some-
where embedded in the divine dealings. The mind of man
will not willingly let that discovery drop, however the notion
of justice may need to be modified.

If Amos is the pioneer in proclaiming the justice of God,
Hosea has the credit of enunciating the complementary truth
of the grace of God. He is indeed as sure as Amos that

1 Jer. xii. 1. See further chap. VIII, pp. 181-182.

104 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

Jehovah is just and that disaster awaits the guilty people of
Israel. Yet when he contemplates the execution of the sen-
tence he feels a "stop in his mind". He had loved a woman.
They married and she bore him children. Then she left him
for another man, and fell into degradation. And yet he found
he loved her still. 1 How then could Jehovah abandon His
people? "When Israel was a child, then I loved him". 2 If
that is true, and if a good man could not throw over the wife
he loved, there must be something eternal in the love of God,
and the maintenance of His justice could not demand that
He should ever hate the sinner.

"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?

How shall I deliver thee, Israel? . . .
I will not return to destroy Ephraim,

For I am God and not man
The Holy One in the midst of thee." 8

Once again we have the idea of the "holy" the mysterious
"otherness" of the divine interpreted in a rational and ethi-
cal sense, within the sphere of value. As the author of Samuel
appealed to that "otherness" against any thought of human
caprice in God, so Hosea appeals to it against any suggestion
that God could love more feebly than a man. Just because
He is holy, God must needs love beyond the poor capacities
of a human heart. Holiness is again being reinterpreted in
terms of the highest human values. It is worth noticing that
this process takes place by way of a "sublimation", as the
psychologists say, of sexual experience, and by way of reac-
tion against the sexual degradation of Baal-worship. 4 It
would perhaps not be too much to say that we have here the

1 Hos. i., iii. 1-3. That this is a true story and no symbolic fiction seems
to me, as to most interpreters of the prophet, self-evident, though it is not
easy to be sure what the precise facts of the story were.

- Hos. xi. 1. Hos. xi. 8, 9.

* Hos. ii. 2-8, 12-14, etc.

The Love of God 105

one positive outcome of the disastrous experiment of Israel
with that form of worship. There was little trace of "tender
emotion" in Jehovah of Sinai. The divinities who competed
for His people's worship found a place in their cults for those
softer, more feminine elements which his original stern mas-
culinity excluded. Their degraded eroticism was bitterly
denounced by the prophets, and by none more bitterly than
by Hosea. Yet the conflict with the Baals challenged religious
experience to find in Jehovah himself something corresponding
to those tenderer elements in man which though they may
lend themselves to gross perversion yet provide the stuff for
the noblest of human relations.

It is the nature and property of love to have mercy and
to forgive; and through the stern proclamations of Jehovah's
relentless justice runs a strain of wistful belief in His mercy.
Isaiah was initiated into the prophetic office through an expe-
rience which included the sense of forgiveness, 1 and though
the message he was then bidden to deliver held out no hope
for the guilty nation, 2 yet he never ceased to call for repent-
ance, and he pinned his faith to the watchword, ."A remnant
will repent". 3 He gave it as a name to his son, Shear-jashub;
and saw in the little group of his own family and disciples
the nucleus of a people on whom Jehovah would yet have
mercy. Similarly Jeremiah, with an even more absolute and
well-grounded pessimism about the corrupt generation to
whom he spoke, nevertheless falls back, when all seems lost,
upon the hope of a "new covenant", by which sin will be for-
given, and God's law written on the heart of His people. 4 In
both prophets the belief in God's mercy is so imperfectly har-
monized with the dominant conception of His justice that it
has sometimes been thought necessary to excise the more
optimistic utterances as later interpolations, but this is prob-
ably going too far. The prophets are not logicians bound by

i Isa. vi. 7. Isa. vi. 9-12.

Isa. x. 21, vii. 3, viii. 16-18, xxx. 6, etc. * Jer. xxxi. 31-34.

106 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

a mechanical consistency. Ezekiel's rigid "Pelagianism"
might seem to have left no loophole for unmerited mercy, and
yet he cannot rest in it. There is no possible hope of mercy,
he thinks, unless men repent and do good. This is indeed
the general prophetic belief. But what if they will not repent?
Then God (not for their meriting, but "for His own name's
sake") will intervene and create in them a "new heart", so
that they will repent. 1 This is conceived in a crudely super-
natural way, but it testifies to the conviction that there must
be something in God beyond mere retributive justice. EzekiePs
younger contemporary, the "Second Isaiah", is most definitely
in this matter the successor of Hosea. Like him he finds in
Jehovah something corresponding to the "tender emotion" in
man.

"But Zion said, 'Jehovah hath forsaken me,

And the Lord hath forgotten me.'
Can a woman forget her sucking child,

That she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Yea, these may forget,

Yet will I not forget you*

Remember these things, Jacob,

And Israel, for thou art my servant:
I have found thee; thou art my servant

O Israel, thou shouldest not forget me,
I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions

And as a cloud thy sins.
Return unto me

For I have redeemed thee." 8

The mercy of Jehovah is thus in some sort prior to repentance
and grounded firmly upon the "faithfulness" of the perfectly
good God. As in the earlier prophets the thought of retribu-
tion most kindles the imagination, so in this prophet the idea
of a righteousness revealed in saving men clothes itself with

*

1 Ezek. xxxvi.

3 Isa. xliv, 21-22 (R.V.) .

2 Isa. xlix. 14^15.

Righteousness and Mercy 107

the emotion which finds imaginative outlet. And it is thor-
oughly characteristic of the whole prophetic outlook that this
merciful and "saving" righteousness is conceived as the chief
part of the "otherness" and (as we may fairly call it at this
stage of development) the transcendence of God. 1

"Let the wicked forsake his way,

And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
And let him return unto Jehovah, for he will have mercy upon him,

And to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

Neither are your ways my ways, saith Jehovah.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts than your thoughts."

It cannot be said that the prophets of the classical period
reached a completely unified conception of the divine charac-
ter in which justice and mercy find a satisfactory reconcilia-
tion. Nor did their successors in Judaism substantially
advance the matter. They bequeathed the problem to Chris-
tianity to solve. Yet it is a permanent contribution of the
prophets to the knowledge of God that they saw with the
utmost clearness that if God be other than man He is so in
nothing so much as in being more completely just, more utterly
loving, and withal more self-consistent than frail humanity
can ever be. This they saw, and they have given their vision
to the world in imaginative utterance which makes us sharers
in their experience.

The prophets then led the way in a reinterpretation of the
nature of religion, by moralizing the idea of the holy; and
in a reinterpretation of the character of God through ethical
values. We must now add that they led the way in a new
estimate of the scope and range of the divine action. They
became in a word the founders of ethical monotheism.

JIsa.lv. 7-9 (R.V.)-

108 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

Jehovah was a tribal deity with a local habitation. Yet the
fact that He was believed to have adopted His tribe at a
point of history by a "covenant" made with them at Sinai,
meant that from the outset there was something that trans-
cended a merely natural relation; and His early migration
from Sinai to Canaan left Him somewhat freer from strictly
local ties than many other gods. But it was still obvious to
David that if he went into exile from Canaan he must needs
"serve other gods". 1 Even within Canaan the God of Israel i*.
had to fight for His position. When Elijah claimed for Him
the power to give and withhold rain within Israelite terri-
tory, 2 it was a definite encroachment on the province of the
Baals. But that belief was still struggling for acceptance in
the time of Hosea 3 and later. Nevertheless from a period
before the great prophets functions were attributed to Jehovah
which had a more than local significance. National legends
represented Him as displaying His power even in the land
of Egypt, turning the holy Nile itself into blood and drying
up the Red Sea. 4 Not only so, but at least in the southern
kingdom He was before the eighth century made the subject of
creation-legends, 5 and represented as "the judge of all the
earth". 6 It is possible that something is due to the fusion
of Jehovah of Sinai with the El of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, 7 who is thought by some to have been a heavenly
Father-god like those of many primitive religions, such as the
Baiame of the Australian aborigines, or at a higher level the
Chinese Shang-ti. 8 However this may be, there was latent
in the religion of Jehovah the possibility of wider activities
than those of a mere tribal god.

* 1 Sam. xxvi. 19.

* 1 Kings xvii. 1, xviii. 1-2, 17-18, 36-45. It seems clear that after two and
a half years of drought the rival deities are called upon to give rain, and Jehovah
beats the Baal on his own ground. See J. G. Eraser, Folklore in the O.T., p. 340.

Hos. ii. 5, 8-9, 12, 21-22; vii. 14 (R.V. mg., cf. 1 Kings xviii. 28).

* Exod. vii. 18, 20-21 (JE) ; xiv. 21 (J). Gen. ii. 4-25 (J).

Gen. xviii. 25. 7 Exod. iii. 13-15 (E).

8 Sodcrblom, Dos Werden des Gottesglaubens, pp. 305-307.

The Tribal God 109

But, however wide His sway might be, His interest was
bound up with His own people, and whatever powers He pos-
sessed were used for the benefit of Israel and the confusion of
their enemies. Other nations belonged to other gods, whose
existence and might it never occurred to the early Israelites
to deny, though they trusted that Jehovah was stronger than
they. If temporarily the enemies of Israel prevailed, it was
because Jehovah was "wroth" with His people; but certainly
He would save them in the end, if only for His own name's
sake, since a god without a tribe is in a woeful case. The
Day of Jehovah would come, in which He would finally vindi-
cate His power by the destruction of foreigners and the humili-
ation of their gods. Along this line it is possible to arrive
at a certain kind of monotheism, but to reach an ethical
monotheism a fresh start must be made.

It cannot be doubted that such prophets as Elijah and
Elisha held this antique view of the scope of Jehovah's interest
and power. Amos made a revolution in religion when he
repudiated it. 1

"What are you more than Ethiopians,

O Israelites, Jehovah asks,
I brought up Israel from Egypt? yes,
and Philistines from Crete,
from Kir the Aramaeans."

The Day of Jehovah is coming; yes, indeed; but Israel has
no cause to welcome it. It will bring the vindication of
Jehovah's power, not on behalf of Israel but on behalf of
righteousness, to Israel's cost. 2 With artful irony the prophet
calls the roll of the nations Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom,
Ammon, Moab, and predicts destruction for their sins at
the hands of Jehovah: and then just as his hearers are ap-

i Amos ix. 7 (Moffatt).
* Amos v. 18-20.

110 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

plauding the prowess of their national God, he turns upon
them with the startling words

"After crime on crime of Israel, I will not relent
You alone of all men have I cared for,
Therefore I will punish you for your misdeeds". 1

It was extraordinarily bold; but bolder still for Isaiah to
proclaim actually in time of war that the Assyrian invader
was Jehovah's instrument to do justice upon sinful Judah ; 2
boldest of all perhaps for Micah to predict that Zion should
be ploughed as a field; 3 and for Jeremiah to declare, in the
last crisis of the war of independence with Babylon, that it
was Jehovah's will that Judah should go under. 4

It is doubtful if any government in Europe (or America)
during the late war would have been more clement than was
Zedekiah in dealing with such blatant dejaitisme. Yet Zede-
kiah and the nabis who supported the war honestly believed,
as had all their fathers, that God had as a matter of course
exclusive care for His own tribe, and that nothing could mat-
ter to Him so much as the triumph of their cause. 5 We on
the other hand recognize (when war fever abates) that God
is in fact essentially a God of righteousness, and must care
more for Right than for the "rights" of any particular nation.
That was first taught by the prophets of Israel. The fact
that after 2700 years the conviction is still far from secure
in the minds of "Christian" peoples indicates how amazing
a discovery it was in the eighth century B.C. It is no wonder
that not all prophets were so ruthlessly consistent in drawing
out its implications as were Amos and Jeremiah. The wonder
is that any of them should have conceived so revolutionary an
idea in the world of their time.

1 Amos i. 3-ii. 16 (ii. 4-5 being by general consent an interpolation. The
translation is Moffatt's).
* Isa. x. 5.

8 Micah iii. 12, cf. Jer. xxvi. 18.
4 Jer. ix. 11, x. 22, xviii. 13-17, xxiv. 8-10, etc.
1 Jer. xxxvii. 3-xxxviii. 28.

Prophetic Criticism of National Religion 111

It was by this route that the prophets of Israel approached
monotheism. Elsewhere one God might attain a lonely su-
premacy either through the victory of his people over other
peoples with their gods; or through fusion or identification
with other gods; or through the sacrifice of a vividly personal
identity to a vague and abstract pantheism. Hebrew mono-
theism arose through the intuitive perception that a God
who is righteous first and last must be as universal as right-
eousness itself.

In taking the view that God cares, first and last for right-
eousness, the prophets did not mean to deny that "mighty
acts" of the living God had indeed been wrought in the history
of Israel. There was an overruling Providence in their stormy
destinies, serving the purpose of eternal Right. The same
Providence had guided Philistines and Aramseans, and by the
same principle of justice Assyria and Moab were judged. Yet
the course of Israel's history had represented the main line
of providential action. Israel had a certain intimacy with
Jehovah, which meant that they were more directly exposed
than other folk to His righteous judgments, but also that
when they were loyal to Him and to the right, they would
experience the most signal tokens of His saving power. Isaiah
had an intense conviction that Jehovah, whose glory filled
the earth, was enthroned on Zion; and when he gave to King
Ahaz the watchword "Immanuel God is with us", 1 it was
with the sense that the immediate presence of the righteous
God of the whole earth was there, to judge and to save. Again,
he proclaimed that Jehovah had brought the Assyrian into
the land, an irresistible foe to a corrupt people, sunk in luxury
and injustice. Entangling alliances and expensive military
preparations were all futile. 2 But let the people only repent
and do the right, and the holy Presence, a terror to ill-doing,
would be their surest shield against calamity. 3 "The Assyrian

i Isa. vii. 10-14, viii. 10. 2 Isa. xrii. 1-14.

8 Isa. xxviii. 16, xxix. 1-8.

112 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

shall fall with the sword not of man". 1 It so happened that
the Assyrian forces unexpectedly retreated. The fact is cer-
tain; the reason remains obscure. Isaiah was remembered,
ironically enough, chiefly as the patriotic prophet who had
declared the inviolability of Zion 2 a doctrine against which
Jeremiah had to protest with all his might, 8 in vain.

Jeremiah indeed was sure that Jehovah was God of the
whole earth; and he broke through all local limitations when
he assured the exiles in Babylon that they could still wor-
ship Jehovah in the fullest sense away from the Holy Land. 4
Yet he too held that the religious community of the future
would be continuous with historic Israel. 5 Though that peo-
ple had contumaciously broken the ancient "covenant" with
its God a covenant so recently renewed with every circum-
stance of solemnity under Josiah yet Jehovah would grant
a "new covenant", upon a new basis of inward and individual
knowledge of God, and it would still be true, in a deeper
sense than ever before, that "they shall be my people and I
will be their God". 6 In that glorious future pagan peoples also j
would come to the knowledge of Jehovah, and in some sort be
incorporate in His people. 7 Yet a renovated Israel is still the ^
focus of His providence. <

There is here an undeniable limitation to the universality f
of God. His rule indeed is universal, and His interest in man-
kind is universal ; yet He works, in history primarily through
His relations with a particular people. The limitation was
inevitable and even salutary at that stage. Monotheism is
indeed the ideal form of religion; but even monotheism can
be too dearly purchased at the expense of a vivid sense of the
personal dealings of God with man in actual history. History

1 Isa. xxxi.

* Isa. zzzvii. (from a seventh-century biography of the prophet, cf . 2 Kings
*) s Jer. vii. 3-15.

* Jer. xxix. 115, cf. Ezek. xi. 16.

6 Jer. xxiv. 4-7, xxxii. 6-16, 36-44.

* Jer. xxxi. 31-34. 7 j er> j^ 19^20.

Nationalism and Universalism 113

is always particular and concrete. If God is a living God
whose purpose works in history, then He must have particular
relations with a human society. The conception of humanity
as one family was not within the range of thought at that
period. The idea of a community formed purely upon the
basis of individual response to the love of God was only
adumbrated by Jeremiah. Thus if the love of God was to
remain an effective religious idea, there must be a people
in whose history His love for men could in the future, as in
the past, be manifested. 1

"Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love

Therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee."

There was something here too precious to be lost, and Jere-
miah served the truth well in holding firmly to his confidence
in the loyalty of Jehovah amid the faithlessness of men, a
loyalty which for him could only mean that despite all its sins
Israel would be granted forgiveness and a renewed oppor-
tunity of becoming serviceable to the divine purpose.

Ezekiel was so persuaded of the truth of this that he set
forth in exile the outlines of a policy of reconstruction, which
indeed in many ways involved a reaction towards ways of
religion repudiated by the greatest prophets. His picture
of the future is a dramatization of the conception that Jehovah
is Lord of the whole world, reigning, however, through His
own people, who have direct access to Him. 2 He was probably
the first of the prophets whose names are known to us to give
a recognized place in his scheme to the popular hope of an
ideal Ruler, or "Messiah". 3 The "Messianic" prophecies
found in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah are widely held
to belong to the period of the Exile; and we can well under-
stand that when the national dynasty was brought to an end
the hope of restoration should have been embodied in the ideal

1 Jer. xxxi. 3. ' Ezek. xl.-xlviii.

3 Ecek. ixxiv. 23-24, etc.

114 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

figure of a great King, whether a "righteous Scion" of David,
or a superhuman personage. The whole Messianic belief must
be understood as an imaginative expression of the conviction
that the great God has purposes yet unfulfilled which He
must accomplish in and through His people. According to the
level of religious belief and experience the idea might become
subservient to the most vulgar kind of chauvinism, or to a
high ethical monotheism.

This peculiar combination of a belief in the universal sov-
ereignty of God with a highly concrete conception of His par-
ticular Providence in history, is found most fully developed
in the prophecies which announced the close of the Exile,
incorporated in the second part of the Book of Isaiah (com-
monly referred to as the "Second Isaiah"). It is indeed in
these writings that we first recognize monotheism in the strict
sense, that is, the belief that Jehovah is not merely the only
God whom Israel may rightly worship, and not merely the
supreme God of the pantheon, but actually the only God
there is. Other so-called gods are mere illusion. "Thus saith
Jehovah the King of Israel, and his redeemer Jehovah of
hosts: 'I am the first and the last, and beside me there is no
God' "- 1 He is "the everlasting God, the creator of .the ends
of the earth". 2 He made man; He orders the destinies of all
peoples, sets up and pulls down their rulers. He used Baby-
lon for His purpose, and when Babylon in pride outstepped
the limits of her divine mission, He raised up Cyrus to punish
her and to carry further His righteous design. 3

This righteous design, however, is to be understood by ref-
erence to the destinies of Israel. From of old Jehovah chose
that people to be the object of His special providence. From
the days of Abraham, the Friend of God, He has led Israel. 4

1 Isa. xliv. 6-20, cf. xlv. 21-22, xlvi. 9.

Isa. xl. 28.

3 Isa. xliv. 21-xlv. 7.

Isa. xli. 8-14.

The People of God 115

When the people proved false and rebelled against His purpose
He "hid His face" in righteous wrath, and gave them over
to their enemies for punishment. But He was faithfull still to
His people, and now that the punishment is complete His
ancient kindness reasserts itself, and He will prosper them
once more. 1 This hope of restoration is not the unethical self-
confidence of the "false prophets". On the contrary, the
promises are addressed to them "that know righteousness, the
people in whose heart is my law". 2 The righteousness of God
is manifested not merely in delivering His people from their
foes, but in making them a righteous nation. The whole
national history is subordinate to the purpose of eternal right.
And the purpose itself extends beyond Israel.

Here a twofold strain reveals itself in the prophet's thought.
At times he speaks as though Jehovah's purpose would be
fulfilled in the establishment of an Israelite empire super-
seding the empires of Babylon and Persia, when the nations
shall "lick the dust" before the chosen people. 3 But at other
times his thought soars higher. He sees Israel as God's
"servant" for the enlightenment of the heathen. 4

"I Jehovah have called thee in righteousness,

and will hold thy hand,
and will form thee and give thee for a covenant of the people,

for a light of the Gentiles;
to open the blind eyes,

to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

and them that sit in darkness from the prison house.
I am Jehovah; that is my name;

and my glory will I not give to another,

neither my praise to graven images".

Here the implications of monotheism are clearly drawn.
Since Jehovah is the only God, His purpose must be to make

Isa. xlii, 18-xliii. 11.

3 Isa. xlis. 22-26, cf. xliii, 3-4.

a Isa. li. 7.

Isa. xlii. 5-9 (R.V. mg.), cf. li. 4-6.

116 The Content of Old Testament Prophecy

Himself known to all peoples. And the reason He called
Israel to be His "servant", and trained him through history
in the way of righteousness, was that ultimately Israel might
be a missionary nation, bearing witness to the righteousness
of God among all peoples. For it is Jehovah's will that all
nations shall be saved. 1

"There is no God else beside me,

a just God and a saviour.
Look upon me and be ye saved,

all the ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is none else.
By myself have I sworn,

the word is gone forth from my mouth in righteousness

and shall not return,
that unto me every knee shall bow,

every tongue shall swear."

This is the high-water mark of prophetic religion. Obviously
there is still a tension between universalism and nationalism,
and the Jewish religion never wholly succeeded in resolving
it. The two tendencies are in manifest conflict throughout
the post-exilic period, and on the whole the narrower ten-
dency is winning. It remained for Christianity to reveal the
full implications of monotheism.

The achievement of the prophets is, when all is said, a
most remarkable advance in religious ideas. They discovered
a God whose divinity is consummately revealed in personal
relations with men upon principles intelligible in the light of
the highest human values a God who is both righteous and
loving. They saw that as a "living God" He manifests Him-
self in concrete historical processes. And this righteous and
living God they saw to be necessarily universal in His activity.
There is but one righteousness, and there can be but one God,
if the will of God be indeed the moral absolute. Holding

i lea. xlv. 21-23 (R.V.).

Ethical Monotheism 117

firmly to this belief they were also convinced that His right-
eous will is the sole finally effective force in the universe. Such
an idea of God, emerging from the confusions of antique super-
stition in early Hebrew religion, we cannot but regard as a
revelation of truth itself to the seeking mind of man.

CHAPTER V

THE PERSONAL RELIGION OF THE PROPHETS; THEIR
HISTORICAL RELATIVITY

WE HAVE now before us the main creative idea's by
which the prophets were inspired. But no estimate
of their achievement would be complete which leaves out of
account their own personal religious life as a contribution
to our knowledge of God. That prophecy is a form of religious
experience is not something that goes without saying. Inspira-
tion of a kind may exist apart from anything that we could
recognize as religion. The psychic "medium" may display
extraordinary powers of suggestibility and automatism, not
unlike those of some prophets, without any sense of personal
communion whether with God or with the lesser spirits sup-
posed to exercise the control. He is as far as may be a pas-
sive, impersonal instrument. Not so the prophet. What
he speaks is the utterance of a truth that has entered deeply
into his own soul first of all, as an element in personal religion.

It is indeed with the great prophets that we first come into
direct touch with personal religion. Behind the stories of such
ancient leaders as Moses and Elijah we can divine authentic
religious experience, but it is a different thing to meet the
prophet in his own writings and follow the movings of his
spirit in communion with God.

Enough has already been said of the imaginative form in
which the prophets apprehended God, of its vividness and of
the intense feeling of reality which lay within it. It is true
that no intensity of feeling is a guarantee of objectivity; yet
our study of the intellectual content of their experience would

118

The Prophetic Vocation 119

dispose us to believe that they were indeed in touch with a
Source of truth beyond themselves; for the ideas they dis-
covered are of a freshness, importance, and universality con-
gruous with the divine origin claimed for them. The truth
of their message is one thing, the touch with God which the
message implies is another. The latter is the central factor
in personal religion, and it is with this that we are here con-
cerned.

We may start with that consciousness of vocation which
we have already recognized as one of the foundation factors
in the prophetic experience. It separated the prophet from
other men, as one who acknowledged himself to be specially
dedicated to a mission. The mission, however, had always
a reference to the people of God as a whole. The great
prophets felt themselves to be in a succession which had had
historic significance for Israel from of old; and however they
might wish to dissociate themselves from the unworthy nabis
of their day, they yet saw in prophecy a national institution
divinely ordered for the training of God's people. Micah
speaks for them all: "I truly am full of power by the Spirit
of Jehovah, and of judgment and of might, to declare to
Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin". 1 Through the
severely impersonal language of the earlier classical prophets
we can discern the travail of their own souls in the fulfilment
of their public calling. Jeremiah and Ezekiel let us a little
more deeply into their private feelings. In Jeremiah particu-
larly we recognize a sensitiveness which makes the sins and
sorrows of his people an intimate personal concern. It is as
though in his own experience the tragedy of Judah were finding
conscious expression. And when Ezekiel tells how he lay first
on his left side and "bore the iniquity of the house of Israel"
and then on his right side and "bore the iniquity of the house
of Judah", through all that is bizarre in his description we can
discern the overwhelming sense of responsibility for his peo-

1 Micah iii. 8.

120 The Personal Religion of the Prophets

pie's sins. 1 "Son of man", he beard the Voice say to him, "if
the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet,
. . . and the sword come and take any person, ... his blood
will I require at the watchman's hand. So thou, son of man,
I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel". 2

Under stress of this public calling the prophets exercised
an almost ascetic suppression of individual feeling. What to
most people is private experience of the most intimate kind
became for them the vehicle of divine lessons to the people.
Hosea's domestic tragedy must have stirred private emotions
at which we can only guess. The whole emotional content
of the situation has been translated into a sublime appre-
hension of the divine love. Ezekiel gives us the poignant
episode of his wife's death in exile. "Son of man, behold I
take away the desire of thine eyes with a stroke; yet neither
shalt thou mourn nor weep nor cause thy tears to run down".
So spoke the Voice, the prophet tells us ; and he proceeds, "At
even my wife died, and I did in the morning as I was com-
manded". 3 Private grief is at once absorbed into the larger
tragedy of national disaster. Some who suffered loss in the
late War will understand.

Yet it was impossible altogether to suppress evidence of
individual reaction to the truth which came to the prophet
first as a message for others. Isaiah's vision of God brought
him, besides a public calling, a personal sense of forgiveness
and of the power and nearness of God. His maxim, "In
quietness and in confidence shall be your strength", 4 was the
principle by which he lived. When his message was rejected,
he records the resolve, "I will tie up the testimony and seal
it in my disciples, and I will wait for Jehovah, who hides His
face from the house of Jacob; and I will look for him". 5
Through good report and ill the prophet gave an example

i Ezek. iv. 4r-6.

>Hp2zek. xxiv. 15-24 (R.V.). " s -

6 Isa. viii. 16-17 (G. B. Gray).

8 Ezek. xxxiii. 6-7 (R.V.).
< Isa. xxx. 15 (R.V.).

Inner Life of the Prophets 121

of quiet, heroic faith in God which is no less a treasure for
mankind than his teaching.

But it is Jeremiah who most "unlocks his heart", in a series
of intimate confessions to which the Bible affords no parallel
until we come to the letters of Paul. For him the personal
problem became most acute because in the conditions in
which he lived his work was almost foredoomed to failure.
His ruthless analysis of the public situation made it impossible
for him to utter any message with the smallest chance of
acceptance by the majority of his contemporaries. He was
alone.

"With the merry crew I sat not rejoicing;

Lonely I sat because of Thy hand:

For with spleen Thou hast filled me.
Why is my grief perpetual?

My wound mortal,

That will not be healed?
Wilt Thou be to me like a winter brook,

As waters that fail?" 1

Then comes the divine answer:

"If thou return I will restore thee;

Thou shalt stand before me:
If pure thoughts thou utter, unmixed with base,
Thou shalt be as My mouth." 8

He looks into his own heart; how can he be sure that the
thoughts he utters are "pure thoughts unmixed with base";
for

"Deep beyond sounding is the heart,
And sick beyond cure:
Who can know it?"

Again there is a reply:

"I, Yahwe, search the heart,
And try the reins." 8

i Jer. xv. 17-18' (Skinner). * Jer. xv. 19 (Skinner).

Jer. xvii. 9-10 (Skinner).

122 The Personal Religion of the Prophets
His need and perplexity make him turn in prayer to God:

"Heal me, Yahwe, that I may be healed;
Save me, that I may be saved;
For Thou art my praise! . . .

Be not a terror to me,

Thou, my trust in the evil day!
May my foes be put to shame, and not I;

May they be dismayed, and not I!
Bring on them the day of evil;

Destroy them with double destruction." 1

It is not altogether Christian in sentiment, but what authen-
tic converse of the soul with God! Here we can see prophecy
bringing forth a distinctive type of piety, which became the
norm for Judaism and Christianity. Friedrich Heiler, in his
treatise on Prayer (Das Gebet, 1919) a work of great learn-
ing and also of unusual insight distinguishes two main types
of piety, that of mysticism and that of the prophetic-evangeli-
cal tradition. Christianity has found a place for both, but
its dominant note is the prophetic-evangelical; and indeed
Christian mysticism has come powerfully under its influence,
and to that extent differs from all other mysticism. Some sen-
tences from Heiler will serve to characterize the type of per-
sonal religion which begins with the prophets: 2

"The fundamental psychic experience of mysticism is the denial,
born of society, of the normal life-impulse. . . . The fundamental
psychic experience in prophetic religion is an unrestrained will-to-
live, a steadfast impulse towards the affirmation, reinforcement and
elevation of the life-feeling, a sense of being conquered and pos-
sessed by values and tasks, a passionate striving towards the real-
ization of these ideals and ends. . . . Mysticism is passive, quietist,
resigned, contemplative; prophetic piety is active and ethical, it
makes claims and demands. ... In the prophetic experience the
affections blaze forth, the will to live asserts itself, conquers and

i Jer. xvii. 14, 17-18 (Skinner).

* The translation is my own; the italics are Heiler's.

Prophetic-evangelical Piety 123

triumphs even in the utmost defeat; It defies death and annihila-
tion. Out of the deepest need and despair faith breaks through
at last, born of the fierce will-to-livefaith, which is unshakable
confidence, rock-firm trust and reliance, bold and daring hope. The
mystic is one who gives up, renounces, and rests; the prophet is a
fighter, who perpetually struggles from doubt to assurance, from
torturing uncertainty to absolute certainty of life, from weariness
to fresh courage, from fear to hope, from the crushing sense of sin
to the blessed consciousness of grace and salvation" (p, 255). "The
mystic has a tendency to turn prayer into contemplation and ab-
sorption; in prophetic piety the naive prayer of primitive man
awakes afresh with the realistic power and vitality proper to it. On
the highest levels of religious experience of the great prophetic per-
sonalities the original creation of prayer is achieved anew. The
occasion to pray is usually supplied, as in the naive man, by some
momentary, concrete need. A menace to the healthy will-to-live,
to the elementary life-feeling, a conflict between experienced value
and the actuality which contradicts that value, gives the motive
for the appeal to God in prayer" (p. 348).

We may now report the most essential things we have
learned from a study of the prophets regarding the character
of their inspiration. Though it often appean to have been
accompanied by psychical phenomena such as we observe in
the "medium", it is not to be identified with any form of
unconscious automatism. So far from involving a "dissocia-
tion of personality" it is a function of personality integrated
in its purest activity, which is communion with God. In such
communion the prophets received an enhanced power of in-
sight and criticism, turned upon their inherited beliefs and
the problems of their times. Its outcome is seen to be con-
tinuous with the best in earlier religion, and yet not readily
to be explained as a mere unfolding of latent elements in it.
Their criticism is radical and their ideas are new. Not only
so, but they commend themselves to the reason as essentially

124 The Personal Religion of the Prophets

worthy of the God whose "word" they seemed to the prophet
to be.

Their inspiration did not make the prophets independent of
the historical conditions of their time. They did not desire
or conceive any such independence. The notion of them as
mystical dreamers brooding in a realm above space and time,
and forecasting the remote future in riddles to be deciphered
by an amazed posterity, is wholly misleading. They were
intensely men of the hour. They believed that God had
shaped the past of their people, and that He had given
them a word relevant to the present in which that past had
issued. When they spoke that word they expected it to be a
decisive factor in determining the course of the immediate
future. Their interests were particular and not general, con-
crete and not abstract.

Yet they spoke eternal truth. We do wrong to suppose
that in order to speak a word for all time a thinker must be
detached from the special conditions of his own time. On
the contrary, those who are deeply implicated in the prob-
lems of real life, which are always particular and never gen-
eral, must "speak things", as Oliver Cromwell said, and it is
the man who "speaks things" whose words posterity is apt
to heed. In the realm of imagination certainly and to this
realm prophecy psychologically belongs it is those who live
vividly in their own immediate situation who attain the
universal. "I suppose it will be generally admitted", writes
Sir William Watson, 1 "that any deliberate and self-conscious
effort after universality of temper and views is the one hope-
lessly ill-fated means towards such an end. Indeed it would
often seem as if the opposite method were more auspicious.
To be frankly local, in the sense in which Burns and Beranger
yes, and one may add Homer and Virgil are local, has not
seldom been a direct road into 'the general heart of men'.
Dante, the poet of a city, a church, a political faction, and a

f

; Preface to Alfred Austin's English Lyrics, 1896, p. viii.

Particularity of Prophecy 125

but newly consolidated language, would appear to have done
his best to de-universalize himself; and we know with what
splendid unanimity the world has baffled that design". Simi-
lar language could be used with perfect propriety of the He-
brew prophets. Their discoveries in the realm of the spirit
are always orientated towards some actual situation, and
that gives them their stamp of reality and urgency. Such dis-
coveries have some prospect of permanence. Opinions may
be formed at leisure; convictions grow out of days of stress.
And where an absolutely sincere mind wrestles whole-heart-
edly with the situation as it is, refusing any flattering fallacies
that offer immediate comfort, it is in the posture to which God
often grants some saving intuition of unsuspected truth. This
sincerity is characteristic of the prophets, and their intuitions
stood the test of their own time so well that they have become
a permanent heritage of the race.

When therefore we set out to read the prophets, it is the
part of a decent humility to let them speak for themselves
with the help of any imaginative effort on our part which
will put us as nearly as may be in their place. To understand
Amos we must try to stand with him before the altar of
Bethel, "the king's chapel", and put ourselves in imagina-
tion in the midst of those hectic years when North Israel
enjoyed its fleeting brilliance under Jeroboam II, with the
storm-cloud of Assyrian aggression darkening the horizon.
Much of what he says will be strange in our ears, but if we
have the sense for such things we shall discern among his
wild eloquence the tones of a man who saw with the utmost
clearness into the real facts of a concrete situation, and uttered
truth so conclusively relevant to that moment that it has
become historic. When we read Jeremiah, we must imagine
ourselves in the beleaguered city of Jerusalem, making its last
stand for independence. Everything has gone wrong. Muddle
and vacillation are on the throne. Faction-strife rages among

126 The Personal Religion of the Prophets

the turbulent nobles. A ruined and sullen peasantry is barely
loyal to its oppressive rulers. Religion is breaking out into
those morbid forms which war-time has made all too familiar.
Then we must listen to this lonely man with his unpopular
message, which he would suppress did it not "burn like a fire
in his bones". Here is the utterance of one who has stood on
the perilous edge of despair, and brings back a word that is
spoken once for all, just because it was spoken truly and
decisively for the moment.

"I am convinced," wrote Goethe, "that the Bible will grow
ever more beautiful the more one understands it, that is to
say, the more one looks into it and observes that every word,
which we take generally and apply in particular to ourselves,
possessed in certain definite circumstances, a special, immedi-
ately individual reference of its own, determined by special
conditions of time and place." 1 That is the way in which we
should approach the biblical writers. In no other way shall
we get the whole value of their writings as authentic expres-
sions of real religious experience. They are historically con-
ditioned, and the conditions are essential to their full meaning.

This has an important bearing on the question we are con-
sidering that of the nature of inspiration in the sphere of
religion. It is closely bound up with history, and in its utter-
ances the temporary and the eternal are intimately mingled.
So far as the mere psychological mechanism is concerned,
many scientific discoveries might be described as "inspired",
as when Archimedes in his bath, according to the story, sud-
denly leapt to the solution of a problem in hydrostatics over
which he had long pondered in vain. But once discovered, the
principle of Archimedes holds its place in an abstract scien-
tific system, and the crown of Dionysius, the dishonest gold-
smith, and the rapturous cry of "Eureka" are the embroideries
of an idle tale. It is not just so with the prophets. They

1 Maximen und Reflexionen, VI, quoted as the motto of Johannes Weiss'
Schriften des Neuen Testaments.

Time-Relativity of Prophecy 127

uttered eternal truth all truth is eternal; but here the
eternal cannot be isolated from its temporary conditions by
my simple analysis. The eternal and the temporary are
together in the unity of an imaginative experience shaped by
historical conditions. For the purposes of theology, which
as a department of philosophy (or as some would have it, of
science) is abstract, we may state the content of prophecy in
isolation from its form, as dogma. But religion (which lies
deeper than theology) returns to the living unity of experi-
ence in its historic conditions. 1 This inseparable interweaving
of the eternal and the temporary in an historical revelation
has important corollaries in the philosophy of religion, which
we must not here consider.

All this means further that we must always allow for limi-
tation and error in the prophets. It should hardly be neces-
sary to state so obvious a proposition, but the doctrine of
inspiration has been so confused by the demand for inerrancy
that it is necessary. No one not blinded by a superstitious
bibliolatry could possibly accept for truth, as they stand,
many elements in Old Testament prophecy. Intelligent
readers who went to the writings of the prophets convinced
that they contained nothing but what, being the directly dic-
tated "Word" of the living God, is eternally true, found it
impossible to give full value to their actual words. It was
necessary to water down, twist and manipulate, explain away,
blunt the edge of trenchant sayings. We now learn that the
"sting" of the truth in them is inseparable from their idiosyn-
crasy, and therefore from their imperfection. We are not here
thinking of errors of fact in the narrative portions of Scrip-
ture, but of elements in the religious message of biblical writers
which we cannot hold to be true or valid. Isaiah in the bitter-
ness of his soul cries out, "Jehovah will not have compassion
on their fatherless and widows . . . His anger is not turned

1 See Wheeler Robinson: The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit, pp. 94-
103.

128 The Personal Religion of the Prophets 1

away, but His arm is stretched out still". 1 While we can >
understand and respect the outraged sense of justice that
underlies his words, we may not take them as a true descrip-
tion of our Father in heaven. It is no laudable ambition that
is expressed in the words, "The nation and kingdom that will
not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly
wasted". 2 Yet they occur in one of the most sublime chapters
of the so-called "Third Isaiah". It is unnecessary to multiply
examples. Any theory of the inspiration of the Bible which
suggests that we should recognize such utterances as authori-
tative for us stands self-condemned. They are relative to
their age. But I think we should say more. They are false
and they are wrong. If they are inevitable in that age and
this is an assumption which can neither be proved nor dis-
proved then in so far that age was astray from God. In any
case the men who spoke so were imperfectly harmonized with
the will of God. "For even in the prophets", says the Gospel
according to the Hebrews, "after they were anointed with
Holy Spirit, was found matter of sin". 3 Inspiration therefore
does not imply moral perfection or intellectual infallibility.
But it is an unprofitable theme. Certainly the prophets
were sometimes mistaken. But in their errors they remain
greater than we in our most impeccable orthodoxies. That is
why it behoves us to let them speak for themselves, with eyes
open to the element of error in their teaching, but in no wise
perturbed by it. The part that error and illusion may play in
the gradual apprehension of truth is a question for that branch
of philosophy known as the Theory of Knowledge, and is not
here to be discussed. We must in any case beware of sup-
posing that there is anything final or absolute about our pres-
ent apprehension of truth. All knowledge is relative (unless

1 Isa. ix. 17. * Isa. be. 12.

3 Etenim in prophetis quogue, postquam uncti sunt spir&u sancto, invenius \
est sermo peccati, cited by Jerome, Adv. Pdag. Ill 2. In a translation from
a Hebrew, or Aramaic, original there can be little doubt that sermo pec&iti
means "matter of sin," i.e. sinfulness, and not "sinful word.''

Truth and Illusion 129

it be in pure mathematics) , and in our minds, too, illusion may
serve the ends of truth. But these are deep matters. What
we are here concerned to report is that inspiration does not
carry inerrancy, nor is it inerrancy that gives authority. It
is the capacity to explore independently the regions of the
spirit and to convince others of the reality of that which one
has discovered. This the prophets possessed. Their words,
without being infallible, carry creative power.

f

f

. PAET II

THE AUTHORITY OF CORPORATE EXPERIENCE

CHAPTER VI

TEE BIBLE AS A RECORD OF RELIGION IN
COMMON LIFE

WE HAVE now got thus far: the ultimate authority is
truth itself. That authority comes home to us when
we find that the world of our experience as a whole compels
us to certain conclusions if it is to make sense at all. Beyond
this immediate authority, in religion as in other spheres, the
layman receives guidance from the expert in religion from
the saint or prophet who thus becomes in a secondary sense
an "authority".

The first ground of the authority of the Bible is the fact
that it contains within it the utterances of men of the highest
religious genius, who rise above the limitations of their age
and environment and display the authentic marks of personal
inspiration. We have, however, already remarked that the
writings of these men are not the whole, nor even the larger
part, of the Bible. There is a further kind of authority pos-
sessed by the Bible as a whole and in its parts, which the
prophets share with writers who can claim no inspiration of
the prophetic kind. To define this kind of authority we must
go back once more to our account of the primary authority,
that of truth itself, brought home to our minds when we find
that only by making certain assumptions can we make sense
of the world #jp our experience.

We must now- analyse more closely what we mean by speak-
ing about "the world of our experience". Let it be granted
that if our religious thinking is to be scientific in any true

133

134 The Bible as a Record of Religion

sense, we cannot assume certain principles as revealed, and
deduce a theology from them by pure formal logic. We must
ground our thinking on facts of experience. Now in natural
science we take "experience" to mean the series of sensible
impressions we receive by observation of the world in which
we live. ^Esthetic experience goes beyond this in that it in-
cludes judgments of value which the mind passes upon the
world. Religion is akin to art more closely than to science,
but the definitely personal element is here even more domi-
nant. We are here dealing, in fact, with personality itself, as
it acts and reacts towards its total environment.

When it is said that belief must rest on experience, we are
inclined to turn our minds at once to what are called "religious
experiences" in the narrower sense, that is, the feelings accom-
panying certain internal processes of the spiritual life, such
as contrition, conversion, peace of conscience, ecstasy, or
mystical union. It is thought that a man should look within
himself for "experiences" of this kind, and build his belief
upon them.

This view is partly a heritage from the pietistic movements
of the eighteenth century, represented in this country by
Methodism and later by the Evangelical Revival, and partly
due to the first attempts to extend the empirical method of
natural science to theology. The pietists laid very great
emphasis upon personal religious "experiences", and by that
emphasis they redeemed religion in their day from a barren
ecclesiasticism. But for the most part they did not think to
base Christian belief upon such phenomena, or to throw the
individual back wholly upon his own limited share in such
experiences. Their belief still rested upon the unquestioned
authority of their churches and of Holy Writ. The eighteenth
century, however, was at the same time the age of rationalism,
which questioned all such authority as it had never been ques-
tioned before. It may well be that the widespread new de-

What Is Religious Experience? 135

mand for emotionally satisfying individual experiences had as
an unconscious motive, the desire to underpin the cracking
foundations of traditional dogma. However this may be,
when in the following century religious people began to admit
that all external authority had lost its old cogency, they
had recourse to the immediate testimony of inward experience,
and many thought to reconstruct theology upon this basis
alone. At the same time the theory of knowledge came to
lay more stress on observation and experiment, and there was
a tendency to bring into prominence the distinctively religious
experiences as "phenomena" to be studied scientifically. Thus
the empirical psychology of the late nineteenth century set out
to collect these "varieties of religious experience", as one
collects butterflies, much indeed to the furtherance of our
knowledge of the workings of the human mind. For a time it
seemed as though theology would take its place among the
empirical sciences in the form of a psychology of religious
experience. Recent popular thought has come, under such
influences, and in the general reaction against traditionalism,
to assume that Christian belief is actually grounded for each
individual in such inward phenomena as these.

It is because of this excessive emphasis upon individual "ex-
perience" in the narrower sense that so much popular religious
thought in these days is defenceless against the latest criti-
cisms of psychology. How is any individual to be certain that
any particular set of feelings aroused in him in connection
with religious ideas or processes is not the product of psycho-
physical stimuli having no special religious significance?

It is necessary to widen the scope of what we mean by
"religious experience". In the first place it means the whole
of life religiously interpreted, rather than isolated feelings. A
religious man is not one who has "experiences" which he can
describe with particularity, in class-meeting, or in reply to a
psychological questionnaire, as the case may be, but one who

136 The Bible as a Record of Religion

takes all life in a religious way. That vague statement could
be made much more definite, but it is not necessary at the
present stage of our enquiry.

Again, when this wider definition is accepted, it becomes
clear that to place a ring-fence round the individual and
expect him to find within that fence adequate material for
religious belief is illusory. We are not so divided from one
another in ordinary life, and our religious experience is not
so isolated. A recognition of this fact might bring assurance
to persons who have come to doubt their religious intuitions
because they do not know how far they are the reflection of
influences in their environment. That is something that none
of us can ever know. But does it matter? Of course, we owe
an incalculable debt to our environment in all possible rela-
tions of life; but if the religious impulses we have received
from our environment make life for its a religious thing, in the
widest sense, then we need not further question their validity.

We may now go further and recognize that as there is no
absolute limit to be placed to our individual experience, so no
narrow limit can be set to our social environment. It is
co-extensive with human history. There is on one side at
least complete continuity in the series of events in time into
which all our own thoughts, words, and actions fall:

"Und viele Geschlechter
reifien sich dauernd
an ihres Daseins
tinendliche Kette."

Now the religious experience of mankind is a function of this
continuous history. It is not the isolated outbreak of abnor-
mal phenomena in this or that individual (though to read
some psychological treatments of religious experience one
would suppose so). 1 The spiritual intuitions of saints and

1 See Selbie, Psychology of Religion, pp. 16-21, for a pertinent criticism of
the narrow field covered by the recently dominant school of religious psy-
chology.

History and Religious Experience 137

prophets take their place in the varied life that makes up real
history. They are inseparably intertwined with economics
and political institutions, with social development and decline,
with literature and art and science.

Within this large historical context religion has taken many
starts and turns. Whittier, in the first enthusiasm of the
modern doctrine of progress, sang:

"Step by step since time began
I see the steady gain of man."

To see anything steady about it needs much resolution. Cer-
tainly in the religious history of the race there have been many
false starts. Whole generations have wandered in the wilder-
ness, and revolutions have come in which it seemed for the
time as though the whole of religion would go under. Yet
the wandering in the wilderness has not been wholly vain.
Over some ways at least the spirit of man has written "No
Road", and that is something gained. And in all the ups and
downs of the road, man has been aware of being in touch
with something greater than he knew.

Those who would discredit religion as an illusion have to
deal not with individual aberrations, but with the stuff of
history. It is no doubt possible to dream of a totally different
history, but such dreams are wholly unprofitable. An Outline
of History (as Mr. H. G. Wells discovered when he came to
write it) is to a surprising degree the history of religion. All
sorts of crimes may be laid to its charge:

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!

But at least it is one of the creative factors in history, and
all the more profound and significant movements have had
religion at their centre.
The subject-matter then of religious thinking is not simply

138 The Bible as a Record of Religion

what I find at certain times in my own mind. It is the ex-
perience that comes to me as a member of the historic society
of mankind. 1 What I feel is less important than I am disposed
to think it; yet it is important, because I too am a man, and
the stream of history is passing through my consciousness on
its way to the farther reaches.

Now Christianity accepts in the fullest way the reality and
validity of history when it insists that the regulative moment
in God's relations with man is to be found in the life of a
human Individual who inherited the traditions of a people
and founded a society through historic acts of His own. And
it is consistent with its own doctrine of the Incarnation when
it offers the Bible as the vehicle of our knowledge of God.
For the Bible is an historical book. Its writings directly
reflect more than a thousand years of the religious history of
mankind, and indirectly they reach far back into the more
distant past. It is true that even so the history it covers is
but a fraction of the whole history of man, whether spacially
or temporally considered. Yet the history it reflects is so
central, so typical, and so obviously creative beyond the par-
ticular places and times in which it was produced, that it has
a very wide significance.

From this point of view it is an important fact that the
Bible is not wholly composed of the striking utterances of
exceptional persons. Its prophets and saints, while they have
the unique individuality of genius, do not appear as solitary
islands emerging from a barren deep. Such islands might be
the peaks of a buried continent, or mere chance eruptions.
The prophets appear rather as the towering summits of a
mountainous landscape, which from its foothills to its moun-
tain tops shows the same geological structure. The prophets
themselves firmly believe that God reveals Himself in the
history of their people from age to age. Scarcely a single

1 See General Introduction, p. vii. ; also H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian
Experience of the Holy Spirit, pp. 105-6.

The Common Man in the Bible 139

X

biblical writer is of the type of the recluse interested solely
in his own communion with God, and contemptuous of the
commonalty. Further, the Old Testament contains not only
the epoch-making writings of the great prophets, but legends
and traditions which reflect the elementary piety of the com-
mon man, historical narratives which show the impact of
religion upon the vicissitudes of society, pedestrian laws
which attempt inadequately to embody ideals in institutions.
In the New Testament similarly we have on the one hand
the unique sublimity of the words of Jesus and the revolu-
tionary theology of Paul; but on the other hand we have the
quiet, everyday piety of James or Peter, and the plain tale
of the Acts of the Apostles.

The layman, when he hears of biblical criticism, is prone to
think of discussions (which may seem to him profane, unin-
teresting, or intriguing, according to his cast of mind) upon
details of the authenticity or the historical trustworthiness of
certain portions of the Bible. The great positive achievement
of the critical method is easily overlooked, namely, that it
enables us to read the Bible historically, as perhaps no preced-
ing generation has been able to read it. In its task biblical
criticism has been greatly helped by the growth in historical
knowledge all along the line. Comparative anthropology,
archaeology, and the application of economic principles to the
interpretation of history have all placed fresh material in the
hands of the student of the Bible. But the most important
thing after all is the new point of view, which dispenses us
from the task of finding verification of dogma in every text,
and leaves us free to read the ancient writings in their plain
historical meaning.

It is not to be supposed that the use of the Scriptures as
historical documents is something for the dry-as-dust an-
tiquary. If history has the significance which Christianity
seems to attach to it, the "living past" is a religious factor of

140 The Bible as a Record of Religion

high importance in the present. Moreover, psychology is
teaching us how permanent are the fundamental traits of the
human mind, which are manifested in history. They may be
in some sort overlaid or disguised, but they are part of our
own equipment, and in this sense history repeats itself.

We may here select for special consideration three aspects
of the historical study of the Bible; Jirst, the value of primi-
tive narratives when read in the light of the comparative
study of religion; next, the value of those writings which pro-
vide as it were a commentary from the spiritual side upon
secular history ; and lastly, the value of the rich portrayal of T
all sides of human life in many ages in a way that does V
justice to the essentially religious quality of it all.

First^ then, we put on record the great value of the primi-
tive narratives of the Old Testament, as we now read them
in the light of the comparative study of religion. They draw
from a very deep stratum of the human mind, which was
uppermost in remote antiquity and survives half-buried in
us all, the substratum of whatever religious feelings we have.
In much of its machinery, its "stage-properties" so to speak,
the psychologist can recognize the natural symbolism with
which the mind in every age tends to clothe its intuitions of
mysterious things. Mythology is never arbitrary: it has natu-
ral roots. The wonderful tree with its forbidden fruit and
the crafty serpent in the garden; the flaming warders of the
Gate; the towej to scale Heaven; the great flood-bath from
which the world rises new-born beneath the rainbow sign
these and many other mythological images are not wholly
strange to our na'ive imaginations. They are found by psy-
chologists in the symbolism of our dreams.

Again, in some of the rudimentary religious feelings which
the primitive folk of the Bible share with widely separated
peoples on a similar plane such as the haunting weirdness of

Primitive Religion 141

mountains and of the dark, the sacredness of bread, the awful
terror of blood, we trace something that civilization may
transform but does not eradicate. In reading of such things
we look into the pit from whence we were digged. They are
the raw stuff of human thought everywhere. And out of
such raw stuff we see in the Bible the most sublime concep-
tions of God and life being formed. It gives us a sense of
solidity, of being in ibpuch with the good brown soil in which
all life is rooted, JWe feel that we stand

". . . mit festen
markigen Knochen
auf der wohlgegriindeten
dauernden Erde."

Secondly,, it is profoundly interesting to study, in these
ancient records of a thousand years and more, the inward or
spiritual aspects of movements in history which the secular
historian treats from the outside. For example, the migra-
tions of peoples bulk largely in any attempt to tell the story
of the human race. Strange stirrings begin from time to time
and drive tribes and races from their ancient habitations, to
spread them over new regions, upsetting or modifying the sys-
tem of civilization. The history of classical Greece begins with
those sweeping migrations which brought the downfall of
Knossos and of Troy, the death of the old Minoan culture
and its resurrection in transfigured forms in Hellenism. Mod-
ern European history begins with the irresistible sweep of the
Teutonic peoples into the Mediterranean basin. Now in the
Old Testament we have two cycles of legend referring to
periods of tribal migrations the patriarchal narratives and
the story of the Exodus. The relation between the two cycles
is not altogether clear, but in both we watch historic migra-
tions in process. What made the Semitic tribes of the desert
force their way into the ancient lands of the Syrian culture-

142 The Bible as a Record of Religion

zone? We can point to certain facts, such as the periodic ex-
cess of population over food-supply, and the pressure of
Babylonian civilization upon stocks at a lower level of culture.
But there were inward facts as well as outward. "God spoke
to Abram in Ur of the Chaldees, saying, 'Get thee out from
thy kindred, and go into a land that I shall show thee' "- 1 No
doubt the voice of God was in part mediated by economic
facts, but we may accept also the sense of an irresistible
spiritual impulse to adventure vague and undefined, but
real. And so Abraham haunted the fringes of civilization in
Canaan, moving his encampment as far as the borders of
Egypt under pressure of famine, 2 making an occasional raid
into Mesopotamia, 3 seeking alliance with his ancient kin at
Haran, 4 and paying awed allegiance to the august priest-king
of the holy city of Salem. 5 In the last generation people were
sorely agitated by the question, Are the stories about Abraham
true? Indeed, did Abraham ever live, or is he a myth? Critics
are still not agreed. Perhaps the name stands for some real
though pre-historic tribal chief. Perhaps it was originally
the name of a deity. Perhaps it is simply the personification
of a clan. We now see that this matters little. At least,
whether all this happened to one man or not, in a broad
sense it is history an'd it is human experience. When the
tribes were on their wanderings, this is the kind of life they
led, and this the kind of faith that supported them. The
authors of the narratives in their present form were indeed
far removed in time from the patriarchs; yet they had the
spectacle of nomadic life constantly before them on the fringes
of their land, and could interpret the ancient traditions on
which they worked with a true sense of their deeper import.

i Gen. xii. 1-4 (J). 2 Gen. xii. 10 (J)

8 Gen. xiv. 4 Gen. xxiv. (J).

*Gen. xiv. 18-20. His name is Melchizedek, i.e. "Zedek is Bong," Zedek
being the local god; cf. Adonizedek, Joshua x. 1 (J). Abd-hiba, king of Jeru-
salem c. 1400 B.C., is known from the Amarna tablets, which help to give a
background to the patriarchal stories.

Migration Legends 143

The New Testament supplies a richer interpretation. No
doubt the author to the Hebrews idealizes these desert wan-
derers, but essentially he is right: it was "by faith" that they
endured, seeking a city whose builder and maker is God. 1
Behind the delight of movement and adventure lies a craving
for the permanent, and a deep-grounded faith that the spirit
of man is made for something that escapes the flux of things.

The other cycle of migration-legends tells how the nomadic
impulse reasserted itself in certain Hebrew clans temporarily
settled on the borders of Egypt, how the Wanderlust grew
to a wild land-hunger, and how at last the tribes burst with
fury into the debatable ground between the two great em-
pires of Egypt and Babylon, and claimed it in the name of
their God as the "promised land". The thing has often hap-
pened: here we are in the midst of it, privy to the thoughts
and feelings of the actors in the drama.

Religious people in the past were much embarrassed by
having to believe in some way that the fierce impulses which
these ancient nomads attributed to their tribal deity were
indeed the commands of the eternal God. Their critics
scorned a God who approved such atrocities. In the interests
of moral sincerity it was necessary for the last generation
to say with all emphasis that whatever might or might not
be true about the inspiration of the Old Testament, the Chris-
tian conscience must indignantly repudiate the horrors of
Joshua and Judges. Now perhaps the time has come when
we can see things in better perspective. At the stage of hu-
man development represented by these books and other pas-
sages like them, a certain ferocity is inseparable from any
intense feeling. The kernel of the matter is not the bestial
cruelty that accompanied the migration into Canaan as it ac-
companied other Vdlkerwand&rungen, but the ideal impulses
which in crude and primitive forms worked upon the desert

1 Heb. xi. 8-10, 13-16.

144 The Bible as a Record of Religion

clans. So the Arabs in later centuries fought in the name of
Allah, and the crusaders cried "Dieu le veult!" as they stormed
the walls of Jerusalem. But in the Bible more clearly than
elsewhere we see how organically these impulses are related
to the heroic in religion. We ourselves have within us the
liability to such impulses; history repeats itself in the inner
life. Well for us if we know that the inward drive to ad-
venture is the purpose of God in us, and can, if the work of
the ages has indeed been wrought in us, be sublimated into
the motive power of a noble life.

In the same way we may follow in the Old Testament the
spiritual aspects of that episode which repeats itself in the life
of various peoples, when the rustic, agricultural, locally cen-
tred type of civilization gives place to the mercantile type
with its international or cosmopolitan orientation. Without
going into detail here we may ask the reader to consider under
this aspect the conquests of Solomon and his Tyrian alliance, 1
with its sequel in the division between the purely agricultural .
south and the north with its opportunities for commerce 2 ;
and to estimate the significance of Elijah's opposition to Jeze-
bel alike in the matter of Baal-worship and of Naboth's >
vineyard, 3 or of Isaiah's attack on foreign luxury, 4 or Jere- I
miah's advice to exiled Jews to throw themselves heartily
into the social and economic life of the Babylonian Empire. 5

If we turn to the New Testament we find ourselves in a
milieu much nearer to ourselves. For the Roman Empire
is so much the foundation of our own system of civilization
and its culture so intimately associated with our own educa-
tion that it can never feel altogether foreign. The Roman
authors who are read in school show us something of what

1 1 Kings ix. 10-28.

* 1 Kings xii. 1-20. The cause is given as the pressure of taxation, levied
for imperialist and mercantile ventures as well as for luxury-building and the
splendour of the court.

* 1 Kings xviii. 18-21, xix. 1-2, xxi. 1-20.

4 Isa. iii. 16-24. Jer. xxix. 4-7.

The Roman Empire 145

Rome meant to its own ruling class. But what did it mean
to the much larger and ultimately more important section
of mankind composed of the middle and lower sort who were
ruled by Rome, with or without their own good- will? It
is only recently that scholars have appreciated how immensely
valuable and important the New Testament documents are
as materials for the study of the spiritual reactions of Roman
rule and Roman ideals upon the subject populations. Take
for instance the exquisitely finished miniature of the cen-
turion in the Gospels, with its feeling for the virtues of the
best sort of subordinate Roman officer and even of the system
under which he worked: l "I am a man under authority, and
I say. . . ." We need not be militarists to understand why
Jesus liked that. And when we have appreciated it, we un-
derstand better why Rome with all it's faults captured the
imagination of the world and endured as an ideal even when
its power had fallen. On a larger scale we have the trial
scene of the Gospels, recently worked out dramatically with
such skill by Mr. Masefield. It is an illuminating study of
the Roman system in conflict with Jewish nationalism, in
which the weak points of both turn their virtues to disaster.
For here both are confronted with a spiritual fact which
neither is able to digest, though in it lies not only the quin-
tessence of the past but the promise of the future of the race.
Again in the cosmopolitanism of Paul contrasted with the
virulent minority-feeling of the Revelation, we have a glimpse
of deep issues being fought out beneath the surface of im-
perial history as it meets us in the Augustan poets or in Taci-
tus and Pliny.

There are, finally, few aspects of the manifold life of man
which are not reflected in the Bible. If the proper study of
mankind is man, not Euripides nor Shakespeare offers richer

i Matt. viii. 5-10; Luke vii. 1-10.

146 The Bible as a Record of Religion

material for such study than the stories of the Old Testa-
ment. Their actors are no faultless types of the virtues, but
men whose blood is warm within them. We have here the
natural play of motive and action which is after all one of
the liveliest interests of the normal mind. The moralist has
to his hand a gallery of "characters" for example and warn-
ing more living than those of Plutarch or Theophrastus. 1 Yet
no narrow moralizing exhausts their interest. For the con-
noisseur of human nature they are a storehouse of acutely
observed types, full of the stuff of tragedy and comedy.

Again it is no accident that since the biblical documents
have been critically studied they have provided a rich field
for the student of social and economic history. For example,
Ezekiel's description of the trade of Tyre is an economic
document of the first importance. 2 It surveys with some ful-
ness the sea-going commerce of the sixth century before
Christ, and to anyone with imagination it portrays the civ-
ilization of the time in the most vivid style. Or by way of
contrast we may take the exquisite idyll of rural life in
Palestine presented by the Book of Ruth. No doubt the pic-
ture is in some measure idealized, yet in essentials this was
what life was like in the country districts not perhaps in the
time of the Judges, in which the scene of the romance is laid,
but in Judaea after the exile. The strength of the people lay
in this simple farming stock, tenacious of the land and its
traditions, prospering through unremitting industry, yet never
far from the poverty which the death of the bread-winner
or two or three successive bad harvests might bring. To put
one's best into the soil, to do the right thing by one's work-
people and one's poorer neighbours, and to stick to the family
through thick and thin, these are its root virtues and no

1 Alexander Whyte's Bible Characters are penetrating studies from this
point of view. They ignore all questions of historical criticism; and why not?
The value of the character of Macbeth does not depend on researches in an
obscure period of Scottish History. * Ezek. xxvii. 1-25.

tit

'Quidquid agunt homines" 147

bad foundation for religion, though of religion in the technical
sense there is almost nothing said. To take a third example,
in view of the association of "Hebraism" in the general mind
with a stern renunciation of the Graces, we may well recall
that the Canon of Scripture contains in the Song of Songs
a sequence of lyrical poems of love, full of a romantic and
even voluptuous sense of physical beauty. If the Bible takes
an austere attitude to sexual experience, it is not because
the life out of which it came was ascetic.

In no part of the Bible is the common life of men more
vividly and sympathetically portrayed than in the parables
of Jesus Christ. Too often treated as cryptic allegories of
theological doctrines, they have not until the other day re-
ceived justice as artistic presentations of daily life in first-
century Galilee. These rapid sketches are drawn with an
unerring instinct for the essential points, and the detail that
enters in is due purely to the Narrator's interest in the human
scene, and not at all, as commentators still stubbornly try
to persuade us, to the exigencies of allegory. Indeed, if we
read these short stories without prejudice, we shall be star-
tled to see how far the attitude of the Narrator is from any
narrowly moralizing tendency. He sets up before us aspects
of real life, not asking in the first place whether this or that
action is to be morally approved or reprobated, but noting
that men do as a matter act so and so the shepherd seeks
his sheep 1 ; the pearl-merchant knows a good bargain when
he sees it 2 ; people often do a service not out of pure kind-
liness but to save themselves trouble 3 ; clever rogues use
their advantages without scruple and profit by it. 4 We are
asked simply to observe that life is like that. When we have
looked at life as it is, then the meaning of the parable sug-
gests itself to the mind. But there is no mistaking the un-

i Matt, xviii. 12-13; Luke xv. 4-6. Matt. xiii. 45-46.

3 Luke ri. 5-8. * Luke xvi. 1-8.

148 The Bible as a Record of Religion

trammelled interest in real life, and this gives the parables
unique value as historical documents. It may safely be said
that the literature of the Roman Empire contains no other
such vivid picture of the life of common men under its rule. 1
The stage is a small town in an agricultural district. Most
of the characters are of the middle sort. A typical character
is the "householder" who has a vineyard 2 in which he and
his sons work, 3 with possibly a gardener to help, 4 and keeps
a few head of live-stock which he feeds in the stall (after the
French fashion, not at open pasture as we do) , and must take
to water daily at the pond or cistern. 5 He will have a garden
for vegetables, 6 and perhaps a small field which he sows
with corn. 7 The soil is mostly shallow, and only too often
suffering from the primeval curse of "thorns and thistles",
but with luck there will be a corner of good soil that may
yield him anything up to a hundredfold. He attends strictly
to business: no social engagement will" stand in his way if
he is bargaining for a piece of land or trying out a team of
ploughing oxen. 8 His wife grinds their own grain 9 and makes
the bread 10 which, with eggs and dried fish n from the neigh-
bouring lake, makes up the staple food of the family. Flesh-
meat is a dish for a feast. 12 His house may have but one
living-room in which the whole family gathers in the evening *
when the lamp is lit. 13 But they live comfortably enough, A

1 The only parallel is the picture of common life in Egypt obtained by a L
laborious study of masses of accidentally preserved papyri from the rubbish
heaps of Oxyrhynchus and other sites.

* Matt. xx. 1. * Matt. xxi. 28-30. * Luke xiii. 6-9.

6 Luke xiii. 15, cf. Matt. xii. 11, Luke xiv. 5.
Luke xiii. 19; Mark iv. 31-32.

7 Mark iv. 3-8, 26-29; Matt. xiii. 24-30.

8 Luke xiv. 18-19.

9 Matt. xxiv. 41 ; Luke xvii. 35.

10 Matt. xiii. 33; Luke xiii, 20-21.

11 Matt. vii. 9-10.

12 Luke xv. 23, cf . Matt. xxii. 4.

13 Matt. v. 15; Luke viii. 16, xi. 33 changes the scene to a larger house where
the light is in the vestibule.

Daily Life in the Parables 149

by dint of a thrift which will patch clothes till the fabric will
no longer hold together, 1 and cannot tolerate the accidental
loss of a single franc-piece. 2 In common with most peasants
he hoards like a magpie, thereby putting temptation in the
way of the burglar who digs through the "cob" wall at night, 3
or even robs with violence. 4 It is characteristic, too, that the
chance discovery of treasure hidden in the earth somebody's
ill-fated hoard from the time of the troubles is too much
for his habitual caution; he sells up and buys the field as a
speculation. 5 His greatest fear is to fall into the hands of the
moneylender, 6 or to become involved in litigation, which may
end in losing the very shirt off one's back. 7 One knows what
these local courts are! Indeed, if the Cadi is the wrong sort,
the only way to get one's mere rights is the truly Oriental
way of making oneself a nuisance until something happens. 8
But the wise man will do anything to get things settled out
of court. 9 Officials of all kinds are persons to be avoided;
they stand for taxes and the hated corvee. 10 To call a man
"a friend of tax-collectors" is an insult. 11

There are more prosperous members of the community
the man whose vineyard is so large that at certain seasons he
has to hire extra labour 12 ; the big farmer who has slaves
ploughing and sowing for him, 13 or a staff of paid labourers
with a bailiff over them. 14 There is the capitalist who deals in
wine and oil in bulk, 15 who makes long journeys abroad 16

1 Mark ii. 21. * Luke xv. 8.

3 Matt. vi. 19-20; Luke xii. 33; Matt. xxiv. 43; Luke xii. 39.

4 Mark iii. 27: Luke xi. 21 has altered this commonplace episode of the burglar
into a more romantic business of an armed man guarding his castle against
raiders. 6 Matt. xiii. 44.

6 Luke vii. 41-42, cf . Matt, xviii. 23-34.

7 Matt. v. 40; Luke vi. 29.

8 Luke xviii. 2-5. Matt. v. 25-26; Luke xii. 57-59.
10 Matt. v. 41. u Matt, xi. 19; Luke vii. 34.

12 Matt. xx. 1-16. Luke xvii. 7-9; Matt. xiii. 27.

"Luke xv. 17; (this farmer, we observe, had no difficulty in raising on the
spot a substantial sum of money to send his younger son abroad; the elder son
worked on the farm.) Luke xii. 42-46; Matt. xxiv. 45-51; Mark xiii. 34.

15 Luke xvi. 1-8. " Mark xiii. 34-36.

150 The Bible as a Record of Religion

and expects his slaves to look after the investment of his capi-
tal in his absence. 1 There is the nouveau riche who has no
sense of the traditional responsibilities of wealth, but says
to his soul "eat, drink, and be merry" a and fares sumptu-
ously every day while beggars starve at his door. 3 A sinister
figure is the absentee landlord, who leases his vineyards to
tenant cultivators on payment of a proportion of the produce
as rent. The system is resented in a district where peasant
proprietorship is the rule, and the tenants have been known
not only to refuse rent but to attack and kill the landlord's
agents. Not that they gain anything by this, for the power-
ful landlord can get a military force from the government and
crush the incipient agrarian revolt. 4

Other figures make a casual appearance the shepherd, 5
the fisherman of the lake, 6 the travelling pearl-merchant, 7
the builder, who in a country subject to storms and floods
must know how and where to build, if his work is to stand, 8
the doctor, 9 the priest, 10 the pious Pharisee, 11 the travelling
Samaritan, the innkeeper and the highwayman 12 ; and a
crowd of loungers, beggars and cripples 13 at one end of the
social scale, and at the other kings pursuing in the dim back-

* Matt. xxv. 14-30; Luke xix. 12-27.
a Luke xii. 16-20.

a Luke xvi. 19-21.

4 Mark xii. 1-9. Leases are extant providing for the payment of rent in
kind, e.g. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1631; and we may recall that Marcus Brutus
once applied for a military force to collect moneys due to him in Cyprus, and
actually caused the Senate of Salamis to be besieged (Cicero ad Att. V. 21, VI.

I).

6 Matt, xviii. 12-13; Luke xv. 4-6.

s Matt. xiii. 47-48.

7 Matt. xiii. 45-46.

a Matt. vii. 24-27; Luke vi. 47-49.

Mark ii. 17; Luke iv. 23.

10 Luke x. 31-32.

11 Luke xviii. 11-12.
Luke x. 30-37.

" Luke xiv. 21-23; Matt. xxii. 9-10; Luke xiv. 13, etc.

Daily Life in the Parables 151

ground their arbitrary way, leading armies, 1 sacking towns, 2
or, if the whim takes them, giving lavish banquets to their
favoured subjects. 3

It is in the main a neighbourly little society, where every-
one is interested in everyone else's business, 4 and hospitality
is free. On a journey you "drop in" on a friend, and naturally
expect to be entertained. If he has nothing in the house he
can always borrow from someone. 5 Moreover there is a great
deal of modest junketing. A homecoming in the family is a
good excuse for a feast, with music and dancing. 6 So of
course is a wedding, about which all manner of festivities
gather. 7 But even without any such special occasion, these
sociable folk seem constantly to be giving dinner-parties. At
these parties the minute grades of social rank are scrupulously
observed. It is the grossest affront to good manners to push
into a place which may be reserved for your social superior.
Indeed, good breeding demands that you should take the low-
est seat until pressed to come up higher. 8 Also, you must
dress festively; else you offend your host. 9 To excuse your-
self from such a party at the last moment, naturally, is un-
pardonable. 10

Such was life in first-century Galilee in the circles in which
Jesus moved. 11 There, as everywhere, it took all sorts to make

1 Luke xiv. 31-32.

2 Matt. xxii. 7.

8 Matt. xxii. 2. In a certain "far country" (Rome) there is a power that
makes and unmakes kings; Luke xix. 12.

* Luke xv. 6, 9.

B Luke xi. 5-8.

6 Luke xv. 22-32.

Matt. xxv. 1-12; Luke xii. 36; Mark ii. 19.

s Luke xiv. 8-10.

9 Matt. xxii. 11-13.
"Luke xiv. 17-21.

11 We can define broadly the position of the family of Jesus in this society.
Two of His grand-nephews were taxed on 39 plethra ( = about 10 acres, the
size of a typical smallholding on Evesham tenure) which they fanned by their

152 The Bible as a Record of Religion

a world. Neighbours were sometimes curmudgeonly or spite-
ful, 1 masters exacting, 2 servants dishonest or drunken, 3 chil-
dren tiresome, 4 young fellows dissolute and extravagant. 5
There is no couleur de rose about the picture.

The parables are in a large measure typical of the Bible
as a whole. For a religious book it is often curiously secular,
for a divine book, astonishingly human. It certainly lends
no countenance to the view that religion is or should be a
thing apart. Here we have life as it has actually been lived
in many ages by men like ourselves. We look more deeply into
the picture, and we see it shot through and through with
religion. Religion is there not as a separable addition to life,
but as a quality belonging to its very nature.

We come back therefore to the question from which we ;
started, What is that world of experience which in religion
must provide us with the authoritative data for all our think-
ing? Our experience, we said, is not purely individual. The
hopes and fears, faiths and aspirations, struggles, endurances
and achievements of mankind are ours. The Bible makes
us partakers in many centuries of human experience, and
invites us to appropriate to ourselves the rich religious mean-
ing of it all. ,*

This does not yet tell us why, under this head, we should
attach unique authority to the Bible. Any historical litera-
ture, equally sincere, equally broad in its outlook and pro-

y

own labour (Eusebius, Hist. Ecd. Ill, 20). He Himself, as an independent. J '
craftsman, probably held a rather better position, like His closest friends, the
sons of John and Zebedee, who formed a small firm owning a few fishing-boats
and employing labour.

1 Luke xi. 5-8; Matt. xiii. 25.

2 Luke xvii. 7-9, xii. 47-48; Matt. xxv. 24; Luke xix. 21.

3 Luke xvi. 1-8; Matt. xxiv. 48-49; Luke xii. 45.

4 Matt. xi. 16-17; Luke vii. 32. Jesus was fond of children, but not senti-
mental about them.

* Luke xv. 13.

The Heritage of History 153

found in its knowledge of human nature, would bring us this
communion with the life of our kind. Perhaps we should
have to look very far for a literature equal in these respects
to the Bible. But its specific authority for us rests upon
further considerations. 1

1 See in particular chap. XII.

1

l

*

J

CHAPTER VII

THE RELIGION OF THE PROPHETS IN THE LIFE
OF THE COMMUNITY

WHEN we turn from the exceptional works of genius
which represent most purely the authority of sheer
"inspiration", to consider the Bible in its broader aspect as
the record of religion in the general life of men, our attention
is claimed by the period following the Babylonian Exile. The
emphasis rightly laid on the prophets in the historical crit-
icism of the nineteenth century, which may almost be said
to have rediscovered them, has tended to make all that fol-
lowed appear less interesting. And even apart from this, the
fact that the historical books of the Old Testament end, as a
continuous record, with the Exile, and have nothing to tell of
any events after the middle of the fifth century, has given an
unconscious bias to our minds when we attempt to assess
the history of Israel as a whole. The post-exilic period is apt
to appear as a mere epilogue, or a barren waiting-time till the
rise of Christianity. But here our perspective is at fault.
These five centuries of a nation's life were very far from in-
significant. If the age of the prophets saw the rise of crea-
tive ideas, it was in the post-exilic period that they became
effective in the life of a community. Then for the first time
a religious system was established upon the prophetic foun-
dation of ethical monotheism. Its documentary basis is the
canon of the Old Testament. Indeed the Old Testament as
we know it is the corpus of religious literature of post-exilic
Judaism. The Jewish legend that Ezra miraculously re-

154

i 1

The Canon of the Prophets 155

stored the ancient writings after their destruction 1 is not all
untrue. Not only was a very large proportion of the canon-
ical scriptures actually written in this period, far larger
than we commonly realize but whatever of earlier literature
has survived has done so because the scribes of the sixth and
following centuries judged it worthy to survive; and all has
come down to us with their mark upon it.

The canon of the prophets was itself the creation of the
post-exilic community. Probably there is not a single book
which has escaped some revision in the light of the dominant
ideas of the period, and in many cases the revision is substan-
tial. The wonder is that so much was preserved by the scribes
which is in imperfect harmony with those ideas; just as at a
later time the early Christian Church preserved words of its
Master by which its own faith and works are judged. It is
a task of nice critical discrimination to recover the original
thoughts of the classical prophets from the skilfully edited
books in which their utterances were preserved for posterity;
and it is a task in which complete success is never attainable.
But while exacting critical analysis is necessary if we would
come face to face with the prophets themselves, the prophetic
books just as they stand are a direct witness to the prophetic
religion in the form which it took when it became a system.
And at bottom it is still the prophetic religion with which
we are dealing, despite all modifications. The work of the
prophets was not done in vain, even though some of the most
profound elements in their message were not fully operative
until Christianity brought them to clarity and gave them their
completion.

The prophetic writings, however, were not, in the estimation
of the Jewish Church itself, the central or most important
element in the sacred Scriptures. The Bible, as we received
it from the Jews, begins with the five so-called "Books of

1 2 Eedras riv. 19-^8.

156 Religion in the Community

Moses", or the Pentateuch, containing, in a quasi-historical
setting, a compilation of the various codes of laws and regu-
lations which formed the institutional basis of the religious
life of Judaism. It is not necessary here to discuss in detail
the criticism of the Pentateuch, but it will be well to indicate
briefly the historical relations of the component parts of this
remarkable corpus.

The fundamental document of Judaism is Deuteronomy.
The problem of its origin is at present one of the most-dis-
cussed problems in Old Testament criticism. 1 Whatever may
have been the traditional sources of the laws and regulations
which it contains, the setting forth of these laws is permeated
with the new ideas which the prophets of the eighth century
had propounded imperfectly assimilated, it is true, but giv-
ing life and spirit to the whole code. In some form it appears
to have been in the hands of the reformers of the time of
Josiah. Their reformation indeed was all but stillborn. But
it was a great memory, and during the Exile it came to rep-
resent the true religious basis on which the people of Jehovah
must stand, and when the community was reconstituted under
the inspiration of Ezekiel and the Second Isaiah it was a re-
vised Deuteronomy that provided what we may call its "con-
stitution". 2 The Jews became the people of a book, and that
book Deuteronomy. It is a noble manifesto of ethical religion
genuinely devotional, soberly humanitarian, 3 marked with
a real sense of delight in the ways of God and joy in His

1 For a summary of the situation see J. E. MacFadyen, The Present Position
of O.T. Criticism in The People and the Book (ed. A. S. Peake), pp. 199-204.

2 This is true in a broad sense, whatever view be taken of the story in
Nehemiah vii. Whatever code was promulgated on that occasion, so impor-
tant in Jewish tradition, so enigmatic historically, during the three-quarters
of a century which preceded it, the community must have lived by the code
which was authoritative at the close of the monarchy. Malachi, writing as
late as the middle of the fifth century, seems still to assume Deuteronomy as
the norm of religious observance.

3 See especially Deut. x. 19, xx. 19-20, xxi. 10-14, xxii. 1-4, 6-9, xxiii.
15-16, 19, xxiv. 5-6, 10-22, and the motive assigned for the keeping of the
Sabbath, v. 12-15.

Deuteronomy 157

commandments, 1 and wanned by a patriotism in which hos-
tility to foreigners is much less prominent than love for the
soil and a fine feeling of national vocation. 2 Its theology is
simple: God is one, all powerful and perfectly righteous;
His will is revealed once for all in the Law; He rewards those
who keep it with long life and prosperity, and punishes those
who break it with disaster and death. 3

In the enthusiasm which Deuteronomy aroused, the whole
tragic history closed by the Exile was rewritten as a story
of God's dealings with His people, on lines first laid down by
Hosea and developed by subsequent prophets. The whole his-
torical literature, from Judges onward, comes down to us
"countersigned" with the dominant ideas of the Deuteronomie
school. The application of these ideas to the facts seems to
us often mechanical and artificial, but if the historical corpus
consisting of Deuteronomy itself with the Books of Judges,
Samuel, and Kings be taken as a whole, it conveys an im-
pressive philosophy of history whose essential truth stands
firm, though much of its detail is to us unconvincing. Its
interest lies not so much in the detail of events before the
Exile to ascertain these criticism has to look behind the Deu-
teronomic editing but in the witness it bears to the concep-
tion of God hi history which was the working philosophy of
the restored Jewish community.

As the life and thought of the restored community devel-
oped, other codes came to be added to Deuteronomy. They
supplemented or even in part superseded its provisions, par-
ticularly on the side of the cult. This marks the most definite
departure from the teaching of the earlier prophets. Ezekiel,
himself priest as well as prophet, had found a place in his
scheme for a reformed and purified ritual, and following his
lead, the priestly leaders of the people during a period of two
or three centuries elaborated a ritual system based on very

* Deut. vi. 4-25, viii., x. 12-15, xxx. 11-14.

2 Deut. iv. 7, vii. 6-11. Deut. vi. 1-3, xxviii, xxx. J5-20.

158 Religion in the Community

ancient tradition, but adapted to more advanced ideas of God.
The outcome of the process was the "Priestly Code" of Le-
Yiticus. And as Deuteronomy prepared the way for a re-
writing of history, so the Priestly Code was supported by a
revision of the Pentateuchal narrative (or the Hexateuch
since Joshua is included) , and by a new version of the history
of the Judaean kingdom in the Books of Chronicles.

The priestly narratives in the Hexateuch and in Chronicles
are of very small historical value as a record of the events
they profess to describe. They have great historical value
as representing the assumptions of the established religion
in the period after the Exile. The enormous importance at-
tached all through to the cult is astonishing after the protests
of the prophets, whose writings the authors of the new code
collected and revered. It is indeed ironical that a movement
in religion which started with Amos' unsparing attack on rit-
ual should have issued in one of the most elaborate ritual
systems ever known. Yet we must not mistake the character
of the revived cult. The paganism of the days of the mon-
archy is gone. Puerile and superstitious as much of the ritual
must appear to us (as indeed it would have appeared to
Isaiah), there is nothing in it that affronts the moral sense.
Ancient practices have been skilfully purged of their grossness
and adapted to the worship of the one God whose holiness
is at the same time righteous. If we find in Leviticus a col-
location of senseless rules of tabu with lofty moral principles,
while we cannot but wish for the clear-sighted criticism of an
Amos or a Micah, yet it is something that in the revived cult
morality has won a definite place. You may still be required
to acknowledge the holiness of God by a particular style of
hairdressing, but at least you must also acknowledge it by
loving your neighbour as yourself. 1 The priestly writers

1 Cf. Lev. xix. 27 with xix. 18. This whole chapter (which mostly belongs
to the so-called Law of Holiness, the oldest stratum of the Priestly Code) is
an astonishing example of the intermingling of the ethical and the unethical
conceptions of "holiness."

Composition of the Pentateuch 159

rarely let us into the secret of the meaning they attached
to their weird ceremonies, but they certainly intended to ex-
press through them their adoration of the lonely and unap-
proachable majesty of God of the one God who is good,
who from His throne on high spoke the word and heaven
and earth were made, 1 and who for His own name's sake re-
vealed to men the way of life which by His inscrutable will
He has obtained. This whole literature is an attempt to give
rigid and unmistakable form to the religious ideas of Ezekiel
and the post-exilic prophets.

Ultimately, the Deuteronomic and later codes were united
with earlier traditional codes going back to the pre-exilic
period, and the whole given a comprehensive setting in the
priestly narrative. The resultant system of life and worship
embodied in the Pentateuch in its final form the Torah 2 >
was the most treasured product of the religious movement of
the post-exilic period. The prophets whose works were now
given to the world in a definitive edition had one and all called
upon men to do the will of God. Well, here was His will set
forth in concrete detail, unambiguous and inescapable. The
comprehensiveness and precision of the code gave great
strength and permanence to the social institutions founded
upon it, and enabled Judaism to survive almost incredibly the
many dangers which threatened its existence. But when we
take a long view of things, we must acknowledge that the
more precise and detailed a code is, the more it is bound
up with temporary conditions. The inspiration of the proph-
ets makes them immortal. The studied precision of the "Law
of Moses" has made it, as a system, long obsolete. Already
before the Christian era Rabbinic casuistry was transforming

1 The creation-narrative of Gen. i. belongs to the Priestly stratum of the
Pentateuch. How it soars above the mythology of earlier creation-stories such
as that of Gen. ii.I

2 The word is much wider in its significance than our word "law," which
we use, following the Septuagint v6(Ms, as its translation. It means etymologi-
cally "instruction," and its religious connotation is the revealed will of God.

160 Religion in the Community

it and Alexandrine philosophy was allegorizing it. To-day it
has, apart from the prophetic ideas underlying it, little more
than an historical interest.

The principal value of the "Law" for us is that in it we have
the bony skeleton which supported the warm flesh and blood
of prophetic religion in the Jewish community. It was the
nucleus of their sacred Canon. Indeed some Jewish authori-
ties take the view that no other writings are in the full sense
canonical. The prophets are regarded as authoritative com-
mentary on the Law, but so are the Rabbinical writings col-
lected in the Talmud, reaching down into the Middle Ages.
But in practice first the prophets and then a selection of other
writings came to be placed alongside the Pentateuch and re-
garded, like it, as Holy Scripture. The threefold Canon is
already mentioned by Josephus, and implied in the Ezra-
legend referred to above, both late in the first century of our
era. It is said to have been officially recognized by an as-
sembly of Rabbis at Jamnia about A.D. 100. The tests for
canonicity given by the Rabbis are date and language: to be
included in Holy Scripture a book must have been written
during the prophetic period (conceived as ending with Ne-
hemiah) and in Hebrew. These tests, however, are mere "ra-
tionalization" of a selection which had already been carried
out by the general sense of the community, and are quite fal-
lacious. 1 The canonical writings are as a matter of fact
those which commended themselves to the religious instinct of
Judaism as in various ways formative of its life and tradition.
So far as we can judge from a comparison with extant works
of the pre-Christian period which found no place in the
Canon, we may fairly say that the selection does in a rough
way represent a genuine religious valuation. It is not, how-
ever, infallible. Who would not give the Book of Esther for
Ecclesiasticus?

1 Ecdesiasticus, for instance, was written (and is for the most part still
extant) in Hebrew, and is older than Daniel and some of the Psalms; yet it
is not in the Canon.

The Canon of the Old Testament 161

But if we regard the classical prophets as giving the spir-
itual basis of the whole, and the Law as defining the institu-
tional forms within which it developed, the other writings
of the post-exilic period transmit to us the living forces of re-
ligion, in great diversities of operation, from the prophecies
of Haggai and Zechariah immediately after the close of the
Exile to the Book of Daniel and the Maccabaean Psalms in
the second century B.C. When they are supplemented, as they
should be, by the so-called Apocrypha, they bring us into the
spiritual atmosphere in which the new religious movement
represented by the New Testament comes to us with its ut-
most fulness of meaning.

The most typical literature of the period is ethical or devo-
tional in character. It is admirably representative of an
established religion whose main task is the peaceful penetra-
tion of a society in which its principles are already traditional.
It is when a religion has become a settled and accepted thing
in the life of a people that it is most likely to bring forth a
literature of devotion. While new ideas have to be fought
for, abuses reformed, false or unworthy notions of God com-
bated, the voices most clearly heard are those of the prophet
and the reformer. When the fight is won, and the general
conscience of the community is content with its established
ways of faith and worship, then the quieter notes of piety
and devotion are sounded. It is with good reason that for
devotional reading we go by instinctive preference not to the
prophets, but to the Psalms. The prophets were concerned
to affirm and defend the truth; the psalmists assume it and
let their spirits dwell securely in it.

The Psalter is the hymn-book of the second Temple. Opin-
ions differ about the amount of poetry of earlier date which
may be included in it, as about the date of its completion, but
there is little doubt that the bulk of its contents was com-

162 Religion in the Community

posed during the centuries between the Exile and the Mac-
cabsean period; and anything in it that may be of earlier date
was selected and adapted with " a view to the needs of that
age. The prophetic religion had won its cause, and had en-
tered deeply into the mind of the people, as well as informing
their accepted institutions. A whole community professed at
least to live by the law of God. Devout souls could "medi-
tate in it day and night" 1 with a serene sense of satisfaction
to be found only in a religion which has become corporate
and traditional. The question has often been discussed, how
far the piety of the Psalms is individual and how far col-
lective. It is of the essence of the case that it is both. In the
prophetic period the individual is set over against the com-
munity in passionate protest. In the period of the Psalmists
the individual is blessedly conscious of sharing a collective
life of faith. The "I" of the Psalmists may often stand for
the community (or a group within it) , but it is none the less
the utterance of a truly personal faith and devotion.

Here personal religion comes to its own. We have observed
its emergence in a certain definite form in the prophets, par-
ticularly in Jeremiah. It is this prophetic piety which per-
vades the Psalter. The Psalmists share the prophets' robust
faith in a God who, while holy, wonderful, and mysterious
beyond telling, has revealed himself unmistakably to men in
His works. Secure in the belief in one God, Lord of heaven
and earth, they are no longer afraid (as the Deuteronomic
writers with their keen sense of natural beauty were still
afraid 2 ) of nature-paganism. For them "the heavens declare
the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handi-
work". 3 In the spirit of the creation-narrative of the Priestly
Code, though with a warmer fancy, they can call the roll of
the creatures and cry "0 Lord, how manifold are Thy works;
in wisdom hast thou made them all!" 4 But the mighty works

1 Ps. i. 2. 2 Deut. iv. 19. Ps. xix. 1-6.

* Ps. civ., cf. cxlviii., etc., also Job xxxviii-xli.

The Religion of the Psalter 163

of God in history are a still more signal witness to His great-
ness and majesty. Incongruous in Christian worship, yet still
moving in its exultant faith, is that Psalm 1 in which we sing
of the destruction of "Sihon king of the Amorites (for His
mercy endureth for ever), and Og king of Bashan (for His
mercy endureth for ever) !" This and similar Psalms are the
poetical counterpart of the Deuteronomic recension of He-
brew history. Their authors, taught by the prophets, sought
and found God in what He had done.

On that twofold ground of confidence, the works of God in
nature and His works in history, the Psalmists take their
stand. Times may be bad, and evil strong in the world, but
they will defiantly tell it out among the heathen that Jehovah
is King, a great God and a great King above all gods. 2 He
has chosen Israel to be His people, and He will deliver them
out of all their distresses. 3 This is not a mere return to the
non-moral optimism of the "false prophets"; for the relation
of God to His people has ethical conditions. The Israel of
which they sing is the people of the Law, the righteous, 4 whom
many of them at least regard as an "ecclesiola in ecclesia",
the true commonwealth of God within a nation not wholly
faithful to Hun. Great is His mercy to them; great His de-
mands of them. Sinners, though they be of Israel, shall ut-
terly fall, for God will judge the world in righteousness. 5
The apparent prosperity of the wicked is of necessity only
temporary. 6 The judge of all the earth must do right. The
first Psalm of the corpus sets forth in brief and decisive con-
trast the inevitable lots of the righteous and the wicked;
whatever be the present aspect of facts, it is a necessity of

1 Ps. cxxxvi., cf. Ixxviii., cv. f cvi., etc.

2 Ps. xcvi. 10, xcv. 3, cf. ii., ix., xxix., xxxiii., xlvii.

3 Ps. Ixviii., Ixxvi., Ixxxiii., Ixxxv., Ixxxvii., etc.

4 Ps. xl., Ixxiii., 1, cxxv., etc.
6 Ps. 1., Ixxxii., xciv., cxlvi.

Ps. xxxvi. 1-4, 11-12, xxxvii., Ixxiii., xci., etc.

164 Religion in the Community

belief that the righteous shall prosper, the wicked perish.
Many indeed are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord
delivereth him out of them all. 1 Acts of faith in God's deliv-
erance, prayers for His help, thanksgiving for mercies received,
are the main stuff of the Psalms. Behind it all lies the as-
sumption that the worshippers are, so to speak, in good stand-
ing before God; they are righteous. That means that they
love and observe the law of God. That pride in the clear,
reasonable, beneficent commandments of God which we find
in Deuteronomy is shared by the Psalmists. 2 The limitations
of the Law had yet to reveal themselves. At this stage we can
recognize the well-grounded satisfaction men felt in a religion
which associated the worship of God with an intelligent dis-
cipline of daily life in social relations. In the main the
Psalmists are conscious of keeping the law, and they express
this consciousness in terms which sometimes have for us a
disagreeable suggestion of self -righteousness. 3 Yet they know
too what it is to have a bad conscience. In some Psalms the
sense of sin finds most poignant expression. 4 But with it
always goes the sense of divine forgiveness 5 a forgiveness
essentially independent of sacrifice and expiation, yet fitly
mediated by the ritual.

Indeed the position of the cult in the Psalms may give us a
juster view of its actual significance in the working religion
of the early post-exilic centuries than might be gained from
an exclusive study of the legal writings of the time. We may
fairly read the Psalms as indicating that devout men had
experience of divine forgiveness and communion with God
in the most inwardly real and direct way, but that it was per-
fectly natural for them to associate such communion with the

1 Ps. xxxiv. 19.

a Ps. cxix., xix. 7-14, xl. 8, etc., cf. Deut. iv. 5-7, xxx. 11-20.

3 Ps. xxvi., vii. 8, xviii. 20-24, etc.

4 Ps. xxxviii., li., xxv. 7-11, cvi. 6, etc.

* Ps. xxxii., Ixv. 3, Ixxxv. 1-2, ciii. 10-12, cxxx. 7-8, etc.

The Psalms and the Law 165

cult, as its fitting medium of expression. 1 Thus in some
Psalms which breathe the most intense yearning for com-
munion with God, an attentive scrutiny reveals the fact that
the form of communion desired is that of mingling with the
crowd of worshippers flocking up to the Temple hill on a
day of festival. 2 It is not for that less truly inward com-
munion. All the heights and depths of spiritual life are ex-
perienced within the forms of a traditional and corporate
"religion.

We found the authority of the prophets to be essentially
that of religious genius, which by virtue of individual "in-
spiration" apprehended intensely and uttered compellingly
fresh and creative ideas. The Psalms too have their authority
for religious minds, but it is of a different kind. We do not
find here towering individual genius, but a high level of cor-
porate religion maintained through many generations. We
are made aware of the immense range of religious experience
covered by those few ruling ideas which the prophets had at
last made current coin. Genius is never altogether normal;
but there are few phases of normal religious experience which
are not represented in the Psalter. There is here nothing
extravagant, nothing fantastic or exotic, nothing smacking of
an artificial and cloistered religiosity. The emotions expressed
are simple, true, and strong, without a trace of the sentimen-
tality which is the bane of all but the greatest hymns. All
is honestly felt and given lyric utterance in language of the
utmost purity and sincerity. 3 There is no part of the Bible
where scholarship finds it so difficult to define the precise
historical setting of the various compositions. There is no
part of the Bible where such criticism is less needed. For
the situations contemplated are those in which most men find

1 Ps. xx., Ixv. 1-5, Ixvi. 13-15, Ixxiii. 16-17, Ixxxi., c., cxvi. 12-19, cxxxiv.,
cxxxv. 1-3, 19-21.

* Pa. xlii., xliii., 1. 14-15, Lriii. 1-2, Ixviii. 24-26, Ixxxiv., cxxii., cxxxii. 13-14.

s "The saint when he tries to express himself is no saint unless he is an
artist. He must be ascetic in words no less than in life." A reviewer in The
Times Literary Supplement.

166 Religion in the Community

themselves who, in a world like this, try to live by a religion
making the large and simple assumptions of the prophetic
faith. The Psalter has in all ages nourished the inward life,
not of specialists in religion alone, but of those who do the
work of the world, and feel the stress and need of ordinary
daily life. 1

The piety of the Psalter implies a definite moral standard
as an inseparable element in it. There are some Psalms which
have morals for their express theme, 2 and from the collection
as a whole it would be possible to get a fairly good idea of
the ethics of Judaism on broad lines. But there is also a spe-
cifically ethical literature to be considered. Typical examples
are the Book of Proverbs in the Canon, and Ecclesiasticus in
the Apocrypha. The former contains the work of many au-
thors, mainly of the fourth and third centuries; the latter is
the work of Jesus ben Sirach, who wrote early in the second
century. All these writers ranked among "the Wise", who
according to Jewish tradition were the successors of the^,,
prophets. Their claim to the succession is so far justified,
that they take with absolute seriousness the principle that to
serve God one must live a good life, and make it their aim
to define what a good life is, even beyond the written rules
of the Torah. As they began by accepting the doctrine, taught
by the prophets and laid down with mechanical rigour in
Deuteronomy, that good is rewarded and evil punished in
this life, their ethics have a utilitarian and prudential cast.
They are sure that to be good is the only sensible course in a
world like this, and that the sinner is a fool. "Wisdom" is
the all-inclusive virture, and "the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of Wisdom". 3 We have seen that the prophets
valued highly the intellectual qualities of insight and judg-
ment, and here "the Wise" are their true followers. It was

1 See E,. E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life.

2 Ps. xv., ci., and in part xli., Ixxxii., etc.

3 Prov. ix. 10 (cf. Ps. cxi. 10); Ecclus. i. 14 (cf. 16, 18, 20, 27) et passim.

Wisdom-Literature 167

a great thing to state religion in terms of a reasonable moral-
ity, where clear common sense keeps fanaticism and super-
stition at a distance. If a good deal of their teaching has the
air of moral commonplace, it is not necessarily the worse for
that. The moralist can hardly dispense with the common-
place, since so much of the groundwork of his subject be-
longs to the unchanging qualities of human nature. It is for
him to recommend such fundamental virtues as kindliness,
honesty, diligence, sobriety, temperance, chastity, truthful-
ness, modesty, and to discourage their contrary vices, with
such arguments and inducements as he has at his command.
Such are the prevailing themes of the "Wisdom" writers. They
handle them with the freshness and vigour which spring from
conviction and wide experience. Their criticism of life is
shrewd, based on a cool and humorous observation, pointed
with wit and adorned with a pretty fancy. Their praises of
Wisdom often rise to the level of great poetry. 1 Their moral
outlook has its limitations. They rarely reach out towards
such heroic ideals as self-sacrifice and forgiveness. 2 Yet in
their pedestrian way these writers often get far on the road.
It is to one of this school that we owe the fine ethical ideal
embodied in the character of Job. His "oath of compurga-
tion" is the classical expression of the ethics of post-exilic
Judaism 3 :

"If I did despise the cause of my man-servant

Or of my maid-servant, when they contended with me,
What then shall I do when God riseth up?

And when he visiteth, what shall I answer him?
Did not he that made me in the womb make him?

And did not one fashion us in the womb?
If I have withheld the poor from their desire,

Or caused the eyes of the widow to fall;

1 Prov. i. 20-33, viii., etc.; Ecclus. xxiv., etc.

2 Yet see Prov. xxiv. 17, xxv. 21; Ecclus. x. 6, xxviii. 1-7. Ben Sirach's more
usual attitude is that of xii. 4-7, xxv. 7; cf. also Ps. Ixix, 19-28, cix,, and many
other passages in the Psalms.

* Job xxxi. 13-35 (R.V. slightly altered).

168 Religion in the Community

Or have eaten my morsel alone,

And the fatherless hath not eaten thereof ...
If I have seen any perish for want of clothing,

Or that the needy hath no covering;
If his loins have not blessed me,

And if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep;
If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless,

Because I saw my help in the gate;
Then let my shoulder fall from the shoulder blade,

And mine arm be broken from the bone! . . .
If I have made gold my hope,

And have said to the fine gold, My confidence 1
If I rejoiced because my wealth was great,

And because my hand had gotten much; . . .
If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me,

Or lifted up myself when evil found him; . . .
If among men I covered my transgressions,

By hiding mine iniquity in my bosom;
Because I feared the great multitude,

And the contempt of families terrified me,

So that I kept silence and went not out of the door

Oh that I had one to hear me!
Lo, here is my signature; let the Almighty answer me!"

There is no doubt that Job stands in the succession of the
prophets as humane moralists. A public that could accept
such a moral idea as its common standard and this is nec-
essary to the argument of the book had certainly not failed
to assimilate one side at least of their teaching.

This ethical tradition was continuous in Judaism, and is 1
represented beyond the canonical period in such literature, '
for example, as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, be-
longing substantially to the second century B.C. It would be *
difficult to find anything in the whole Old Testament quite
up to the level (in its own line) of the counsel put into the
mouth of the Patriarch Gad (I) 1 , though it is a direct de-
velopment of that humane tendency that we have observed all
through:

1 Testament of Gad vi. 3-7 (R. H. Charles).

Ethics of Judaism 169

"Love ye one another from the heart; and if a man sin against
thee, speak peaceably to him, and in thy soul hold not guile; and
if he repent forgive him. But if he deny it, do not get into a pas-
sion with him, lest catching the poison from thee he take to swearing,
and so thou sin doubly. And though he deny it and yet have a
sense of shame when reproved, give over reproving him. For he
who denieth may repent so as not again to wrong thee; yea, he
may also honour thee and be at peace with thee. And if he be
shameless in his wrong-doing, even so forgive him from the heart,
and leave to God the avenging."

The great Rabbis whose cards are preserved in the early por-
tions of the Mishna are once again in the same tradition, and
even though Pharisaism often obscured the plain lines of
"Wisdom" morality by a false emphasis on irrational forms
of religious observance, yet it held within it an ethical ideal
inherited from the great prophets. This ideal is acknowledged
in the Gospels, 1 with all their trenchant criticism of the
Pharisees, and it passed with Paul from Pharisaism into
Christian ethics.

It is important to realize that while the post-exilic religion
was elaborating the system of rites and ceremonies in the
Priestly Code, it experienced also a parallel elaboration of the
ethical side of the Torah of which Deuteronomy is the foun-
dation. The "wise" describe their own moral teaching as
"Torah" in the wide sense. Ben Sirach expressly identifies
Wisdom with Torah, and even with "the book of the cove-
nant of the Most High God, the Torah which Moses com-
manded us for a heritage". 2 Thus the "Law" in which the
Psalmists delight is not a mere code of rules mostly cere-

* Luke x. 26-28; Mark xii. 28-34; cf. Matt, xxiii. 2-3, 23-24. Jesus accepted
from Hillel (with a characteristic modification) the summary of "the Law and
the Prophets" which we call the Golden Rule (Matt. vii. 12; Luke vi. 31).
Hillel said, "This is the substance of the Torah: what thou hatest for thyself
do not to thy fellow" (Aboth d' R. Nathan cited by I. Abrahams, Studies in
Pharisaism, I., p. 23) ; cf . Tobit iv. 15.

2 Ecclus. xxiv. 23.

170 Religion in the Community

monial and non-rational, as we are apt to think if we have
in mind the legal literature of their age, but a comprehensive
ethical ideal. When we contemplate this ideal as it is richly
illustrated in the Wisdom literature, we must acknowledge
the justice of the claim of Deuteronomy 1 :

"This commandment which I command thee this day, it is
not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven,
that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to, heaven and
bring it unto us and make us hear it, that we may do it?
Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who
shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make
us hear it, that we may do it? But the word is very nigh
unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest
do it."

1 Deut. xxx. 11-14.

CHAPTER VIII

k THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

RELIGION

>

THE devotional literature, then, of the Psalms, .and the
ethical literature of Proverbs, with other kindred writ-
ings, represent the religion of the Jews as an accepted system

w satisfying in the main their spiritual needs. The lofty teach-
ings of the prophets proved themselves capable of being trans-
lated into terms of life and faith for a whole society, living
in a larger and more complex world than theirs, and exposed
to many vicissitudes and disturbing influences. For during
these centuries the Jews were no longer a compact and com-
paratively isolated national state, but were caught up in the

r wider life of great empires. They were the subjects first of
the Persians, the last of the ancient Oriental monarchies, then
of the Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, and finally
after a brief period of independence were absorbed into the
great western Empire of Rome. They were powerfully af-

k fected by these foreign contacts, and the fact that their re-
ligion was able to assert itself with undiminished force, and
successfully to absorb ideas from the environment without
losing its character, is a strong proof of its spiritual vitality.
At the same time there are evidences of strain and tension

> within the accepted system, as various unsolved questions are
brought into prominence by the pressure of changing condi-
tions. Partly they are due to insufficient assimilation or
application of prophetic ideas, partly to defects or gaps in
the prophetic teaching itself. But some such tension there

171

172 Inconclmiveness of Old Testament Religion

must be wherever a high type of religion like that of the
prophets is taken seriously by a community of ordinary men
and women who try to make it the guide of an active social
life in a complex and civilized world. We who read the Bible
to-day have to face the like task. Its value to us is all the
greater because it not only attests the fundamental satisfac-
tion which these people found in their religion, but also re-
fleets the tensions that arose in it when they faced the com-
plexities of an actual situation.

For example, there is perpetual tension between the priestly
conception of religion as cultus and the prophetic conception
of it as spiritual and ethical life. As we have seen, the re-
ligion of Judaism, while it set out to be prophetic in its main
intention, yet found a place for the revived sacrificial system.
There was an unsolved problem at its heart. The problem
faces every established religion. For it is hard to see how
any corporate religion could dispense with cultus, and yet in
practice the cultus always tends to become a substitute for
religion as the prophets understood it. Post-exilic Judaism
found no radical solution of the problem. In the very period
when the cultus was growing to unheard-of elaboration we
hear echoes of the prophetic protests 1 :

"Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it;

Thou delightest not in burnt offering;
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

The Psalms themselves are witness that for the finest spirits
prayer rather than sacrifice became more and more the heart
of worship, even while sacrifice was unquestioningly accepted
as a necessary part of it. In other literature of the time we
can see a new ideal of priesthood growing up, in which the
priest is a man of prayer more than an official for the punc-

s. li. 16-17 (A.V.).

Sacrifice and Prayer 173

tilious performance of ritual. Judas Maccabseus saw a vision
of the High Priest Onias "a great gentleman (avdpa KO.\OV

' not ayadov), reverend of bearing and mild in disposition,
fair-spoken and practised from childhood in all the ways of
virtue" and he was not offering sacrifice, but "with out-
stretched hands praying for the whole body of the Jews". 1
That priesthood in an ethical religion demands ethical quali-

^ fications Is implied already in Malachi's imaginary "charac-
ter" of Levi, the ancestral priest 2 :

"The law of truth was in his mouth,

And unrighteousness was not found in his lips;
He walked with me in truth and uprightness,
And did turn many away from iniquity."

Three centuries later the same ideal reappears in the Testa-
ment of Levi, 3 and on the eve of the Christian revelation
Hillel summed up the character of the true "disciple of Aaron"
"one who loves peace, who pursues peace; who loves man-
kind and brings them near to Torah". 4 It was this subli-
mated conception of priesthood, divorced from any necessary

' connection with a material cultus, that lay to the hand of
the Christian writer to the Hebrews, 5 who presents Christ as
the true High Priest. A long succession of actual high priests
who scandalously departed from this ideal must have done
more than any argument or denunciation to remove the Tem-

> pie cultus from the centre to the circumference for men of true
and energetic piety. When Jesus, claiming succession to Jere-
miah, 6 expelled the sacrificial animals from the Temple, and
pronounced it, in the words of the "Third Isaiah", "a house
of prayer", 7 He was carrying this process to its natural ful-

|^ filment.

Meanwhile so much of the traditional ritual as could be

* 2 Mace. xv. 12. a Mai. ii. 6 (R.V.).

3 Test. Lev. xviii. * Pirke Aboth, i. 12.

8 Heb. iv. 14r-v. 10 Jer. vii. 11, quoted Mark xi. 17.

7 Isa. Ivi. 7.

174 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

practised by laymen took a new lease of life in the discipline
adopted by the pietists of the time the Chasidim and their
successors the Pharisees. Fasting, Sabbath-keeping, cere-
monial purity, and the payment of a burdensome ecclesiastical
taxation formed a code of religious observance, essentially no
less external than the cultus itself, and yet commended by
the post-exilic prophets and their successors as earnestly as
the "weightier matters of the law". 1 In somewhat the same <^
way the English Puritans, while denouncing the external-
ism of the Catholic cultus, devised for themselves a disci-
pline, in part resembling the old monastic rule adapted for
persons living in the world, and often maintained with equal
moral fervour the practice of the cardinal virtues and a mere ,
religious etiquette. This peculiar combination is very char-
acteristic of the piety which finds attractive expression in such
writings as tho.; ~ne hundred and nineteenth Psalm and the
"Third Isaian", and less attractive expression in the Pharisa-
ism of the Gospels or of Paul's pre-Christian days.

The double process by which the cultus became a matter of
prayer more than sacrifice, while many of its ritual or cere-
monial elements were absorbed into the discipline of daily life,
prepared Judaism for the final catastrophe under Titus. The
Temple having been destroyed, the religion was re-constituted
with prayer and the Commandments as its pillars.

Again, there is acute tension between the idea of religion 1
as essentially universal (since God is one), and the sectarian ^
nationalism of the Jewish system. As we have seen, the
prophets did not bequeath a perfectly thought-out or con-
sistent doctrine on this point. Of the two great prophets who
prepared for the restoration after the Exile, one, the "Second
Isaiah", is in the main universalist, the other, Ezekiel, in the
main nationalist. Both found successors. The Book of Ruth,

1 Isa. Ivi. 2, 6, Iviii. 13, Ixvi. 23; Mai. iii. 7-10; cf. Tobit i. 3-14 (c. 200 B.C.) ;
Jubilees xxxii. 8-15 (2nd cent. B.C.); Test. Jos. iii. 4; Psalms of Solomon (1st
cent. B.C.) iii. 9.

Nationalism and Universalism 175

pleading against Ezra's harsh suppression of mixed marriages, 1
and the Book of Jonah, proclaiming God's mercy upon
heathen Nineveh "wherein are more than six score thousand
persons that cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand, and also much cattle" 2 are outstanding
examples of the continued protests made in the interests of
a humaner ideal against a hardening national exclusiveness.
The "Third Isaiah", while firmly convinced of the superiority
of his own people, would have them become missionaries to
the nations, and envisages a day when "all flesh" will wor-
ship Jehovah. 3 Malachi goes further, and declares, "From
the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same my
name is great among the Gentiles".* But the narrower tend-
ency prevailed, especially when oppression exasperated na-
tional feeling. 5 It had some justification, for the preservation
of the prophetic religion might well seem ttf u e bound up with
the integrity of the nation, and friendliness to the foreigner
was too often accompanied by demoralizing compromises with
paganism. Hence the Chasidim, who, forming a sort of con-
venticle within the national "church", were not nationalists
hi a political sense, lent all their weight to the exclusive tend-
ency and we find their successors in New Testament times
upholders of a narrow nationalism in religion. Thus whether
through political nationalism or through a rigorous puritanism,
the later books of the Old Testament are deeply scored with
a gloomy and rancorous kind of corporate egotism, which
shows how difficult it was for the lofty spirituality of the
prophets to become a workaday religion for a whole com-
munity. The difficulty is perpetually recurrent, for it is in-
herent in the situation. The patriot who is also a religious

1 Ezra x., cf. Neh. xiii. 1-8. This policy was in the sense of Dt. xxiii. 3.
Contrast Ruth ii. 12, iv. 11-12, 17. Cf. Mt. i. 5-6.

Jonah iv. 10-11.

Isa. Ivi. 1-8, Ix. 1-6, Ixvi. 18-23; cf. Zech. ii. 11, viii. 20-23; Isa. six. 19-25
(5th century). So also PB. Ixvii., etc.

Mai. i. 11.

1 Cf. Ps. ix., bodi., Ixxhc., Ixxxiii., cxxxvii., etc.

176 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

man wants his country to be "God's own country", goes on
to believe it such, and ends with "So let all Thine enemies
perish, O Lord!" The Puritan, seeing in the discipline of an
exclusive society the only safeguard for true religion in an
evil world, readily comes to identify religion with his sect, and
develops the vices of the minority mind. How is corporate
religion, in any concrete expression of it, to be other than
national or sectarian? Yet there can be no going back upon
the prophetic discovery that God is the God of all men. The
Old Testament wrestles with the problem and hands it on un-
solved to the New.

But there was a problem that struck deeper into the heart
of things. The prophets had done a dangerous thing when
in the interest of a spiritual conception of God they had upset
the natural equilibriums of primitive religion. We have seen
that a certain tension between the aloofness and the nearness
of God is inseparable from religion. The plain "heathen"
(and the Hebrew people at large before the prophets were
hardly more) solves his problem in a rough way by attribut-
ing an awful "holiness" to familiar objects, and by mingling
mysterious rites at the local shrine with all the operations of
daily life. The prophets took away from the common man all.
those homely reminders of the presence of God "on every
high hill and under every green tree". In modern jargon,
they emphasized the transcendence of God at the cost of His
immanence. For the prophets themselves nothing was lost
thereby, for the depth and strength of their religious experi-
ence were such that without any dependence on symbol or
ritual they found God very near to their own souls and knew
Him at the same moment to be infinitely high and mysterious.
It is a post-exilic prophet who has given us the classical ex-
pression for that reconciliation of transcendence and imma-
nence which belongs to all complete religious experience:

\

Transcendence and Immanence 177

"Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose
name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place; with him also
that is of a humble and contrite spirit." 1

Many of the Psalmists have reached the same level of insight,
and there is for them no longer any contradiction between
the nearness and the aloofness of God. But it is evident that
the tension had not been altogether overcome for the average
man. The elaboration of the cultus is itself a symptom.
Jehovah, it was now taught, was confined to no earthly spot.
The heaven of heavens could not contain Him. Yet of His
infinite mercy He had chosen to dwell on the hill of Zion
the one spot on earth where men could find Him near at
hand. 2 The awful "holiness" of that hill therefore must be
guarded with all conceivable apparatus of rite and ceremony,
which must be made to symbolize in the most impressive way
the preciousness of such approach to the Inapproachable as
He condescended to authorize. 3 This ritual, defined in the
priestly writings of the Old Testament, has had an influence
on liturgical practice and language which still survives. It is
the cult of a God who is far away, and its anxious scrupulosity
betrays an unsatisfied craving for some more direct sense of
God's nearness and accessibility such as a cruder religion
had given. The idea of intermediaries between God and man
begins to be important. Popular imagination makes great
play with "angels". It is thought that we may here rec-
ognize influence from the Persian religion, beginning in the
period when the Jews were subjects of the Persian Empire,
though even in pre-exilic literature the idea of angels is not
unknown. "The angel of Jehovah" is a convenient form of

lisa. Ivii. 15(R.V.).

1 Isa. Ixvi. 1-4, looks at first sight like a prophetic declaration of the utter
transcendence of God, but is found to be a protest against a schismatic temple
with a syncretistic cult (probably with reference to the Samaritan temple ou
Mt. Gerizim).

3 See e.g. the ritual for the Day of Atonement, Lev. xvi.

178 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

speech to avoid the anthropomorphism of the older ways of
thinking, and an "angel" has sometimes evidently been substi-
tuted for a god in the primitive tradition, as when Hosea says
that Jacob prevailed over "the angel", 1 alluding to the very
ancient tale of his wrestling with a river-god. 2 The more
extravagant developments of the doctrine of angels are found
in non-canonical literature, but it is clear that even within the
Old Testament some functions of the providential government
of the universe are being delegated to subordinate powers
and that not only in apocalyptic contexts, where the activity
of angels is an essential part of the scheme, 3 but also in the
literature of personal religion. 4 But where the discarded
gods of polytheism for that is what angels really are have
to be brought back to safeguard the transcendence of God,
it is clear that the root-problem of religion is not solved.

Deeper thinkers treated the problem of the mediation of
the divine in a more interesting way. The conception of
Wisdom, as a sort of half-personal emanation of the Divine,
mediating between God and the world, is one of the most
fruitful products of the contact of Judaism with the outer
world. For although we cannot mistake the native Hebrew
lineaments of this Wisdom, yet the doctrine would hardly
have developed as it did without the influence of Egyptian
mysticism and Greek philosophy. For the Hebrew, wisdom
was primarily the practical right judgment by which a vir-
tuous man guides his conduct, and the Wisdom-literature is
full of common sense precepts for daily life. But since Juda-
ism was a religion of revelation, all wisdom was conceived
as the inspiration of God, and its standard form was the
revealed Torah, as an all-sufficient "expression of the will of
God for men. The Wisdom-morality is the Torah on its more

i Hoa. xii. 4. 2 Gen. xxxii. 24-32.

s E.g. Zech. i. 8-17; Dan. viii. 15-16, x. 11-21.

4 E.g. Ps. xxxiv. 7, xxxv. 5-6, xci. 11, etc.; Dan. iii. 28, vi. 22. Cf. also Tobit
v. 4. et passim.

Wisdom as Mediator 179

humane and rational side. In a system which tended more
and more to emphasize the aloofness of God, the Torah, as
His revealed will, came to take the place of supreme inter-
mediary between God and man. In its aspect as Wisdom it
could more readily be thought of, especially under the for-
eign influences already mentioned, in relation to the works
of God in Nature as well as in relation to His Law for man.
Already in the more poetical parts of the Book <of Proverbs
Wisdom is half-personified as the Companion of God in crea-
tion 1 :

"Jehovah formed me as the beginning of his way,

The first of his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,

Or even the earth was. . . .
When he established the heavens, I was there,

When he set a circle upon the face of the deep;
When he made firm the skies above,

When the fountain of the deep became strong . . .
Then I was with him as a master workman,

And I was daily his delight."

A century later Jesus ben Sirach 2 carries the thought of Prov-
erbs a step further, making Wisdom say:

"I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, .
And covered the earth as a mist.
I dwelt in high places,

And my place was in the pillar of the cloud.
Alone I compassed the circuits of heaven,
And walked in the depths of the abyss.
In the waves of the sea and in all the earth,
And in every nation and people, I got a possession."

Finally in the Wisdom of Solomon, which brings us down

^Prov. viii. 22-30 (R.V.). The rendering "master-workman" in 30 is not
certain; a possible meaning is "foster-child," but LXX supports R.V., and it
was clearly so understood in traditional exegesis before the Christian era.
Cf. Wisd. vii. 22.

2 Ecclus. xxiv. 3-6.

180 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

practically to the Christian Era, we have a fully developed
doctrine of divine immanence in terms of Wisdom 1 :

"Wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

Yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of her

pureness.

For she is a breath of the power of God,
And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty;

Therefore can nothing defiled find entrance into her.
For she is an effulgence from everlasting light,
And an unspotted mirror of the working of God,

And an image of his goodness.
And she being one hath power to do all things:
And remaining in herself reneweth all things:
And from generation to generation passing into holy souls
She maketh men friends of God and prophets."

In such a doctrine there is the possibility of a valid reconcil-
iation of transcendence and immanence, and doubtless it was
a possibility realized by many in their experience. But as a
philosophy of religion it has inherent weaknesses. The poet-
ical half-personification of Wisdom evades rather than an-
swers the question whether in religious experience one is in
direct touch with a personal God, or only moved by a cos-
mic force. The doctrine was perhaps at once too mtellectualist
and too nearly mystical to strike deep root in Judaism, except
in so far as Wisdom could be kept strictly identified with the
concrete Torah as the form of a national religion. The ulti-
. mate phase of Wisdom-philosophy is to be sought in the
Christology of Paul and the Logos-doctrine of the Fourth
Gospel, in both of which the fictitious personification of Wis-
dom is carried into the realm of reality by the conception of
God incarnate in a human Person.

But once again, behind the difficulty raised for religious
experience by the new emphasis on divine transcendence lay
a more radical doubt. Could the prophetic assurance of the

*Wisd.vii. 24-27 (R.V.).

Prophetic Theodicy Questioned 181

government of the universe by a good and all-powerful God
stand in the face of facts? The theodicy of the prophets, 1
at least in the form in which it reached the mind of the or-
dinary man, was simple and rigorous: because God is just, the
righteous prospers in this world, the wicked is punished.
Throughout the Old Testament this belief is "orthodoxy".
The prophets had mainly had in view the destiny of peoples
as historical units. In that sense their doctrine obviously
meets many of the facts. At least, the most profound ob-
servers of many peoples and ages have seen reason to regard
history in its great rhythms as a moral order. Die Weltge-
schichte ist das Weltgericht. But any application of the
principle in particular detail is confessedly difficult. The
Jews very naturally did not find it easy to admit that they
were so vastly more wicked than other nations as to account
for their repeated calamities on straightforward principles of
justice. The problem became far more difficult when, under
the influence of teachers like Ezekiel, the doctrine of exact
retribution was extended to the individual lot. There is no
question more perpetually recurrent in the Old Testament
than that of the undeserved sufferings of the righteous and
the undeserved prosperity of the wicked. 2 It besets the later
prophets. In the Psalms it crops up with pathetic insistence.
It is in the minds of writers of the Wisdom school. The as-
tonishing thing is that the doctrine of exact retribution should
have been so tenacious of life. Many partial solutions of the
problem are offered. The wicked may prosper in life, but
their "latter end" will be terrible; or their sins will be visited
on their posterity. 3 The righteous suffer by way of moral dis-
cipline. 4

1 See chap. IV. pp. 100-104.

2 Jer. jcii. 12; Pa. Ixxiii. et passim.

Ps. xxxvii., Ixxiii. 17-19, etc.; Ecclus. rxvii. 25-29, xl. 15, xli. 6.
* Pa. cxix. 67, 71 (R.V.).

182 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion i

"Before I was afflicted I went astray,

But now I observe thy word ...
It is good for me that I have been afflicted,
That I might Jearn thy statutes." ;

There is no mistaking the genuine experience that lies behind
such confessions. Profounder still is the suggestion of the
"Second Isaiah" that the sufferings of the righteous may
have vicarious value for the redemption of the nations, 1 but it
was a suggestion that did not, apparently, carry much weight
in the biblical period. 2 The most elaborate treatment of the
whole problem is in the dramatic poem of Job, in which the
orthodox doctrine is expounded with persuasive eloquence, only
to be decisively rejected as untrue to the facts of life. The
traditional theology is in ruins, and no theory is offered to
replace it. The author offers only his own unshakable cer-
tainty of God, and his acceptance of a purpose too vast for
his understanding. 3

"I had heard of thee with the hearing of the ear,
But now mine eye seeth thee".

it-.

There is, of course, nothing more to be said. It is no small
part of the value of the Old Testament that it faces these
ultimate problems of human existence simply and frankly,
without having recourse (with exceptions which we shall pres-
ently notice) to the hypothesis of a future life. That hypoth-
esis too easily becomes a mere way of escape from the
pressure of the problem, and it may be said at once that a
belief in immortality which is adopted merely as a way of
escape is of small religious value. Not when it is made to
buttress up a dogmatic interpretation of the world, which
would fall apart without its support, but when it springs
out of a religious experience of life as a whole, already secure
on its own ground, is the belief really valuable for religion.

1 Isa. liii.

* See chap. X, p. 215.

"Jobxlii. 5(R.V.)-

I Intimations of Immorality 183

;0nly this latter kind of belief in immortality is likely to hold
'its own in pur time, when so many people cannot accept it as
; a dogma. [Those who accept it and those who do not will
profit by the intellectual discipline of following out the lines
;of Old Testament thought, and seeing how with no help from
any doctrine of immortality such as most surrounding peo-
ples possessed, the men of the Bible found themselves able
to maintain all the religious values through a penetrating ex-
; perience of God in life. All the more significant then become
those passages in which we are brought to the threshold of
belief in another life. A late Psalmist sings of his com-
munion with God in these terms: 1

; "Nevertheless I am continually with thee:

Thou hast holden my right hand.
Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel,

And afterward receive me to glory,
i Whom have I in heaven but thee?

And there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.
My flesh and my heart faileth;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever."

A reader with a Christian background is naturally inclined
to take such a passage as referring directly to a future life;
but no such reference, apparently, was in the writer's mind.
Nevertheless, such an experience of God carries within it its

; own eternity. Similarly Job, although he will not solve the
problem of his suffering by positing a future life in which it
may be redressed, yet gives utterance to the famous passage

, "I know that my Redeemer liveth", which has been trans-

i lated in closer agreement with the true original text as fpl-

\ lows 2 :

;

': "I know One to champion me at last,

To stand up for me upon earth.

This body may break up, but even then

My life shall have a sight of God;

^ 1 PB. bnriii. 23-26. 2 Job xix. 25-27 (Moffatt).

184 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

My heart is pining as I yearn
To see him on my side,
See him estranged no longer."

The exact implications of this rather obscure passage are still
disputed, but at least the poet asserts that it is unthinkable
God should lose interest in His servant after his death. From
this it is a mere step to a real doctrine of eternal life in
communion with God. As Mr. H. G. Wells once said that
there is "a God-shaped blank" in the heart of some atheists, 1
so we might say that the religion of the Old Testament has
within it a blank which more and more closely shapes itself
to the form of a belief in a future life.

Where even faithful men felt so bitterly the difficulties of
faith, it is not surprising that in many minds a deep scepti-
cism arose about the whole prophetic religion. Was it at all
true that the world exhibited the moral government of a right-
eous God? Some of the Psalmists allude to such scepticism
as being rife in their times, or even confess to having once
shared it. 2 Its best representative within the Canon is the
anonymous writer of about 200 B.C. who calls himself "Ko-
heleth", the Preacher in our version Ecclesiastes. The dan-
gerous questionings of this writer have been in some measure
cloaked with a decent lip-service to orthodoxy by some pious
interpolator, no doubt, rather than by the man himself. But
the main lines of his commentary on life remain clear. He is
no atheist, or scoffer at holy things, but he has observed life
coolly, and whether as a whole it justifies the assertions made
by contemporary teachers of religion, he takes leave to doubt. 3

"All manner of things have I seen in my fleeting life, the good
man perishing by his very goodness and the evil man flourishing
upon his evil. Be not over-good; be not over- wise; why expose

1 God the Invisible King, p. 99.

2 Ps. xiv. 1, liii. 1, Ixxiii. 11-17, Ixxvii. 7-10, xcii. 6-7, xciv. 7.
s Ecclea. vii. 15-17 (Moffatt).

Scepticism 185

yourself to trouble? And be not over-evil either, do not play the
fool; why die before your time?"

As a criticism of the ultra-pious Chasidim, with their theology
of exact retribution, it is admirable. No less admirable is his
comment on their overdone devotions x :

"God is in heaven and you are on earth; so let your words be
few."

From this unexpected quarter we seem to hear preludings of
that devastating criticism of conventional religion that meets
us in the Gospels: "I came not to call the righteous" . . .
"They think that they shall be heard for their much speak-
ing!" No fanaticism or high-falutin could live before the pen-
etrating satire of Ecclesiastes. A religion that could tolerate
his book in its sacred Canon must have been very sure of it-
self or sure of something deeply real in it that could survive
fallacies in its theology and trivialities in its practice. But
Ecclesiastes cannot himself offer any positive valuation of
life beyond the repeated maxim 2 :

"There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and
enjoy himself as he does his work";

Nor, in spite of his genuinely reverent spirit, can he find in
God more than a vague over-ruling power, whose rule is a
blind fate 3 :

"Whatever happens has been determined long ago, and what man
is has been ordered of old; he cannot argue with One mightier than
himself; and lavish talk about it only means more folly. What is
the use of talking? Who can tell what is good for man in life, during
the few days of his empty life that passes like a shadow."

Here is a portent that for men incapable of the heights of
prophetic experience, or prone to analysis rather than to

1 Eccles. Y. 2 (Moffatt). * Eccles. ii. 24 (Moffatt) et passim.

8 Eccles. vi. 10-12 (Moffatt).

186 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

enthusiasm or submission, the religion of Judaism was failing
because it had no adequate philosophy behind its faith and
practice.

The pessimism of Ecclesiastes is shared by a group of writers
who in other respects stand at the opposite pole, namely, the
apocalyptists. While the sceptical mind of the one contented
itself with criticism, and fell back into a refined and reverent
Epicureanism, the ardent faith of the others "brought in a
new world to redress the balance of the old". But they agreed
that the traditional prophetic doctrine of an absolute divine
justice meted out exactly in this present world did not meet
the facts.

Apocalypse was in itself no new thing. The primitive
nabi had his visions of divine mysteries, and vision is an
element in the experience even of the classical prophets.
Doubtless, too, such visions had early been concerned with
what became the absorbing interest of literary apocalypse,
namely, the ultimate issues of the divine purpose for the
world, that is eschatology. But apocalypse as a literary form
arose as prophecy declined, and although there are apoca-
lyptic traits in such prophets as Ezekiel, yet such typical
apocalypses as those which we have in the second part of the
Book of Zechariah and in the Book of Daniel, with their nu-
merous non-canonical successors, clearly form a distinct class
of literature, differing both in form and in content from
prophecy proper. While prophecy is spontaneous, first-hand,
and imaginative, and carries the proof of its inspiration in
what it says, independently of the psychological forms in
which it is cast, apocalypse revives all the primitive respect
for the psychologically abnormal, and yet is derivative, reflec-
tive, and even pedantic in its methods. Where the prophet
gives us personal intuition in an imaginative form which kin-
dles the imagination of the reader to respond and understand,
the apocalyptist gives an artificial allegory to which he must

Origins of Apocalypse 187

provide a key. The "interpreting angel" is a standing char-
acter in works of this sort. The material of the "vision"
frequently has a literary history of its own, and certain
features recur so constantly that they come to be common
property, rather like the stock plots of an Elizabethan theatri-
cal company. Thus Daniel's vision of "one like a son of man"
(a figure which, as many authorities believe, was already tra-
ditional when the Book of Daniel was written) provides ma-
terial which is variously utilized hi the Parables of Enoch,
in the Apocalypse of Ezra, and in the New Testament Reve-
lation oj John' 1 (a work deeply Jewish and only superficially
Christian). This is not to say that these authors did not
"see" the vision for themselves in an abnormal psychical
state ("in the spirit", as the Christian writer says 2 ). The
"subconscious" is capable of curious processes, and the
presentation of material, originally learnt from tradition, as a
fresh "vision", lies by no means outside observed psycho-
logical facts. 3 However that may be, it is characteristic of
apocalyptic to work upon derived material. Much of this
material can in fact be traced to earlier prophecy, and the
apocalyptists regularly turn the poetry of the prophets into
prose, taking what the prophets meant as imagery for literal
prediction. This is directly connected with the outstanding
difference between prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology. 4
The events to which the prophets look forward, though they
are supernatural in the sense that they are the direct act of
God, and on a scale unprecedented in human experience, are
yet not different in kind from the work of God as known to
us in nature and history. Apocalyptic eschatology, on the
other hand, includes events which mean the break-up of the
whole order of Nature. The stars fall from their places, the
moon is turned into blood, the sea gives up its dead, and so
forth.

i Dan. vii. 13-14; 1 En. rivi. 1-6; 2 Esdras xiii. 1-6; Rev. i. 13-20.
1 Rev. i. 10, iv. 2, xvii. 3. See B. H. Streeter, Tlte Sadhu, chap. V.

* T. H. Robinson, in The Psalmists, ed. D. C. Simpson, p. 88.

188 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

We have seen that the post-exilic literature of Judaism re-
veals an increasing tension between the current doctrine of
divine justice and the observed facts of life in an increasingly
complex world. Job and Ecclesiastes boldly deny the current
doctrine. Apocalyptic gives up the attempt to show that the
fortunes of men and peoples in the present world are directly
governed by God. This order of space and time is under the
rule of a power or powers of evil, which God, for reasons best
known to Himself, permits to hold temporary sway. Here it
is almost certain that we must again recognize influence from
the Persian religion. The Old Testament as a whole knows
no "devil", in the sense familiar to traditional Christianity.
Even in the Book of Job the Satan, however unwelcome his
attentions may be to men, is a faithful servant of the will of
God. But the Persian system sets the evil Angro-mainyu and
his minions over against the good Ahura-mazda. Similarly
in the apocalypses evil spirits and rebellious angels oppress
the people of God. Thus sin, and the suffering of the right-
eous and the prosperity of the wicked, are no longer a problem.
What else would you expect in an age given over to the powers
of evil? But the sovereignty still belongs de jure to the God
of heaven, 1 and in His own good time He will assert that sov-
ereignty de facto, passing judgment on all evil and giving
to merit the recognition denied to it in the present. Thus
all the blessings promised to the righteous are postponed to the
good time coming, and they endure the light affliction of the
moment in the hope of an exceeding weight of glory in the
future. As for those who died without receiving the promise,
God will by His illimitable power raise them up at the end
to enjoy the reward of their good deeds. 2

In the hands of its greatest exponents, as notably in the

1 Dan. iv. 17, 25, 32, vii. 22-27.

2 Dan. xii. 2-3. Note also that the other clear reference to resurrection
which the Old Testament contains (Is. xxvi. 19) is found in a late apocalypse
(Is. xxiv.-xxvii.) .

Values of Apocalypse 189

Book of Daniel, apocalyptic is capable of becoming the ex-
pression of a splendid faith, and of giving what may fairly
be called a philosophy of history. But it opened up a realm
of fantasy full of dangers. Not only could the most sublime
faith in the ultimate supremacy of right clothe itself in this
fantastic guise, but also the baser passions, repressed in the
real world by conscience or fear, could find unbridled license
in a world where nothing was too extravagant to be true.
Thus it comes about that the typical apocalypse is full of a
vindictive gloating over the downfall of national enemies,
and an unhealthy indulgence- of personal and corporate pride
and cupidity. The New Testament apocalypse is tainted
with these vices no less than some of its Jewish congeners,
and perhaps it would have been well for Christendom if those
great scholars of the Eastern Church who disliked its pres-
ence in the Canon had had their way. Yet it must not be
thought that apocalyptic is no more than an outlet in fantasy
for the repressed passions of a deeply injured people. In
spite of its defects it was an adventure of faith into unfa-
miliar regions. It established the principle that the issues
of the providential order of history lie in the unseen, and it
made current coin the sublime doctrine of a future life, which
when a fresh outbreak of prophetic experience gave it richness
of content and purged it's crudity, made its way into the very
centre of religion. Apocalyptic profoundly influenced the
writers of the New Testament. Where they are most true to
the distinctive Christian outlook they criticize its ideas by
the light of reason and experience, and restore to the realm
of poetry its misused symbolism, thus revealing how great
a service it rendered towards the ultimate resolution of the
inner tension within the religion of Judaism.

If now we survey the Canon of the Old Testament in its
complex unity, we must report that there is no finality in it.

190 Inconclusiveness of Old Testament Religion

It represents a process, and an unfinished process, rather than
an achievement. It could carry no authority, if authority be-
longed only to that which is fixed and final. But the religious
life is itself a process rather than an achievement. In the
minds of all of us a few great affirmations contend with doubts
and speculations as widening experience puts them to the test.
The Old Testament sets this process before us on the large
scale of history, and bears impressive witness that through all
uncertainties faith advances towards something surer and
finer. If at moments in our own pilgrimage we are as much
in doubt as Job or Ecclesiastes, we can stand back and see'that
such moments belong to a process which taken as a whole
reveals God. Thus the process at large in history bears
directly on the process in little in our lives, and our faith is
confirmed by the authority of corporate experience through
the centuries. Nevertheless, to see clearly whither the process
is tending we must look beyond the Old Testament to the
New, without which its witness remains incomplete.

V

*

PABT III
THE AUTHORITY OF THE INCARNATION

4 '

v I

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW TESTAMENT AS THE LITERATURE OF A
DECISIVE MOVEMENT IN RELIGION

IN THE New Testament, as in the prophetic literature of
the Old Testament, we are once again in the presence
of religious genius, authenticating itself to the mind that has
the sense for such things in the inspired quality of being
"first-hand". In Paul at his best, here and there in the minor
epistles, certainly in the fourth Gospel, most of all in the para-
bles and lyrical sayings recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, no
one can miss the prophetic note. The "inspiration" of such
writing is not in question; this is inspiration, the datum of
any argument about its nature. Nor is its authority de-
pendent on any tradition or theory of authorship. Even where
the ultimate authorship of sayings attributed to Jesus is in
question, the primary religious value is not affected. For
some purposes it is extremely important to ask whether the
Parable of the Prodigal Son, or the fourteenth chapter of
John, was or was not actually spoken by Jesus Christ; but
the answer to that question is not the measure of the author-
ity we feel in such utterances. They possess inherent truth,
which was once apprehended in experience, it matters little
by whom, so passionately that its utterance makes us sharers
in the experience.

The claim, however, is put forth that the Scriptures of the
New Testament have a specific authority going beyond their
general and intrinsic authority as religious classics. The tra-
dition of the Church indeed makes no distinction between the
inspiration and authority of the two Testaments; but the hesi-

193

194 A Decisive Movement in Religion

tation of many people to-day to allow in the field of the New
Testament the freedom of criticism they allow in the Old
issues from a feeling that in the documents which record the
beginnings of Christianity there must be found somehow a
final authority which remains when the authority of Church
and Councils, and the authority of the Bible as such, have
been given up. Jesus Christ, the Lord and Master of Chris-
tians, must surely be absolutely authoritative for them. The
Gospels, therefore, which record His words, and report the
"saving facts" of His life, death, and resurrection, must have
unique authority. The epistles, though less directly deriving
from Him, must surely be held to proceed from a point so
near to the source of the Christian tradition that they retain
binding force even for minds prepared to treat the older
Canon with critical though respectful detachment.

If any apologetic is offered for this attitude, it usually takes
the form of argument for the early date and historical ac-
curacy of the Gospels, and for the "genuineness" of the epis-
tles, as writings of the early and venerable teachers of the
Church to whom they are traditionally attributed. This
line of defence, however, wears thin. Its upholders, if their
minds are at all open, are apt to find themselves defending a
diminishing nucleus of writings. Even a moderate criticism
leaves few epistles beyond nine or ten of Paul's to their re-
puted authors, and makes large deductions from the material
offered in the Fourth Gospel as a direct record of "the his-
torical Jesus". If in addition to this we should be obliged
to admit that there are elements in the genuine epistles of
Paul which are rather inherited from Judaism or borrowed
from Greek thought than learned from Jesus, and that even
in the Synoptic Gospels the tradition of His words and acts is
not entirely pure, the ultimate body of authoritative New
Testament writings may reduce itself to quite insignificant
dimensions.

The Canon of the New Testament 195

In this book the view is taken that the New Testament as
a whole does possess a specific authority going beyond the
general authority which would be allowed by a discerning
mind to parts of it, as to any such religious classic whatever
its source. But in order to recognize and define it we must
not try to show that when criticism has done its worst there
remain at least a few sentences of such immediate and infal-
lible authority that they outweigh all the other religious lit-
erature of the world, and lay private judgment to rest. Nor
must we attempt to draw an absolute line between the scrip-
tures of the Old Testament and the New, any more than we
can draw an absolute line between these and other sacred
books. The uniqueness of the Bible in both Testaments is
the uniqueness of the particular historical process it repre-
sents; and the specific character of the New Testament is due
to the unique intensity of the process within its field. That
unique intensity proceeds from the central Figure of the New
Testament, in Whom the whole history finds its climax and
its interpretation.

The New Testament consists of twenty-seven writings,
about twenty of which were already collected into a Canon
recognized in practically all parts of the Church by the end
of the second century. Later additions to the Canon came
slowly; they were few and relatively unimportant. In the
fourth century Eusebius * counts as "acknowledged" Scripture
the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, fourteen Pauline
Epistles (including Hebrews) , I John and I Peter, the Reve-
lation being added with a note of doubt. This may be taken
as representing the old second-century Canon. He gives a
second list of "disputed" writings, namely, the Epistles of
James and Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John. These complete
our own Canon. His third list contains books which had
claimed canonicity at some period in one church or another,

1 Hist. Ecd. Ill, 25.

196 A Decisive Movement in Religion

but were not ultimately accepted as Scripture. Among these * f
he would like to include the Revelation, but is clearly aware
that he has the general opinion against him. The rest are
still known to us in whole or in part, and three of them are ^
commonly read among the "Apostolic Fathers", namely, the
Shepherd of Hennas, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Teach-
ing of the Twelve Apostles. The exclusion of these and the
inclusion of their competitors which form Eusebius' second
list resulted from a long process of discussion and balancing
of claims. The original Canon on the other hand came into
being by a process which we can no longer trace in detail.
The grounds of canonicity alleged by the Fathers are not
always convincing, and as in the case of the Old Testament
Canon we may suspect that they were rather "rationalizing"
an existing selection than freely applying tests. At bottom
the selection was instinctive. The Church read as Scripture
those writings which it felt to be most vitally related to the
spiritual impulse that created it. It did not at first regard
these writings as specially authoritative because they were
canonical; they became canonical because they had already
made good their authority. So far as we are able to compare
the writings of the original Canon with their competitors,
especially with those which were ultimately excluded, there
can be no doubt that as a whole they stand, spiritually, in-
tellectually, and aesthetically, on an altogether higher plane.
By about A.D. 200, then, there existed a New Testament
which substantially is ours. Now by that time the Christian
Church had come to hold a "strategic position" in the spirit-
ual life of the world, and was quite conscious of it. For three
or four centuries in the lands which inherited the ancient civ-
ilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece the spirit of
man had been on the move. Alexander's conquests had
brought the old order to an end. There was a mingling of
cultures, a cross-fertilization of East and West. The old

The Hellenistic Civilization 197

forms of communal life provided by the tribes and its civi-
lized analogue the city-state were broken, and the individual
soul was astray in a world to which there seemed to be no
limits. Philosophy sought to give him a foothold in it. New
religions arose and old ones were transformed to meet fresh
needs. Judaism, now widely diffused through the new Greek-
speaking world, played its part in the spiritual adventure.
The Old Testament was done into Greek. The first transla-
tion, the so-called Septuagint, is already a Hellenistic docu-
ment in more than language. It was read by pagans, and
as Greek thought had profoundly affected the religious out-
look of the Jews, so the influence of the Septaugint was felt
beyond the borders of Judaism. But in the end Judaism
shrank, or was forced, into its shell again. By the time of
which we are speaking it had reorganized itself after the re-
volt of Bar-Cochba on the rigid and exclusive lines which
have persisted until our own time. All round in fact we see
evidence that things were settling into new lines within the
stable organization of the Roman Empire. The greater mys-
tery-religions, particularly Mithraism, were emerging from
the general mass, and ministering to the religious needs of
whole classes of worshippers. In philosophy, Stoicism had by
this time reached its final form, and had shaped the moral
ideals of the age, and the later Platonism, uniting philosophy
with religious experience, was preparing for its classical ex-
pression in the next century.

While out of the chaos and ferment of the earlier Hellen-
istic period these various tendencies defined themselves, it
gradually became clear that the destined leader of the central
advance was the Christian Church. Consciously the heir of
the most powerful religious tradition of the ancient world,
that of the Jews, it found itself able also to interpret and even
to incorporate the deepest elements in Hellenistic philosophy
and religion. The Judaism from which it sprang had already

198 A Decisive Movement in Religion

responded, to a greater degree than it intended or admitted,
to the influences of the wider world, especially among Jews
resident outside Palestine and speaking the common dialect
of Greek.

How far the influences present in this Hellenistic Judaism
had power in Palestine itself, the scene of the Gospel history,
is uncertain, but in Samaria at least, and likely enough in
"Galilee of the Gentiles", they were stronger than we com-
monly realize. In any case the majority of the New Testa-
ment writings were produced in the environment of the Graeco-
Roman world, where the Judaism of the Dispersion was of a
type better represented by Philo of Alexandria than by the
tradition of the Talmud. But in asserting its independence
of Judaism, Christianity naturally became more hospitable to
thoughts which were in the air of the Grseco-Roman world it
set out to win. Thus it comes about that the New Testament
largely speaks the language and answers the questions of that
cosmopolitan civilization which is in so many ways the fore-
runner of our own. The historian of Greek thought can trace
a true continuity running through all its stages, in which the
New Testament forms a vital link. It is in fact even more
than the Septuagint a department of Hellenistic literature.

To pursue this theme in any detail would lead us too far
afield, but the following points may be considered:

First, the principal conceptions employed by the New Tes-
tament writers to signify the religious status of their Master
are such as would carry their full meaning only to a reader
who had learnt in some measure to "think Greek". The
purely Hebrew "Messiah" (chiefly in its Greek dress as
"Christ") is indeed freely used, but it is hardly ever left to
explain itself, and indeed its Christian meaning departs far
from any sense it had borne in Judaism. The titles "Lord",
"Saviour", even "Son of God", though they all have a Hebrew
ancestry, get the distinctive shades of meaning which fit them

Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity 199

to express Christian experience largely from their non-Jewish
religious associations. "Logos", or "Word", had been natu-
ralized in Hellenistic Judaism by Philo, who owed a great debt
to Plato and the Stoics. No other titles given to Jesus are
of greater weight than these. Thus the New Testament im-
plies that the divine Person whom it sets forth meets the
spiritual demands of the changing world-civilization of the
time, and claims to dominate it.

Secondly, the sacramental ideas of early Christianity, es-
pecially as presented by Paul and in the Fourth Gospel, have
undeniable affinity with those of some contemporary Hellenis-
tic cults, as Paul himself confesses when he compares and
contrasts "the Table of the Lord" with "the table of dae-
mons". 1 .This affinity should not be exaggerated. The Chris-
tian sacraments originated in a Jewish context; they have
behind them the prophetic symbolism of the Old Testament 2 ;
and their meaning for the earliest Christians was knit closely
with ideas drawn from Jewish eschatology. Yet Christian-
ity, eyen in its New Testament forms, is a sacramental re-
ligion in a sense in which Judaism never has been. Baptism
and the Eucharist answered to a widespread need of the Gen-
tile world, to which the great advance of mystery-religions
in the same period also bears witness. The Christian "mys-
teries" proved finally more satisfying than the others, we may
fairly suppose, because while their very simplicity made
them the more impressive, they carried a greater power of
regeneration and moral cleansing by reason of the Person
whose Spirit informed them. But when the historian of the
period is surveying the development of the sacramental or
mystery-religions in the Grseco-Roman world, he is justified in
including early Christianity among them, in spite of marked
differences.

1 Cor. x. 21.

J See H. Wheeler Robinson, Prophetic Symbolism, in Old Testament Essays
(pub. Griffin), pp. 1-17.

200 A Decisive Movement in Religion

Thirdly, in many parts of the New Testament, and notably
in Paul, the vigorous and ethically progressive philosophy of
Stoicism has provided congenial matter for the Christian
spirit to work upon. Not only is Paul frequently a Stoic in
method and vocabulary, but such important conceptions as
those of "conscience", 1 of the "law of nature" 2 as the norm
of morality, and of "contentment" or self-sufficiency 3 as a
quality of the good life, are thoroughly Stoical. The re-
sultant Christian ethic looks very different from Stoicism, but
there can be no question that a very large Stoic element has
been taken up into New Testament thought, not in the least
by way of mere copying, but by the absorption and transmu-
tation of essentially kindred ideas in a new philosophy of life
inspired by a distinctive religious experience.

Fourthly, the influence of Plato, which Judaism had already
found congenial, has entered deeply into the thought of the
New Testament, especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews and
the Fourth Gospel. In the former, the philosophy of "Ideas",
or eternal Forms, of which all phenomena are copies, domi-
nates the whole argument. In the Fourth Gospel the affinity
is rather with that peculiar kind of Platonic thought, modified
by oriental influences, which is otherwise best represented
for us by the Hermetic literature of the second and third
centuries. This Gospel is in fact one of the most remarkable
examples, in all the literature of the period, of the profound
interpenetration of Greek and Semitic thought. Some critics,
approaching it from the side of Judaism, have pronounced
it the most Jewish of the Gospels, while others, approaching
it from the other side, see in it a thoroughly Hellenistic book.
Nowhere more evidently than here does early Christianity

* Rom. ii. 15; 1 Cor. viii. 7-12, x. 25-29, etc.

2 Rom. ii. 14-15. This is the original and proper use of the term. Its use
in the loose terminology of modern science is improper and misleading.
s Phil. iv. 11-12.

Hellenism in the New Testament 201

take its place as the natural leader in new ways of thought,
uniting in itself the main tendencies of the time, yet exer-
cising authority over them by virtue of the creative impulse
proceeding from its Founder.

Apologists for Christianity have often thought it necessary
to minimize or explain away the presence of such "pagan"
elements in the New Testament. Rightly considered, this is
one of the most illuminating things about it. It means at
least that early Christianity was not a thing "done in a cor-
ner". It was deeply implicated in the life of the time. Chris-
tian thinkers of the period after the New Testament freely
recognize how like many things in their religion were to ele-
ments in the "Hellenism" it was to supersede. They offered
explanations of the resemblances which were not always con-
sistent. The most profound explanation offered was that the
divine Word which was incarnate in the Founder of Chris-
tianity had already been active in the world before His com-
ing, preparing the way for the Incarnation. It was therefore
nothing to be wondered at if there were many things already
in the minds of men whose true meaning became quite clear
only in the light of Christian experience. None of the New
Testament writers is a mere borrower of ideas. They have
taken up as though by some natural attraction all that was
of deep spiritual import in the life of the time and given it
fuller significance within the movement of thought started by
the impact of Jesus upon men. Thus the historian of ideas in
the ancient world can trace them again and again into an
ultimate phase which is a Christian phase, true to their
original intention, yet creatively new. What such ideas meant
merely for the time we may often best gather from non-Chris-
tian writers, but what they were to mean for the future was
determined by the part they could play in a Christian
philosophy.

Looking back we can see that within the frame of the Chris-

202 A Decisive Movement in Religion

tian Church a new civilization was forming, which would re-
main and bring forth its own distinctive life as the old civ-
ilization fell away. In the second century this was still
hidden in the future; yet the Church of the second century
was intuitively aware of its destiny. It looked back upon its
own formative period as upon the crisis of the spiritual
history of mankind, and made its canon of Scripture out of
those writings which most directly represented the spiritual
forces active in that crisis.

Thus the New Testament writings, all produced, with
insignificant exceptions, within a century of the death of
Jesus, are a contemporary record of a great spiritual move-
ment in which the history of mankind took a decisive turn.
Quite apart from all detailed questions of authorship, sources,
and so forth, in every New Testament writing we are in di-
rect touch with this movement, through the mind of someone
or other who shared in it. We, whose world has been shaped
by this movement in its ever-expanding waves of influence,
may here learn from within what, as a matter of spiritual
experience and apprehension of truth, was the secret of the
movement, and by sharing the experience and the apprehen-
sion may have its central act re-enacted in ourselves.

The principal writers of the New Testament all hold the
firm belief that they are living in a "new age". The terms in
which they express this belief are for the most part bor-
rowed from the apocalyptic eschatology of the later Judaism.
This was for men of that time a natural and not unreasonable
form in which to clothe their most energetic religious beliefs.
For us it is, as a scheme of thought, too fantastic to be taken
seriously. Consequently we tend either to ignore as far as
possible the eschatological language of the New Testament,
or to give it a hasty "re-interpretation" which leaves out a
large part of its vital content. When the New Testament

The New Age 203

writers tell us that the Kingdom of God has drawn near, 1
that they are risen from the dead, 2 or born again, 8 that they
have tasted the powers of the age to come, 4 that the princi-
palities and powers governing the age of darkness have been
finally overthrown, 5 and that they have been translated into
the kingdom of the Son of God 6 when they use these and
many other expressions of the same order, they are speaking
the language of apocalyptic eschatology. Every one of these
expressions variously signified, for those who used them, the
point at which miracle enters in on the grand scale. Through
a long apocalyptic tradition runs the idea for which they stand
that after the tedious centuries God would awake and act,
and an age of supernatural bliss would dawn for His "elect".
Always the day of miracle had been postponed to the future,
and it was not expected to come without a shattering of the
whole frame of things as we know them. For the men of the
New Testament this awakening of God has taken place, and
the age of miracle is here. It is no longer fantasy, but actual
experience, and not less truly "supernatural" because the
crude supernaturalism of apocalyptic expectation is not justi-
fied by the event.

We do less than justice therefore to such language as I have
cited if we seek to confine it within the bounds of the "psy-
chology of religious experience", after the current fashion.
No doubt we have before us the phenomena of individual
"conversion", which the psychologist can study with profit.
But if -these "converted" persons were at all right about what
had happened, their "conversion" involved the acceptance of
something that had been done, in a more "objective" sense.
To describe this something they had at their disposal only
the mythological language of eschatology, supported by two
significant rites, both originally eschatological in their asso-

i Mark i. 15. Col. iii. 1-3.

John iii. 3-8; I Pet. i. 2, 23. Heb. vi. 4-6.

Col. ii. 15; John rii. 31, xvi. 11. Col. i. 13.

204 A Decisive Movement in Religion

ciations. The sacraments remain to us, rich in suggestion,
whatever particular explanation we may give to them when we
"rationalize". For the rest, we are perhaps in no better case
than the first Christians for describing directly the "new
creation" of which they became aware in their "conversion".
But on the other hand we have what they had not, an his-
torical perspective down many Christian centuries. We
have before us the historical situation briefly set forth above:
at the dawn of the Christian Era, a new spiritual impulse,
momentous in its issues for the future, entered history, pre-
pared and assisted by many movements beyond Christianity,
but finding its decisive point of application in the Christian
Church. That is the external account of what happened.
The inside account is given by the New Testament writers.
Using the language of mythology they bear witness to spiritual
facts verified in their experience, and corresponding to facts
of the outward order verifiable by historical evidence. A
new age has begun for mankind through the coming of the
Son of God into the world. In thus referring the new spir-
itual impulse to a unique Personality entering the world of
men, they supply a sufficient cause for the effects observed,
and a cause attested by their experience. Everything in fact
that they have to say of their Founder falls within this con-
text, and the evidence for His supreme religious dignity is
bound up with the evidence for His s historical existence.

CHAPTER X

THE NEW TESTAMENT AS THE "FULFILMENT" OF

THE OLD

IF WE wish to assess the religious significance of the New
Testament as "objectively" as may be, we shall do well
to view it in relation to its direct historical antecedents; and
that means primarily, in relation to the Old Testament and
the non-canonical literature of Judaism. The New Testament
writers themselves are intensely aware of their continuity
with this older tradition. However revolutionary they feel
their experience to be, they always regard it as the "fulfil-
ment" of what had been contained in the ancient faith of the
Jews. Their frequent references to that which "is written" are
apt to be an embarrassment to the modern reader. He rightly
feels that the application of the written word is often mechani-
cal and arbitrary. The evangelist, for instance, who suggests
that when Hosea wrote "Out of Egypt have I called my son" 1
he was foretelling a temporary exile of Christ in that country,
instead of alluding to a well-known episode in the early his-
tory of Israel, in no sense illuminates the matter by his mis-
placed ingenuity. But such aberrations (by no means ex-
travagant when compared with some contemporary rabbinic
interpretations) need not blind us to the truth which underlies
the appeal to prophecy. No great religion was ever a wholly
new religion. Christianity could hardly have made its uni-
versal appeal if it had not taken up into itself so much of the
deepest religious experience of past generations, and while it

1 Matt. ii. 15.
205

206 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

laid under contribution the whole spiritual life of the ancient
world, it found the continuity of tradition which a great
religion requires in Judaism; and this continuity it could never
abandon without essential loss. No doubt Christianity still
needs to be exhorted to cast off "Hebrew old-clothes". The
need was first pointed out by its Founder, and emphasized by
its pioneer theologian, Paul. But when Paul's great but one-
sided interpreter, Marcion, that eminent non-conformist divine
of the second century, proposed to abandon the Old Testament
altogether, the Church rightly rejected the tempting 'simpli-
fication. It is not accidental or unimportant to Christianity
that it related itself directly to the needs, aspirations, and
intuitions of the Old Testament tradition, a tradition em-
bodied in the continuous life of a particular people, yet shaped
by contact with the great civilizations of the ancient world,
Babylonian, Iranian, Egyptian, Greek.

Pre-Christian Judaism, as we have seen, was an attempt to
embody in the whole life of a society the religious ideas of
the prophets. The attempt met with a large measure of suc-
cess, but it also revealed a certain lack of complete clearness
and consistency in the ideas themselves, and it raised fresh
questions relative to the new world of wider contacts in which
the religious society now had to live. Provisional answers
were given to such questions, but a thoroughgoing solution
waited upon a fresh outbreak of religious genius like that of
the prophets themselves. That outbreak came with Chris-
tianity, and the answers given to some of the outstanding
questions of Judaism in the New Testament will serve to
bring out the significance of this fresh step, provided we
always bear in mind that the new thing that came into the
world was not merely a fresh handling of an intellectual prob-
lem, but a new life which included as one of its elements a
fresh insight into the whole spiritual situation.

Among the outstanding questions left open by Judaism we

O. T. Questions and N. T. Answers 207

may select five of the first importance which may be formu-
lated as follows:

I. The issue between nationalism and universalism in religion
or the question of the implications of monotheism.

II. The issue between righteousness and grace, or the question
of the divine character.

III. The issue between divine justice and the human lot, or the
problem of suffering.

IV. The issue between this-worldliness and bther-worldliness, or
the question of immortality.

V. The issue between transcendence and immanence, or the prob-
lem of mediation.

It will not be easy to treat of the Christian answers to these
questions separately. It is indeed a mark of every significant
advance in thought that questions formerly supposed to be
independent are seen to be related, so that in answering them
we are led to a fresh synthesis. This is certainly a mark of
the movement of thought represented by the New Testament.
For convenience, however, we may follow these five headings.

I. If there is but one God, and He wholly good, then all
mankind must be His care. But if He has revealed Himself
by "mighty acts" in the history of a people, and if His service
consists principally in regulating the conduct of men in society
by definite and concrete principles of righteousness, what then?
How can the conclusion be resisted that His Providence must
be specially concerned with that society which having experi-
enced His "mighty acts" has made His righteousness the
fundamental constitution, so to speak, of its body politic?
This was the dilemma. The Christian Church was itself
the solution. For almost without meaning any such thing
it "found itself a supra-national body which nevertheless car-
ried over the traditions of historic Israel. During the early
New Testament period there was acute controversy between
the party in the Church which wished to perpetuate within it

208 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

the national distinctions that marked Judaism, and the party
which held all this to be superseded. The logic of facts was
on the side of the cosmopolitan tendency. Paul gave it its
rational justification. The Epistle to the Galatians is its
polemical manifesto, claiming the acts of divine Providence
in the history of the ancient people for a new and emancipated
"Israel of God" in which there is neither Jew nor Greek. In
the epistle to the Romans the battle is in substance won, and
the whole epistle may be regarded as an exposition of the
philosophical basis of the supra-national religious society. In
the epistle to the Ephesians the cosmopolitan character of
Christianity can be calmly contemplated as an assured fact,
and the most signal manifestation of a divine purpose deeply
embedded in the structure of the spiritual universe.

But there is a subtler movement in the thought of Paul on
this point. From the outset he has no doubt that the Church
is in principle supra-national, but in the earlier epistles it
is still an exclusive society, over against the bulk of mankind,
which will be destroyed at the coming of Christ to judg-
ment. 1 In the later epistles the Church is truly universal, for
by an inward necessity it must ultimately include all mankind,
and form the centre of a reconciled universe. 2

It is noteworthy that at every point of the argument the
universality of the religious society is related to Christ and
His work. At bottom it is because the experience of Christ
is experience of a universal Person that national limits are of
necessity transcended by His Church. He was a Jew and
worked within the religious society of Judaism, yet there was

1 2 Thess. i. 6-10. The Pauline authorship of 2 Thess. is disputed, but it is
probably to be accepted. If, however, it is not his own work, it is now very
generally held that it comes from the Pauline circle and belongs to an early
period of his mission.

2 Rom. xi. 32, viii. 18-23; Col. i. 20; Eph. iii. 6-10, i. 10. Ephesians, if not
by Paul's own hand, certainly represents the final development of his thought.
See this writer's introduction and commentary on the Epistle in The Abingdon
Commentary.

Nationalism and Universalism 209

that in His personality and His message which necessarily
touched men at a level deeper than nationality, and broke the
system which tried to restrain Him.

If we turn from the epistles to the Synoptic Gospels we
see the conflict between the national and the universal in
religion fought out to an issue on the stage of Jewish history
at a period of peculiar significance. In one sense the whole
scene is local, provincial, particular in the extreme. Yet the
universal makes itself felt with growing power. It is not
that the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels has the traits of a
cosmopolitan sage. The picture is too historical for that. He
is "a prophet like one of the prophets", 1 or He is that intensely
national Figure, the Messiah; in any case a Jewish Teacher
and Leader. Yet even in the Gospel according to Matthew,
where the influence of nationalist or Jewish-Christian sym-
pathies is most strong, we are given a report of the teaching of
Jesus which at once lifts religion into the sphere of the univer-
sally human. In the Second Gospel we are shown more
dramatically how the best and the worst elements in contem-
porary Judaism rally to the defence of the national ideal
expressed in law and tradition against One whose broad
humanity brought Him into conflict with it, and as the tragedy
reaches its climax the veil of the Temple is rent in twain
and a pagan centurion confesses the Son of God. 2

But it is to the third evangelist that we owe the most
moving and masterly presentation in historical terms of the
theme with which we are now concerned. A man of imagi-
nation and insight, he conceived the plan of writing a work
in two volumes to show how, in the actual sequence of events,
religion ceased to be national and shaped for itself a universal
society. This great work loses something of its appeal to the
imagination because it has come down to us divided into two
apparently independent books the Gospel according to Luke

i Mark vi. 15. 2 Mark xv. 38-39.

210 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

and the Acts of the Apostles. The two should be read con-
tinuously. This first history of the beginnings of Christianity
opens with two chapters of stories and short lyrics which give
a beautiful and sympathetic picture of the best kind of Juda-
ism of the time, full of the deepest piety of prophets and
psalmists and warm with apocalyptic hopes. The aged Simeon
speaks with the voice of the vanishing old order as he moves
from the stage with the words: 1 {

"Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, . . .

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation . . .
A light to lighten the Gentiles,
And the glory of Thy people Israel!"

Then the author indicates the wider setting: "In the fif-
teenth year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor
of Judaea. . . ." 2 And so Jesus comes upon the scene, sur-
rounded by those representatives of humanity outside the
Law whose need reveals Him as Saviour of mankind publi-
cans and sinners, Samaritans, heathen, and penitent thieves.
The inevitable clash with the national tradition brings the
tragedy of the Cross, but leads to Pentecost, where the fol-
lowers of Jesus, now conscious of His Spirit driving them on,
proclaim a "promise to all that are afar off". 3 Stephen dies
for words against the Temple and the Law, with a vision of
Christ in glory before his eyes. 4 His defence, in itself a tedi-
ous and uninspired composition, gains meaning when we
realize that its review of Hebrew history might serve as notes
for a fitting prologue to the whole Lucan work. 5 Then through
vision 6 and prophecy, 7 through experiment and conference, 8
it becomes plain that the Gentiles are to be admitted to equal
citizenship in the Israel of God. Leadership in the new ad-

1 Luke ii. 29-32. % Luke iii. 1.

* Acts ii. 39 (echoed in Eph. ii. 13, both being based on Isa. Ivii. 19).

* Acts vi. 13-14, vii. 55-60.

6 Acts vii. 2-53. Acts x. 9-16.

7 Acts xiii. 1-2. Acts xi. 1-18, xv. 1-29.

The Universal Society 211

vance falls, in the strange working of Providence, to Paul, the
former pillar of the Law, and after his course is run we take
leave of him, dramatically enough, "in Rome, unhindered"! 1
The universal religious society is in being, at the very seat
of universal empire.

That the religious society of the one God must be universal
is to us perhaps so much a truism that its discovery hardly
stirs us. It seems to us, looking back, inevitable that the ideas
of the prophets, if they were true, must antiquate tribal and
national conceptions of religion. But it is the mark of that
which is true to the nature of things to appear inevitable in
retrospect. The emergence of the idea of a religious society
of mankind transcending all accidental divisions was actually
due to the New Testament experience of Christ as Saviour of
men in their simply human need. It cannot be said that even
yet Christendom has fully realized the meaning of that idea
in its practice, or ceased to need the witness of the New Testa-
ment to the experience that gave it birth.

II. Amos proclaimed a God of judgment, Hosea a God of
grace (as well as of judgment). The tension between these
two was never really resolved in pre-Christian Judaism. That
God, as utterly righteous, can "in no wise clear the guilty"
was as certain intuitively as that forgiving mercy is without
bounds. 2 The prophets wrestled with the problem. At the
end of the prophetic period the only solution that has emerged
is that variously set forth by Ezekiel and by the second Isaiah:
in the age of miracle to come God will, by sheer exercise of
the prerogative of omnipotence, create that righteousness in
men which will make it possible for Him to accept them as
His people and to be their God. This belief remains part of

1 Acts xrviii. 31. The word dKwy&rws, with which the whole book closes, is
frequent in legal documents "without let or hindrance."

2 Num. xiv. 18 (JE).

s

212 The New Testament as "Fulfilment

the general apocalyptic hope. But so far as present experience
is concerned the belief in the justice of God and the belief
in His mercy live on in uneasy juxtaposition. An occasional
flash of insight gave the assurance that these two divine
attributes are not in irreconcilable opposition even in this age,
as when a psalmist writes, "There is forgiveness with Thee
that Thou mayest be feared". 1 But it is clear that the devel-
opment of legal Judaism was not favourable to the rise of
a thoroughgoing doctrine of God which without weakening
the moral imperative of His righteousness should give effective
play to His grace. The last of the great apocalyptists, the
author of the Apocalypse of Ezra, 2 despairs of any real recon-
ciliation of the antinomy.

Now the New Testament writers lift the whole subject to a
fresh plane by declaring that the miracle of grace foretold
by Ezekiel and the second Isaiah has taken place. God Him-
self has justified sinners 3 and communicated to them the
Spirit whereby they possess not their own righteousness which
is of the law, but the righteousness which is of God by
faith. 4 This is just what the prophets had declared God must
do. When Paul presents God in Christ as "just and the
Justifier" 5 he is not making a combination of opposites hith-
erto inconceivable, but bearing witness that what was con-
ceived as ideal is now actual in experience. But, of course,
that makes all the difference. For Ezekiel the act of God
remained not only miraculous but actually irrational, a tour
de force of irresponsible power. It would happen some day,
but that is all that could be said about it. When it has
become matter of experience it can be reasoned about, with-
out ceasing to be in a deep sense supernatural. The way Paul
sees it is this: the highest form of righteousness, and there-
fore the righteousness of God, is love. The kindness of God,

1 Ps. cxxx. 4. 2 See 2 Esdras vii. 45-74. 3 Rom. v. 6-11, etc.

* Gal. iii. 2-6; Phil. iii. 9. * Rom. iii. 26.

Righteousness and Grace 213

being the outflow of pure love, is not bestowed as a reward
for human virtue, or even for repentance; it "leads us to
repentance", and so to righteousness. 1 While there is a
grave difficulty in conceiving how righteousness in the legal
sense can be communicated by an act of grace, love is a dif-
ferent matter. Not only does God "commend His love to us",
but His love is "shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy
Spirit given to us"; 2 or as a later writer puts it, "God is
love" and "we love because He first loved us". 3 We cannot
profess to understand fully what love is, or why it so propa-
gates itself; but we know it as part of a total and reasonable
experience of life. If therefore love is the key to the character
and operation of God, then it is no paradox that the highest
righteousness is displayed in a forgiving grace which antici-
pates even repentance, as also every other merit on the part
of man, and makes possible for him all that is necessary for
untroubled communion with a holy God.

It is clear that this apprehension of the nature of God arose
in men who had found Him through Christ, in particular
through what Christ had come to mean for them after He had
made the supreme act of love in dying. Now the Synoptic
Gospels once again show us in an historical narrative how
Christ came to make this kind of impression on men's minds.
They never set out to discuss, as do Paul and "John", the
theological problem bequeathed by the prophets; and cer-
tainly they do not represent Jesus as discussing it. But the
teaching they report as from Him presents the relation of
God to men, and indeed to all His creatures, as one of unlim-
ited beneficence unlimited in particular by any unworthiness
on their part. 4 But still more significant is it that Jesus is
represented as exhibiting precisely this attitude of gracious
and forgiving love in His own dealings with sinful people, and

1 Rom. ii. 4. 2 Rom. v. 5.

3 1 John iv. 19. Matt. v. 43-48; Luke xv. 11-32, etc.

214 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

finding in their loving response the proof of their forgive-
ness. 1 While in one way nothing could be farther from the
theological arguments of Paul than the simple and natural
converse of Jesus with men, it is clear that the arguments are
about a spiritual reality manifested in the plain story.

Further, the Synoptic narrative makes plain what is im-
plicit in the whole Pauline argument, that the universalizing
of religion is intimately associated with this synthesis of
righteousness and grace in the love of God. For it was because
Jesus employed with the utmost spontaneity and consistency
the divine method of unqualified and gracious beneficence
even towards the least worthy, while calling upon men for a
righteousness exceeding that of scribes and Pharisees, that
His ministry became a revolt against the national religion
of the Law, and ended in His death.

III. The prophets had tried to establish a correspondence
between the ideal righteousness of God and the actual lot
of men by the doctrine that virtue is rewarded by prosperity
and wickedness punished by suffering. This doctrine, authori-
tatively laid down in Deuteronomy, became the standard of
Jewish orthodoxy in the whole subsequent period. It was
challenged again and again, but showed an extraordinary
tenacity in face of adverse facts. The dominant theology
ultimately took refuge in a visionary future where the balance
should be righted, and left the undeserved suffering of this
age as something due either to the inherent wrongness of the
present order or to some inscrutable dispensation of Provi-
dence, in any case something unrelated to any rational con-
ception of human values. The "Second Isaiah" indeed, in his
ideal picture of the martyr Servant of the Lord, had suggested
that the suffering of the righteous might have in this age a
positive value, as vicarious expiation for the sin of others.

* Luke vii. 41-48. '.

i

The Problem of Suffering 215

He was not without followers, but the doctrine he taught can
hardly be said to have effectively asserted itself in Jewish
theology, though it was invoked to glorify the Maccabsean
martyrs. 1 Jewish theologians perhaps showed a praiseworthy
sobriety in refusing to commit themselves to it; for indeed
the bare idea of vicarious expiation is not wholly rational,
and easily lends itself to fanaticism. After all, if God de-
mands the suffering of one in order that the sins of others may
be forgiven, a meaning is found for suffering, but at the ex-
pense of the rationality of God for which the prophets con-
tended so vigorously.

Now the New Testament takes up the doctrine of the
Suffering Servant into a broad philosophy of life in which its
irrational elements are transcended. It avers that "Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures (of the second
Isaiah)", 2 and freely cites the language of those Scriptures
in illustration of the fact. 3 But that language receives a fresh
meaning from its setting. It is not that God demanded, or
accepted, the suffering of a man as expiation. He Himself,
as Paul has it, "propounded the expiation" 4 which puts the
whole transaction on a different footing. While the Cross is
historically the suffering of a Man, it is the manifestation of
something in God, which is the analogue or equivalent of suf-
fering. It may be defined as self-giving under the motive of
pure love. "God so loved the world that He gave His only-
begotten Son". 5 The expression is evidently anthropomorphic.
It is a mythological way of saying that in Christ God gives
of his own Being the utmost that it is possible for humanity
to receive of God, and that the giving involves for Him what

1 4 Mace. xvii. 22 (about contemporary with the life of Jesus).
2 1 Cor. rv. 3 (where Paul is citing the tradition that came to him from the
first believers) ; Mark ix. 12.

Acts viii. 29-35; 1 Peter ii. 21-25.
Rom. iii. 25.
* John, iii. 16.

216 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

we can only describe as sacrifice. It is thus that Paul can
say that God "commends His own love to us in that Christ
died for us". 1 The result of this teaching is that the problem
of suffering is placed in a new light, because suffering is seen
to have a place in the process whose origin is in divine Love,
and consequently to possess a positive value. That value is
relative to the existence of evil in the world, for Christian
theology does not deny the reality of evil, but suffering now
appears not as irredeemably evil, but rather as redemptive
from evil, when it takes the divine form of sacrifice. This
view of things accounts for the strangely serene and untrou-
bled mood in which the most characteristic New Testament
thought faces the facts of suffering a mood so unintelligible
to the impatience of much modern thought.

This is what early Christian theologians made of the reve-
lation that came to them in Christ. The earliest accounts
of His life were written under the impulse of thought of this
kind. The motive of the Passion is obviously dominant in the
earliest of them all, the Gospel according to Mark. Compara-
tively little of the theology, nevertheless, has got through into
the Synoptic Gospels. They tell the story of a bitterly
wronged and innocent Sufferer, not, like the Book of Job, to
raise the problem of suffering, but as "good news". They show
Jesus, conscious of a mysterious destiny as Son of God and
Son of Man, accepting the suffering that evil entailed' upon
Him, in the pure spirit of sacrifice. 2 He accounts for it to
Himself and to others by half-veiled allusions to the Suf-
fering Servant of Isaiah. 3 But as he resolves to face death
He enunciates a simpler and more profound maxim to save
your life is to lose it: to give it up is to find it. 4 That is a
law of life as such, and therefore surely has its roots in the

1 Rom. v. 8.

* Mark ix. 12, x. 45, xiv. 24.

* Mark viii. 35; Matt. x. 39. Luke xvii. 33.

* Luke xii. 50; Mark xiv. 36.

Suffering and Sacrifice 217

being of God Himself. No unbiased reader of these Gospels
could understand that maxim as a pessimistic denial of life;
it takes up sacrifice into the idea of life at its highest. As we
follow the story we are constrained to confess that the way in
which Jesus faces suffering, not resenting it, but accepting it
with a redemptive purpose, is inherently divine.

It is to be observed that the Christian reply to the ques-
tion raised by suffering is not a theoretical vindication of the
justice of God, but a challenge to accept as divine a certain
attitude to life as a whole, in which suffering comes to be
subordinate and instrumental to a positive purpose of good.

IV. The prophets know nothing of any life but the present.
The troubles of the period after the Exile raised the ques-
tion of a future life for the individual, while the influence of
other religions with which the Jews now came into close
touch suggested an answer. Judaism was, however, strangely
slow to accept a doctrine of immortality in any sense, and
it is only in the Greek period that the belief became current
that those whom God deemed worthy would be raised from
death by His power, to share in the blessings of the Age to
Come. Only such a strongly Hellenized book as the Wisdom
of Solomon inculcates anything like the Platonic doctrine of
.the immortality of the soul.

The New Testament is full of the assurance of everlasting
life. There is indeed no discussion of immortality as a philo-
sophical theory. Paul's argument about the resurrection
which we are accustomed to read at the burial of the dead * is
quite unconvincing if we suppose him to be attempting to
prove the immortality of the soul. Actually that is not what
he is talking about. His premises are those of contemporary
Judaism: that a dead man really is dead and done for unless
and until God makes him alive again by an act of creative

1 1 Cor. xv. 12-58.

218 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

power, and that this miracle will take place when the New
Age dawns. On these premises, the fact that Jesus had been
dead and was alive did afford a proof that the age of miracle
had come, in which all whom God deemed worthy should
receive from Him the supernatural life. In a scholastic sense
the argument is sound, though it operates with conceptions
strange to us. But what lies behind it is a conviction, based
on the religious experience mediated by Christ, that there is
now no absolute barrier between this workaday world and
the eternal order. The new outlook is not limited by the
robust "this-worldliness" of the prophets, and yet it differs
from the pessimistic "other-worldliness" of apocalyptic. When
Paul had outgrown his early eschatological fanaticism, 1 he
saw that the natural values of this world, such as those of the
family, 2 of work, 8 and of political order, 4 remain for the Chris-
tian; and yet his real life is "hid with Christ in God" 6 and
while living "in the flesh" 6 he is already "in the heavenly
places with Christ Jesus". 7 In other words, he has experience
of the eternal values in a world of space and time.

For the author of the Fourth Gospel the eschatological
framework of the conviction has almost dissolved. He holds
that to know God as He is known in Christ, that is, through
participation in the divine quality and activity of love, is
eternal life. 8 This is in substance the position of practically
all the New Testament writers. For people who have reached
this position, personal survival needs no proof, nor is it a
hypothesis demanded by the attempt to justify the ways of
God to men in face of the daunting facts of our mortality.
Philosophically, the whole matter is still open to speculation,
and Christian thought after the New Testament has often

1 1 Cor. vii. 29-31. Col. iii. 18-rv. 1; Eph. v. 21-vi. 9.

3 Eph. iv. 28. * Rom. xiii. 1-7.

6 Col. iii. 1-3. Gal. ii. 20; 2 Cor. x. 3. .

7 Eph. i. 3, ii. 6. 8 John rvii. 3. Cf. 1 John iv. 16, iv. 12. '

Eternal Life 219

used, quite justifiably, Platonic and other conceptions of the
immortality of the soul as the intellectual forms of its faith.
But the New Testament outlook is in itself such a liberation
from the disabling fear of bodily death as makes it possible to
think about it with calm clearness of mind, untroubled by
that morbid depreciation of this life which is often the price
paid for an emphatic assertion of the life to come. That
Christian thought has not always maintained this outlook in
its purity goes without saying. We may still return with
profit to the witness of the New Testament.

We turn again to the Synoptic Gospels. The early be-
lievers, we have said, found in the living Christ the centre and
ground of their assurance of everlasting life. What did they
see in the story of His early ministry to guarantee their faith?
There is singularly little discussion of the question. Once only
is Jesus brought into controversy with the typical deniers
of the resurrection, the Sadducees. On this occasion He dis-
misses with cool contempt the crude notion of a renewal of
physical existence. He pronounces the simple but pregnant
maxim "God is not a God of the dead but of the living". 1
That saying bases belief in survival upon the consideration
that communion with the Eternal must in its nature be eter-
nal. 2 For the rest, He always assumes His own survival of
bodily death, declaring at His last meal on earth that He will
hereafter drink the mystical "fruit of the vine" in the King-
dom of God. 3 This Kingdom of God, which here stands for
the eternal order into which He enters after death, He never-
theless declares to have already come upon men. 4 He lives, in
fact, speaks and acts, on the assumption that the manifest
rule of God, which contemporary thought often associated

i Mark xii. 18-27.

8 It is thus in direct succession to Ps. Ixxiii. rather than in the apocalyptic
/ tradition. Mark xiv. 25.

4 Matt. xii. 28; Luke xi. 20

/
'

220 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

with the Coming Age of miracle, is a fact of daily experience. 1
He convinced His followers of it, and they tell His story as
that of one who "could not be holden of death", 2 because in
Him the Kingdom of God itself lived. Whatever we may
make of the resurrection narratives as history, we must con-
clude that experiences of the risen Christ such as Paul tells
us were claimed from the earliest days by personal followers of
the Crucified well-known to him, 3 would be unintelligible and
irrational if they had not been under the spell of a life which
they had come to feel to be in its nature invulnerable by the
accident of bodily death.

V. We have seen that the problem of reconciling the im-
manence and the transcendence of God, which has its roots
in the primitive tension between the "otherness" and the
familiarity of the Divine, became acute in Judaism, and
found a partial solution through various conceptions of media- ,
tion. These conceptions range from the crude belief in angels,
which is a sort of reduced polytheism, through the idea of the
Law as itself a sufficient mediation, to poetical or philosophical
constructions in which the immanent Divine is conceived as
the Wisdom, the Spirit, or the Word, of the transcendent God,
and these aspects of God are given a quasi-personal existence.
In the New Testament angels still figure in popular imagina-
tion, but the clearest and most vigorous thinker among its
writers, Paul, definitely refuses to regard them as valid media-
tors of the divine. The place of the Law is taken by the
Spirit, as in some schools of Jewish thought the Law was
identified with Wisdom as a personified emanation of God.
But the thought of the New Testament takes a decisive step
in identifying the Holy Spirit of God with the Spirit of Jesus,
and regarding Jesus Himself as the incarnation of the Word 4

I Matt. xiii. 16-17; Luke x. 23-24.

I 1 Cor. xv. 4-8.

* Acts ii. 24.
* John i. 1-18.

The Problem of Mediation 221

or of divine Wisdom. 1 This means that the immanent Divine,
instead of being conceived in a manner which remains abstract
in spite of poetical personification, is conceived as a Person;
in history as embodied in a real human personality, and in
experience as a spiritual presence continuous with that per-
sonality. Thus all that was true in primitive anthropomor-
phism regains its place in religious experience, while the trans-
cendence of the Eternal God, the Fons Deitatis, is fully
safeguarded. Naturally this bold adventure in faith raised
philosophical problems which have occupied the mind of the
Church ever since. But it is clear that religiously it proved
satisfying. If we review the several problems which we have
had under consideration, we can see that the Christian solution
of them all came through the discovery of God in Christ.

The faith of the Incarnation is variously expressed in the
New Testament writings. Its most developed expression is to
be found in the Fourth Gospel. The unique constitution of
the distinctively Christian experience of God is here portrayed
in conclusive fashion. It is intimately bound up with an
historical Person, and yet has all the depth, universality, and
immediacy associated with mysticism. That it is the Eternal
God Himself who is the Object of experience is not for .a
moment in doubt, yet He is experienced in and through Jesus
Christ, whose every word and act in history is a "sign" 2 of
eternal realities. The "otherness" and transcendence of God
are asserted, and yet in Christ the Unknowable is Object of
experience. "No man hath seen God at any time: the only-
begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath
declared Him" 3 : "He that hath seen me hath seen the

* 1 Cor. i. 24; Col. i. 15-18, where the terms used all belong to the "Wisdom"
theology. Cf. Heb. i. 2-3.

a John ii. 11, vi. 26. The contrast here drawn between the physical miracle
of feeding and the "sign" which those who had experienced it failed to discern
/ehows that the sense "John" gives to the word "sign" is other than that in
which "signs" are repudiated in Mark viii. 11-12; 1 Cor. i. 22-24.

John i. 18.

222 The New Testament as "Fulfilment"

Father". 1 To anyone who has thus "seen" God in Christ, all
serviceable and significant things in the world become means
of communion with God light, water, bread, wine. For be-
hind these palpable things lie their eternal archetypes, the
"real light", the "real bread", which are elements in the
hidden world of the divine mind and purpose. Christ Him-
self in fact is the real Light, the real Bread, since He is the
Logos, 3 the uttered Thought of the Eternal, the ultimate
Meaning of the world. Thus for the Christian the common
world is as full of the divine (of "holiness") as for the naive
animist; but that immanent divine is experienced through and
through in terms of Christ, and therefore in a way which does
full justice to personal values, rationally and ethically.

While in this view of religion all things are "sacramental" of
the divine Presence, the Fourth Evangelist, like other New
Testament writers, finds its sacramental quality most intense
in the two sacraments of the Church which were already in his
time traditional, 4 and particularly in that Sacrament which
is mystically a partaking of "the flesh and blood of the Son
of Man". At a time when the living memory of the days of
Jesus was fading, the experience of Him as a divine Presence
might well have lost hold on history. In that case the decisive
value of the Incarnation would have been missed. But from
very early times the rite about which the distinctive Christian
life gathered was one deeply rooted in the solid facts of his-
tory. When Paul visited Corinth, about twenty years after
the death of Jesus, he "handed on that which he had re-

i John xiv. 9.

8 John i. 9, etc., iii. 5, iv. 10-16, vi. 26-63, ii. 3-10, xv. 1. Observe that
these figures are different hi character from the parables of the Synoptic Gospels.
The intention is to select an object in the world of phenomena, to direct the
attention to the eternal "idea" or "meaning" (Ao-ycs) embodied hi it, and
then to represent this as an aspect of God as known hi Christ. ("John's"
&\i]8u>a i.e. the real essences behind phenomena, correspond to Plato's ISkat
and Philo's \6yoi).

9 John i. 1-14. Philo had equated the A&yos with the Platonic I8ea TUV
ISeuv, the highest and most inclusive of "real" or eternal existences.

* John iii. 5, cf . xiii. 8-10, vi. 1-59, xxi. 12-17, xv. 1-10.

The Incarnation and the Sacraments 223

ceived", 1 and this tradition included the statement that "the
Lord Jesus, the night on which He was betrayed", had per-
formed certain acts and uttered certain words, by which He
had wrought out of the most significant elements in His own
historical achievement a sacramental rite of communion. 2
Whether by His express intention or not, His followers had
continued to repeat these acts and words "in memory of
Him", and thereby to "proclaim the death of the Lord".
The sacrament remained, linking indissolubly the deeply
spiritual experience of God in Christ with the history that
gives it its meaning. In it is decisively expressed the Christian
interpretation of life and religion.

1 1 Cor. xv. 1-3. The meaning can hardly be different in xi. 23.
2 1 Cor. xi. 23-26.

CHAPTER XI

JESUS CHRIST AND THE GOSPELS

THE Gospels have so far been treated along with the
epistles as documents of the religious experience of
the early Church. This approach to them corresponds with
the way in which they actually came into being. None of the
four books which we call by that title was written until thirty
or forty years after the death of Jesus. In the meantime
the first unprecedented outburst of spiritual energy had car-
ried the Christian message far and wide; the lines of the
Christian philosophy had been laid down; and the new re-
ligious society had created its distinctive institutions, at
least in their rudiments. The life which was in it all had
found characteristic expression in epistles and similar "tracts
for the times", whose pointed brevity and informal freshness
transmit directly the living experience of those early days.
But the centre of the Christian experience was a Person Who
had recently lived, and brought about an historical crisis by
the things He had done and said. The Hebrew prophets "ex-
perienced God in terms of history"; so did the early Christians
in terms of the historic life of Jesus, with its great sequel,
Paul seems to us moderns curiously little concerned about
the Gospel history; yet when he delivered to his converts "the
things which he had received", these things, we learn, included
things that Jesus had said and done and things that had hap-
pened to Him. 1 This historical reference is implicit when it
is not explicit in all primitive expositions of Christian experi-
ence. When the events began to fade out of living memory

1 Cor. xi. 23, xv. 1-3.
224

The Gospel before the Gospels 225

as the first generation passed, the need arose for an orderly
written account of "the things fully established among us" 1 ;
and a powerful sense of the value and urgency of the facts, in
the evangelists themselves, provided the impulse to write.
Thus the Gospels represent in another form of expression the
same experience that lies behind the epistles. They represent
it not in terms of interior spiritual states induced by Christ
in the believer, but in terms of his memories or imaginations
of Christ as acting outwardly on the stage of history. That
is in fact why these writings are called, not Memoirs or His-
tories, but Gospels or rather, why they were at first called
simply "The Gospel", with sub-headings, "according to Mat-
thew, Mark", and so forth. "The Gospel", the Good News,
meant the setting forth by a Christian missionary of what
Christianity is, as a "power of God unto salvation" 2 ; and
Mark felt himself to be giving this to the world in writing his
story 3 just as truly as Paul did in writing the epistle to the
Romans. Neither he nor any other evangelist had any idea
that in setting forth "the Jesus of History" he was doing other
than illuminate "the Christ of faith".

It is important to emphasize this point of view at the pres-
ent time. 4 In the last generation discontent with traditional
Christian dogma coincided with a new interest in the his-
torical criticism of the Gospels. It came to be thought that
in order to discover the essence of Christianity das Wesen
des Christentums we had only to concentrate our minds upon
stripping off everything in the New Testament, and particu-
larly in the Gospels, which might conceivably have come out
of the experience or the reflection of the early Church, and

Luke i. 1.

2 Rom. i. 16, and BO regularly in the N.T. (except where it means the actual
preaching, as distinct from the content of the preaching, as 2 Cor. viii. 18,

etc.).

* Mark i. 1. Cf. his use of evayye^iov elsewhere, i. 14-15, xiv. 9, etc
4 On this point see B. W. Bacon, The Story of Jesus, chap. I.

226 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

getting down to the bare unedited facts. We should then be
face to face with "the Jesus of History", and from that point
could reconstruct a reasonable Christianity free from the per-
versions which had unaccountably beset it from the first
moment it was preached to the world. There is no doubt of
the intellectual and moral stimulus that has come through the
discipline of trying to penetrate through all mists of dogma
and tradition to Jesus Himself as He was in Galilee and Jeru-
salem in the early part of the first century. But in fact, the
attempt to portray "the Jesus of History" in complete inde-
pendence of the experience of the early Church has not met
with great success. Either the critic imports into the narrative
far more of his own ideas and predilections than he knows,
or his resultant picture is so colourless that we know in-
stinctively this was not the Jesus who turned the course of
history.

The manner in which the story is told by the evangelists
is in fact part of the story, as the value Jesus had for those
who followed Him is part of what He was. Thus the elements
in the Gospels which may have been contributed by the
evangelists themselves out of their own experience or reflec-
tion have both an historical and a religious value, and are
not to be cast aside as so much lumber by those who would
understand the Jesus of the Gospels. When we have before us
any particular story of Jesus, before we bring into play the
apparatus of criticism to answer the question, Did this really
happen just so? we may pause to consider that whether it
did or no, at least someone found at the centre of a profound
religious experience a Person of whom it was natural to tell
such a story. We know of course that neither his experience
nor his way of relating it to history was perfectly pure, and
we shall be quite prepared for an element of error. Here the
Christian mind exercises an instinctive criticism of the Gos-
pels. It does not really believe, though the evidence is in the

The Christ of the Gospels 227

earliest Gospel, that the Lord of its faith was such an one as
to "curse" a harmless fig-tree because it failed to satisfy His
craving for fruit out of season. 1 Taken as a whole, however,
the Gospel stories ring true to Christian experience, and pro-
mote it in their readers. That is, they serve the primary
purpose for which they were written.

When this has been said, however, we must go on to say
that the strictly historical criticism of the Gospels is of im-
portance for their religious value and for this reason: When
the Christian experience is set forth directly in terms of the
interior life, it is of necessity largely affected by the individual
limitations of the human subjects of the experience, however
true may be their claim that they are "in Christ". When it is
set forth in a form controlled by memory of external events,
though the limitations are never wholly transcended, it is
nevertheless possible for much in Christ that was imperfectly
assimilated in the experience to find a place in the record.
That this is actually the case is patent to any careful reader
of the New Testament. We may take an example from one
element in the Gospel record where no disturbing influence of
dogmatic interest enters in. 2 There are well-known passages
in the Synoptic Gospels which express an attitude to little
children and to animals very remarkable in that age. 3 There
is no evidence that this attitude was appreciated in the early
Church. Paul asks incredulously, "Does God care for oxen?" 4
and for him and other New Testament writers the child sug-
gests childishness rather than childlikeness. 5 Even the evan-

1 Mark xi. 12-14, 20-21. We may take it from Mark that Peter saw some-
thing, or heard something said, which he interpreted as the cursing of a tree,
but what that something may have been we cannot say; perhaps a clue may be
formed by comparing the fig-tree parables, Mark xiii. 28-29; Luke xiii. 6-9,
xvii. 6.

2 1 owe this illustration to Canon Streeter.

s Mark is. 36-37, x. 13-16; Matt, xviii. 1-6, 10-14 x. 29 (Luke xii. 6), vi.
26.

* 1 COT. ix. 9.

& 1 Cor- iii. 1, xiii. 11; Eph. iv. 14; Heb. v. 12-14.

228 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

gelists show a tendency to interpret the exquisite stories of
Jesus and the children in reference to the treatment of spirit-
ually immature adults in the Church. 1 Yet their faithfulness
to historical memory led them to represent their Master as
dealing with children and speaking of animals in a way they
did not understand, but felt to be characteristic of Him. If this
is so in this one instance, it may well be so in others, espe-
cially where deeply rooted beliefs or prejudices interfered with
the penetration of the new life "in Christ". It is certainly
true that the evangelists have preserved statements about
Jesus which neither they nor other early Christian writers
appreciated in their full significance. Hence we need not be
so sceptical as some recent critics have shown themselves
of the possibility of getting behind the early Church to the
real Jesus of history. 2 At least, the Church was honest enough
to tell stories and report sayings of its Master which transcend
its own thought and practice, and remain a challenge to the
Church of later days. Here was Someone "above the heads of
His reporters", and the extent to which their best imagination
could have invented the words and deeds attributed to Him
must be strictly limited.

It is therefore worth while to exercise the most strenuous
historical criticism in seeking to recover the earliest and most
trustworthy forms of the Gospel tradition. A century of such
criticism has not been without result. We may now say with
confidence that for strictly historical material, with the mini-
mum of subjective interpretation, we must not go to the
Fourth Gospel. Its religious value stands beyond challenge,
and it is the more fully appreciated when its contribution to
our knowledge of the bare facts of the life of Jesus becomes

1 Even Mark shows this tendency in ix. 42, and the context in which Mat-
thew has placed the sayings about "little ones" in xviii. suggests that this was

his interest in them. .

2 See B. S. Easton, The Gospel before the Gospels. \

Source-Criticism of the Gospels 229

a secondary interest. This is not to say that it makes no such
contribution. But it is to the Synoptic Gospels that we must
go, if we wish to recover the oldest and purest tradition of the
facts. These Gospels coincide, overlap, diverge, confirm and
contradict one another in a way that is at first simply per-
plexing. But out of these curious interrelations of the three
it has been possible to deduce a gradually increasing mass
of probable conclusions about the earlier sources upon which
they rest. This is not the place for any detailed treatment of
what is called "the Synoptic Problem"; 1 but the ordinary
reader of the Gospels should be aware of certain conclusions
which command a very wide consensus of expert opinion.
Mark is the earliest source for the story of the public ministry
of Jesus, and preserves a number of narratives, including that
of the Passion, which in all probability rest upon a first-hand
apostolic tradition. 2 Further, those sections of Luke which
have parallels in Matthew but not in Mark represent another
source, probably in the main a single written Greek docu-
ment which cannot have been later than Mark, and in some
respects had a more primitive tradition of the teaching of
Jesus. This second source, commonly referred to by the rather
odd symbol "Q", cannot be reconstructed as a whole, but
its contents can be sufficiently inferred from a comparison
of Matthew and Luke. It can then be compared with Mark,
and the two sources can be allowed to corroborate or correct
one another. Where they corroborate one another as they do
in some remarkable ways we can be pretty sure of being in

1 See B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins; B. W. Bacon,
The Story of Jesus.

2 The ancient tradition that Peter was the source of many of Mark's stories
is found credible by most critics; for the Passion narrative we must probably
find the authority in the Jerusalem circle of the early Church. If the evangelist
is to be identified with "John whose surname was Mark" (Acts xii. 12) he was
in close touch with this circle; the name, however, was very common. That the
Gospel as a whole is anything like a transcript of Peter's reminiscences cannot
be maintained.

230 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

touch with a common tradition that is very primitive indeed. 1
Mark and "Q" are (along with Paul) the pillars of our knowl-
edge of the facts of the life and teaching of Jesus. The con-
stant study of both, in and for themselves, and particularly
in comparison, is an invaluable discipline for anyone who
wishes to read the Gospels as a whole with a critical standard
in mind. 2 For while neither Mark nor "Q" is unaffected by
the modification, revision, and editing of the tradition during
thirty or forty years, the more deeply one studies them the
more confident does one feel that in them we are in real
though not direct touch with the memory of the early dis-
ciples. The other portions of Matthew and Luke no doubt
contain material drawn from traditional sources just as old
and trustworthy as Mark or "Q", but it is certain that they
also contain secondary elements not easily isolated except by
applying criteria learnt from the earliest sources.

As has already been observed, we all, if our minds are
open, apply a certain instinctive criticism to the Gospels. But
such criticism has an element of "subjectivity" which though
inevitable is dangerous. We so easily doubt the historicity
of that which disturbs us. Through the study of the earliest
sources we approach a greater "objectivity" of criticism, and
our mere preferences are controlled. The amount of ascer-
tained historical fact that emerges should neither be overesti-
mated nor underestimated. It is small in bulk, but not negli-
gible. What matters most is that the more critical our study
has been, the more sure we become that here is a real Person
in history, many-sided, often perplexing, certainly too great,
to be reduced to any common type, and not fully intelligible
to us; but, for all that, unmistakably individual, strongly

1 See F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, pp. 147-
168.

2 For the "general reader," Q, the Earliest Gospel? by A. Peel (pub. Teachers \
and Taught), may serve as a tentative reconstruction of the "Q" material. \

The Gospels as Historical Documents 231

defined in lines of character and purpose, and challenging us
all by a unique outlook on life. Browning is right:

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose."

After the discipline of historical criticism we do know Jesus
better, and whatever was faulty in the traditional Christianity
that has come down to us, or in our apprehension of it, is
confronted afresh with the Reality that started it all.

We now approach the question of the authority of Jesus
Christ as we find Him in the Gospels. It must first be said
that His authority over the Christian soul can never be
simply that of a prophet, however great, who speaks to us
through a written record. For Christ in Christian faith is not
merely an historical figure of the past. Theologians and sim-
ple Christians alike (not that these terms are mutually exclu-
sive) find a mystery in His Person to which historical
categories are inadequate. While the former seek formula,
varying from age to age, in which to express His transcendent
religious value, the latter find in Him a "present Saviour",
or a "Lord and Master" to whom they are personally respon-
sible, in a sense not applicable to any mere character in his-
torical literature. Many theologians are ill-content with the
Christological formulae of tradition, and still more non-theolo-
gians find them unmeaning, but few of them would be content
to sum up their relation to Christ by saying that they had
read about Him in a book and thought Him admirable and
His teaching convincing. Even if we start from that curiously
dull development of Protestantism for which the Christian
religion is "morality touched with emotion", we may still ask,
What do you mean by saying that this or that is "un-Chris-
tian"? You do not mean that Christian people do not do it,
') for they do many "un-Christian" things, and even do them

232 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

without being conscience-stricken. You do not mean that
it is explicitly condemned in the Gospels, for many of our
ethical problems do not appear there. Do you not mean that
in some sense Christ is One who stands in the midst of
the world to-day, representing an ethical standard in advance
of common ideals and practice? From this to the lofty
"Christ-mysticism" of Paul, which some Christians, though
they have never been a majority, to-day as always share,
there are many imperceptible gradations of Christian experi-
ence. For them all an appeal to a Christ contemporary
because eternal is natural and indeed unavoidable, over and
above any reference to the New Testament records. At the
risk of raising philosophical problems which we are not in a
position to solve, may we not say in general terms that for
Christians, even for Christians who would hesitate to assent
to any traditional creed, Christ is in some way identical with
"that of God in us", the inner Light, the indwelling Spirit,
whatever it is that we live by at our best? His authority,
therefore, is the one and only authority we have declared to
be absolute, the authority of truth, the authority of God.
There can be no discussion of it.

But it is characteristic of Christianity to find its Christ in
history as well as above history. Those who would neglect
the Gospels as mythical or obsolete and point us to the eternal
"Christ within" as the only object of faith, no less than those
who will allow us nothing but a "Jesus of History", are pro-
posing an unreal simplification contrary to the genius of our
religion, and missing that in it which makes it a unique inter-
pretation of life the unity of the eternal with the historical.
Thus when we have said that the authority of the eternal
Christ is absolute, we have not thereby answered the question
of the peculiar way in which that authority is mediated in
the Gospel history.

A rough and ready answer which is often given is that the

\

Eternal Christ and Jesus of History 233

teaching of Jesus, as the utterance of the Eternal Word, has
the authority of absolute truth. If by this is meant that the
sayings reported as His in the Gospels have this authority,
it cannot be maintained. There are sayings (not many, in-
deed) which either are simply not true, in their plain mean-
ing, or are unacceptable to the conscience or reason of Chris-
tian people. Thus according to Mark xiii, Jesus gave an
elaborate forecast of events to follow His death, ending with
the categorical statement, "This generation will not pass
away until all these things have happened". By no legitimate
ingenuity of interpretation can it be shown that anything
resembling some of these events happened before A.D. 100,
when the generation to which Jesus belonged may be presumed
to have died out. The common-sense reply to such difficulties
is that there must have been some mistake in the reporting.
Either someone else's words have been wrongly attributed
to Jesus, or His words were misunderstood. But in that case
we must take the maxim that the teaching of Jesus is abso-
lutely authoritative to mean not the teaching which we pos-
sess in the Gospels but some hypothetical teaching which is
not directly accessible to us though it is imperfectly reflected
in the Gospels. The maxim therefore is of little use to those
who seek an infallible external authority. For we no longer
accept a saying as authoritative because it lies before us as a
word of Jesus, but because we are rationally convinced that
it is a word of His, and that will mostly mean in the last
resort, because we are convinced that it is worthy of Him, that
is, true and important. For although scientific criticism of
the Gospels can do a great deal to guide and correct our
instinctive criticism, it can seldom speak the last word. If
we have been driven from a belief in the verbal infallibility
of the Gospels as a whole, we are not likely to find permanent
refuge in the verbal infallibility of "Q".
Jesus Himself, if the Gospels are to be believed, did not

234 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

wish to dispense His hearers from responsibility for their own
convictions. "Why do you not from yourselves judge what is
right?" 1 He is reported to have said on one occasion, and that
Principle governs His whole use of parables in teaching. For
a parable sets before the hearer a situation in real life which
he is expected to recognize as true to experience, and leaves
it to him to deduce the meaning. "He who has ears to hear
must hear". 2 Someone asked, "Who is my neighbour?" Jesus
gave no authoritative definition but told a story, and asked,
"Which of these was the neighbour?" 3 The authority there-
fore which He claimed, and which contemporaries acknowl-
edge in His teaching, 4 was not of a sort to silence private
judgment.

If Jesus Christ was a real human Person if, in theological
terms, there was a true incarnation and not a mere theophany
in human form, then He was an individual living under his-
torical conditions and limitations. His authority, therefore,
as a religious Teacher must be estimated on the principle we
applied to the prophets. 5 He lived intensely in a particular
historical situation, and the relevance of His teaching to that
situation is part of its eternal significance. He dealt not with
general abstractions, but with issues which the time raised
acutely for the people to whom He spoke. He dealt with them
not as an opportunist,, but radically, and with the profound
simplicity that comes only of complete mastery of the problem.
We have not to face these identical issues, and we cannot

1 Luke xii. 57. The meaning, as indicated by the context, is that reflection
upon one's own normal, or even instinctive, behaviour as a rational and social
being should reveal the fundamental principles of morality without any appeal
to an external authority.

2 Mark iv. 9, etc. The theory of parabolic teaching enunciated in Mark
iv. 10-12 is inconsistent with other words of Jesus and with His manifest prac-
tice, and is almost certainly due to theological reflection in the early Church.
Nor is it likely that the "interpretation" offered in iv. 13-20 goes back to
Jesus Himself. See A. Julicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, 2. Teil, pp. 514-
538.

3 Luke x. 29-37. Mark i. 22, 27. See chap. V.

\

Historical Relativity of Sayings of Jesus 235

always apply His words strictly to ourselves; but the response
that Jesus made to the issues raised for Him challenges us to
be satisfied with no solutions of our own problems which have
not the same quality. To attempt to free His sayings from
their relativity to the particular situation is often to blunt
their edge rather than to bring out their universality.

To take an example: there is a saying reported several
times in the Gospels, about "bearing the cross". Luke, intent
on applying it directly to the situation of his readers, repre-
sents Jesus as saying that His follower must "take up his cross
daily and follow me". 1 That rendering of the saying has
largely influenced its application. It has been taken to refer
to habitual forms of self-sacrifice or self-denial. The ascetic
voluntarily undergoing austerities felt himself to be bearing
his daily cross. We shallower folk have often reduced it to a
Inetaphor for casual unpleasantnesses which we have to bear.
A neuralgia or a defaulting servant is our "cross", and we
make a virtue of necessity. What Jesus actually said, accord-
ing to our earliest evidence, 2 was, quite bluntly, "Whoever
wants to follow me must shoulder his gallows-beam" for such
is perhaps the most significant rendering of the word for
"cross". It meant a beam which a condemned criminal car-
ried to the place of execution, to which he was then nailed
until he died. Jesus was not using the term metaphorically.
Under Rome, crucifixion was the likeliest fate for those who
defied the established powers. Nor did those who heard
understand that He was asking for "daily" habits of aus-
terity. He was enrolling volunteers for a desperate venture,
and He wished them to understand that in joining it they
must hold their lives forfeit. To march behind Him on that
journey was as good as to tie a halter round one's neck. Now
it is clear that the saying, in its original form and meaning,

* Luke k. 23.

* Mark viii. 34, and so in "Q"; see Luke xiv. 27, Matt. x. 38.

236 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

can rarely have any direct application to ourselves. Few of
us are likely to be in any situation which even remotely recalls
that tragic moment. But it is surely good for us to go back
and understand that this is what Christ stood for in His
day. We shall then at least not suppose that we are meeting
His demands in our day by bearing a toothache bravely or
fasting during Lent.

This will illustrate how the historical study of the Gospels,
with the criticism that necessarily belongs to it, is of religious
value. We want to know how Jesus dealt with an historical
situation, for although the situation does not recur, all subse-
quent history, including our own environment, is different
because of the way in which it was faced. The way in which
it was faced was the right and true way at that time. There-
fore it is relevant to all time. We are not at liberty to take
the words of Jesus and insist that they must fit any and
every situation in which we may find ourselves. He was too
deeply concerned with the critical time in which He lived
to be thinking about us. Nor can we finally solve our own
uncertainties by trying to copy what He did. Again what
He did was directed to a particular situation. We must
undertake the harder task of passing through the act and
word with their time-relativity to the Spirit in them which
is eternal. But the more actual the historical situation be-
comes to us, in all its particularity of time and place, the more
powerfully does the Spirit make itself felt.

It is a part of this time-relativity that Jesus, like the
prophets, could not but make use of the thought-forms of
His age. Some of His teaching, for example, is cast in the
mould of an eschatological outlook which is distinctly that
of the first century and alien from our own thought. It is
almost certain that this element has been exaggerated by His
reporters, and it is highly probable that in various ways our
records of His teaching are more deeply coloured by their \ I

/ Temporary Forms of Teaching of Jesus 237

milieu than the teaching itself was. Yet it is not to be thought
that even in a perfectly accurate report it would have appeared
entirely free from such colouring. We need not doubt that
' Jesus, as He is represented, shared the views of His contem-
poraries regarding the authorship of books in the Old Testa-
ment, 1 or the phenomena of "demon-possession" 2 views
which we could not accept without violence to our sense
of truth. We readily recognize that so far He was a man
of His time. But who will venture to define how far, or to
say, "Here He speaks as a Jew of the first century; there as
the Eternal Word"; as theologians once presumed to distin-
guish what He did "as man" from what He did "as God"?
Enough to affirm on the one hand' that He could not have
spoken so effectively to His time if He had not spoken in
its terms, and on the other hand that as a matter of fact
this has not stood in the way of His universal appeal. If
it be true that much of the prophetic writings appeals at once
even to minds quite outside the biblical tradition, it is far
more fully true of the teaching of Jesus. The eternal in it
has so permeated and transformed the temporary and local
that it strikes home to the sincere and open mind anywhere.
We must further observe that it is easy to be overhasty
in attempting to purge His teaching of temporary elements.
Thus, a great deal of the teaching of Jesus as we have it in
the Gospels is coloured with ideas which we readily recognize
as belonging to Jewish apocalyptic the catastrophe of Dooms-
day, the coming on the clouds, the miraculous transformation
of the earth and its inhabitants. How much of this is origi-
nal? The earlier liberal criticism said, "None; it was all inter-
polated by the evangelists out of current thought". With

1 Mark xii. 36. The argument depends upon the assumption of Davidic
authorship of a psalm which is, in the opinion of recent critics, as late as the
Maccabaean period.

2 Luke xi. 24-26 (Matt. xii. 43-45). Mark iii. 23-27, however, contains a
constructive criticism of such beliefs.

I

238 Jesus Christ and the Gospels {

\

some relief we concluded that when Jesus spoke of the King-
dom of God He was talking about something we understood
very well progress towards a social ideal. More mature
criticism however showed that no objective analysis of the
Gospels gave any justification for eliminating eschatology
from the teaching of Jesus, though it showed at the same time
that in adopting such conceptions from current thought He
modified them more than the evangelists themselves realized.
To-day we are distrustful of the superficial evolutionism of
the last generation, and prepared to confess that anything
worthy to be called the Kingdom of God must be more than
immanent and natural. Something mysterious, other-worldly,
supernatural is inherent in it. 1 The mythological forms in
which Jesus' proclamation of it is handed down, we now see,
preserve something essential to the idea, which we were in
danger of losing altogether in our haste to modernize what
He is reported to have said.

The changed outlook is not due to any reaction from the
critical position, but to a willingness to be more objective
in our criticism and more patient in our re-interpretation.
Jesus knew that His teaching might easily be misunderstood
by impatient hearers. We do not do justice to it by a light-
hearted criticism which prematurely pronounces this or that
to be unauthentic or part of the temporary dress of the truth.
If Jesus said a thing, or even if He was understood to have
said it, all experience shows that it is worth while to wait with
great humility and patience until the truth in it, or behind
it, declares itself, and separates itself decisively from any tem-
porary and relative element. Patience is a great virtue in
all our study of the Gospels. A wise suspension of judgment
is often called for. But patience is more readily exercised if
we do not feel compelled by piety to accept every word that
Jesus spoke, supposing we could recover it with certainty from

1 See a series of papers on The Kingdom of God in Theology, May, 1927.

The Permanent in the Temporary 239

the records, as true for us independently of the conditions
which made it the truth for His contemporaries.

When all this is said we must go on to say two things more.
First, the peculiar historical situation in which Jesus lived
and taught was such that the questions it raised and He
answered were of decisive significance not for that age alone
but for all history. The very elements in His teaching there-
fore which are most particularly related to His time are rele-
vant to every age. We shall return to this point in a subse-
quent chapter. 1 Secondly, the recorded teaching of Jesus has
in point of fact related itself in a quite extraordinary way to
the universal needs of men. Its radical and elemental sim-
plicity is such that the eternal in it is but thinly disguised,
and meets us still with unescapable challenge. Not only is its
impact on the mind of subsequent ages no less than on that
of His own, but it has revealed under the stress of problems
of a later day meanings which were not and perhaps could
not have been discerned by His contemporaries.

So much for the teaching of Jesus as a body of reported
sayings. But for a final account of its authority we should
have to go behind the sayings to the Personality they reveal,
or partly reveal. Fragmentary as they are, they yield to
diligent and open-minded study the picture of a Mind greater
even than its uttered thoughts, a picture which combines with
the story of the Life to bring us into the presence of Jesus
Christ as a Person speaking with authority. If we ask for
proof of that authority, we are in no better case than those
who asked it of Him at Jerusalem. He answered by asking
another question: "Was John's baptism of human or divine
origin?" As if to say, "If you cannot recognize what is divine
when you see it, I cannot tell you".

It is in view of the total impression made by the Gospel

1 See chap. XIII.

240 Jesus Christ and the Gospels

account of Jesus Christ that we advance to a further point.
While we recognize in His teaching the temporal relativity
which belongs to whatever is in history, we shrink from at-
tributing to it that other and deeper relativity which affects
the words of the prophets because of some defect of moral
integrity in themselves. They were great men, in true com-
munion with God, and responsive to His grace. Yet they did
not meet all their experience in the only right way and react
to it with invariable truth. Thus they did not see perfectly
straight, and we must acknowledge in them not only the rela-
tivity inseparable from time, but also an element of error
which is there because they are not wholly reconciled to God.
Now the total impression made upon us by the Jesus of the
Gospels, is that there was not in Him any such uncertainty or
disharmony. This is, of course, not a statement which can
be demonstrated by enumeration of instances, nor do we
expect to prove the universal negative implied. The state-
ment is indeed not capable of proof at all in the strict sense.
But it is a belief which rests on good grounds. First, so far
as we are able to understand personality at all, we can see
that the attitude of Jesus to God and to life, as portrayed in
the Gospels, differs from our own and from that of other men
precisely in its wholeness, simplicity, and finality. It is undis-
turbed as ours never is. Secondly, the effect He produced
upon men with whom He came in contact the effect indeed
which He still produces upon men is such that we cannot
think He had any unresolved discords in His own soul.

Thus while we do not uncritically accept what Jesus said
because of a prior belief in His "sinlessness", yet there is some-
thing in the record that leads us to believe that in some deep
and not fully explicable way His inner life possessed a unique
moral perfection, which would account for the unique author-
ity His words have actually carried in spite of all local and
temporal limitations. It is ultimately this elusive personal
"something" that drives us back again and again to the admit-

Personal Authority of Jesus Christ 241

tedly imperfect record of His words, to exhaust every resource
of criticism in the attempt to recover the most authentic and
original form of His teaching and to understand it as He
meant it. And the more deeply we study the record the more
sure do we become that behind all, even the most primitive,
interpretation and application of His words, in the words
themselves, lay a unique gift to men from the very Spirit of
truth. There for the present we will leave the matter, to
return to it for a final statement at a later stage.

PABTIV
THE AUTHORITY OF HISTORY

CHAPTER XII
PROGRESS IN RELIGION

THE idea of evolution, originating as an hypothesis in
biology, holds wide sway in contemporary science. How
far is it applicable to history? This question is related to
the other question, much debated recently, whether history is
the field of ordered progress. 1 It is difficult to get such a
standard of value as to determine with final precision whether
the movement discernible in history is or is not progress. In
the history of religion, with which we are at present con-
cerned, the attempts which have been made to construe the
process of change in men's beliefs and practices as a process
of continuous evolution from simple to complex or from lower
to higher have not been wholly successful. It now appears
that in many respects the religion of peoples which seem to
us primitive is more elaborate than that of more advanced
peoples, and that so elevated a belief, for instance, as that
in a single supreme God, a Father in heaven, is found at such
low levels of culture that it is difficult not to call it primitive. 2
We may fairly assume that all life, not excluding the life
of the spirit of man, is evolutionary in the sense that its move-
ments and changes are continuous and organic, resulting from
the reaction -of an unexplained spontaneity in the living being
to the stimuli of its environment. We shall do well not to
make any further dogmatic assumption that history can be
formulated according to" evolutionary laws derived from

1 The Dean of St. Paul's threw down the challenge to the belief in progress
in his Romanes Lecture.

2 See Soderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, pp. 114-185.

245

246 Progress in Religion

biology. We do not know that peoples, or civilizations, or
religions, follow the course of growth, maturity, and decline
which is characteristic, more or less, of biological species. 1
Thus we shall hesitate to assume from the outset that the
phenomena of biblical history can all be brought under the
formula of "the evolution of religion". Rather we shall start
with the facts presented by the biblical documents and ask to
what conclusions they point.

Amid the perplexing multiplicity of data for the study of
religion we have in the Bible a comparatively limited range
of such data. We may place the chronological limits roughly
at 900 B.C. and A.D. 100, recognizing at the same time that the
upper limit must for some purposes be extended indefinitely 2
(though not infinitely) . During this period the biblical writ-
ings enable us to follow the religious history of a single cul-
ture-unit. This unit is the community originally formed by
the cohesion of a number of nomad Hebrew-speaking clans
who called themselves B'ne Yisrael, or Israelites. They settled
in the country then known as Canaan, now Palestine, and,
strengthened by the inclusion of sundry other racial and cul-
tural elements, formed two kingdoms which enjoyed a com-
paratively brief independence and were then absorbed into
the empires which in turn possessed the near East those of
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Macedonians, and Rome. With
the Babylonian conquest the unit ceased to be a nation in
the ordinary sense. It became a diffused religious group,
with its nucleus in the small community resident at Jeru-

1 See B. G. Collingwood, The Theory of Historical Cycles, in Antiquity, vol.
I, nos. 3 and 4.

* The earliest documentary sources which we are in a position to reconstruct,
the prophetic narratives of the Pentateuch (J and E) may probably be dated
to the ninth century and the early 'part of the eighth, and no doubt still earlier
written material was incorporated in them and in the narratives of Samuel and
Kings. Earlier still is traditional poetry like the Song of Deborah. Broadly
speaking we have contemporary documentary records from about the beginning
of the ninth century.

Continuity of Biblical History 247

salem. Ultimately this central nucleus lost all local con-
nection with the ancient capital, and Jewry became what it
is to-day. But in the meantime the religious life of the dif-
fused culture-group had found a new centre, and expanded in
new directions. Out of Judaism arose Christianity, overleap-
ing almost from the outset the racial frontiers set up by Juda-
ism. The Bible closes at the point at which the religious
tradition hitherto preserved within the Israelite community
in its various forms breaks away and becomes cosmopolitan.

There is true continuity here. The medley of Bedawin
clans that invaded Canaan, the monarchy of Solomon, the
two kingdoms, the little centralized state ruled by Josiah
and his successors, the Jewish world of the Dispersion looking
to Jerusalem under the High Priests, and finally the Christian
Church as we meet it in the New Testament, are widely dif-
ferent. The religious ideas informing the life of the com-
munity at these various stages are also widely different. Yet
there is no violent break in the process of change by which one
stage gives place to another. We can say more; if we com-
pare this religious tradition with other religious traditions,
as for instance that of Buddhism in the far East, we can
indeed discern similarities and parallels, but the biblical tradi-
tion as a whole displays certain characteristic marks which
distinguish it from others and give it a unity of its own. We
may if we choose compare it with the evolution of species
in the natural world. Homo Sapiens is a distinct species, not
identical with any of the anthropoids that preceded him; yet
. certain unmistakable identities in physical structure indicate
the continuity of development along this particular line in
distinction from all others.

Now the biblical literature, properly treated, gives us fairly
full information of the development of this particular tradi-
tion. It has been studied by scholars on principles well estab-
lished in other departments of historical investigation; for the

248 Progress in Religion

"Higher Criticism" is applied to all literature by those who
study it scientifically. This critical process has been guided
and confirmed by all auxiliary studies which the comparative
method puts at the disposal of the student. Its results are
not arbitrary guesses, but conclusions scientifically reached,
lacking indeed the final certainty of mathematics, and even
the relative precision possible to the natural sciences, but
possessing that high degree of probability which satisfies the
investigator in all fields where human life and action provide
the subject-matter.

These conclusions put the biblical writings before us in a
chronological order which, though not always certain in detail,
yet suffices to give us the general succession of events and the
broad lines of thought-development. The evidence does not
suggest anything like a smooth and uniform evolution. There
are diverse tendencies, sometimes one leading, sometimes an-
other. There are conflicts and cross currents. To interpret
the data we need to have the whole process before us, and to
"see the end from the beginning". The biologist does some-
thing of this kind in his study of the "origin of species". That
phrase itself betrays the fact. We are studying the origin
of that religious species known as Christianity, and in the
light of the end we interpret and value stages of the process.
It must be further admitted that Jewish scholars, who also
inherit the tradition, naturally estimate details somewhat dif-
ferently, since for them the culmination of the process is not
Christianity, but Rabbinic Judaism. For Moslems, who are
also in the succession of biblical religion, the process would
reach it's climax in the coming of Muhammad. There is no
final court of appeal beyond the religious instinct of mankind
and the course of future history.

We may not attempt to summarize the facts as the biblical
evidence sets them before us. At the outset the Hebrews must

Pagan Israel 249

have had a religious life very like that which the comparative
study of religion shows in most peoples at a relatively primi-
tive level. As we have seen, the ancient narratives reflect all
the characteristic ideas of such undeveloped peoples. Already,
however, before our written records begin, some strong and
original impulse had entered in which differentiated Hebrew
religion from the common type. Yet its influence was for cen-
turies precarious. The actual practice of religion down to
the eighth century, though it cannot be described as primi-
tive, differed hardly at all from that current among surround-
ing peoples. The ordinary reader of the Bible scarcely realizes
all that is implied in the prophetic denunciations of the con-
temporary cult. It is evident that the grossest heathenism
prevailed. At the holy cities of Bethel and Dan Jehovah was
worshipped in the form of a bull. 1 The Temple at Jerusalem
was adorned with fetish-poles, 2 one of them in the form
of a serpent. 3 Human sacrifice was practised at least in
times of stress, 4 and sacred prostitution flourished as it does
to-day in the temples of India. 5 Nor did this state of things
i cease at the protest of the prophets. Jeremiah and Ezekiel
still describe all manner of heathen rites practised as openly,
if not quite as shamelessly, as a century earlier. 6 Even in

1 1 Kings xii. 25-31. The condemnation of this form of worship in the
Books of Kings is the result of prophetic teaching; there is no evidence that
it was regarded at the time as reprehensible. According to E (the northern
history) it had been instituted by Aaron in the wilderness, Exod. xxxii. 2-6.

2 1 Kings vii. 21.

3 2 Kings xviii. 4. It was called Nehushtan (probably from nahash=ser-
pent), and was believed to have been made by Moses in the wilderness by com-
mand of Jehovah (Num. xxi. 9E) ; i.e. it was of great sanctity and immemorial
antiquity. It was not an ordinary serpent, but of the kind called saraph ("fiery
serpent" A.V.), probably a mythological creature (a sort of gryphon perhaps);
and it is at least curious that in Isaiah's vision the winged attendants of Jehovah
are called by the same name. In Isaiah's time Nehushtan was still worshipped,
but before his death it was destroyed in Hezekiah's reformation.

4 See p. 88.

5 1 Kings xiv. 24. It was forbidden by Deuteronomy (xxiii. 17) and accord-
ingly abolished (officially) in Josiah's reformation, 2 Kings xxiii. 7.

6 Jer. vii. 9, xi. 13, xvii. 2, xliv. 15-19; Ezek. viii., etc. Cf. also Zeph. i.
4-5 (late seventh century).

250 Progress in Religion

the fifth century, B.C., there was a Jewish temple at Ele-
phantine in Egypt which Jehovah shared with four other
deities, two of them goddesses. 1 Its worshippers appealed for
support to the High Priest at Jerusalem with no apparent
sense that they were doing anything outrageous.

It was out of this morass of paganism that the great
prophets arose. A hasty evolutionism was formerly inclined
to assume that nothing but this paganism had hitherto existed,
and that the earlier prophets represented the first advance
from this primitive paganism. But the prophets themselves
appealed to an older tradition of a purer faith, and stories
certainly older than the eighth century, and probably very
much older, consistently assert that this state of affairs was a
degradation of something better. How far the religion of the
patriarchs as presented in Genesis is really ancient, and how
far it represents a phase of prophetic teaching, is not certain.
But the oldest literature we possess, such as the Song of
Deborah, 2 wild ..and primitive enough in all conscience, has
nothing of this gross and sophisticated paganism. The fact
seems to be that the traditions of a great religious movement
led by Moses and centred at Sinai reflect a real event. There
was a revelation of God "by His name Jehovah", a name
which stood already for conceptions of the deity capable of
leading to the ideas of the prophets. 3

The next stage was the adaptation of the Jehovah-worship
of the desert to relatively civilized conditions in Canaan. If
the evolution of religion were continuous, this should have
meant an advance, and doubtless to the majority of those who
thought about such things it appeared an advance. When
Solomon built his great temple at Jerusalem for Jehovah, as

1 This surprising information is contained in papyri discovered at Elephantine
in the years 1906-1908. See Ungnad, Aramaische Papyrus aus Elephantine.
An excellent short account in the Clarendon Bible, O.T., Vol. IV (W. F. Lofir
house), pp. 212 sqq.

3 Judges v. 3 See chap. II.

False Progress under the Monarchies 251

well as chapels for a number of satellite gods, 1 and introduced
elaborate rites borrowed from the Canaanites or from his
Phoenician allies, his enlightened courtiers no doubt con-
gratulated themselves that now the old barbarous ways were
gone, and Israel was a civilized nation. Indeed there was
much to justify their view. The most conspicuous representa-
tives of the old ways were crazy dervishes, 2 or at best fanatics
like Elijah the Tishbite, who came from their deserts and
caves in hairy mantles and interfered in politics about which
they knew nothing. Their associates were gipsies like Jona-
dab ben-Rechab living in tents, forsooth, in this enlightened
age! 8

The great prophets of the eighth and following centuries
saw through the sham of progress. Of course, they were not
simply reviving a pure Mosaic religion. Yet the half-sub-
merged tradition of the earlier time, which had never wholly
died, gave them a starting-point. Gathering up the best in
the tradition, they transformed it in their own living experi-
fence, and gave forth to the world a new word, which once
spoken could not be recalled or ignored. History justified
them by showing that there was no future for a pagan Israel.

The prophets stood for the belief that one God, and He
first and foremost a righteous God, claimed the undivided
allegiance of Israel. He desired mercy and not sacrifice. He
cared for Israel, but He cared for justice and mercy more.
He cared for Israel, but He also cared for all nations. Indeed,
so they came to say at last, there was no other God. He alone,
Whose will was eternal right, governed the destinies of all
peoples. If Israel was to be His people that meant that they
must be servants of His righteous rule, which would one
day cover all the earth.

i 1 Kings xi. 5-8.

1 See chap. II, pp. 47-49. This was the attitude of the typical army officer
in the time of Elisha, 2 Kings iz. 11.

2 Kings x. 15-16. Cf . Jer. xxxr. 1-10.

252 Progress in Religion

An attempt was made to embody this ethical monotheism
(or monolatry) of the prophets in a legal code. Josiah's
reformation had this in view, and his law-book is probably
represented in some sense by Deuteronomy. But the attempt
never succeeded, and Judah went into exile. The recon-
structed community, however, started from Deuteronomy. It
aimed at including only those who accepted the prophetic
religion in its codified form. Thus while the "people of the
land" remained at a semi-pagan level, the main stream of
religious tradition now flowed through an artificial community
based upon a constitution intended to represent the prophetic
religion.

After the Exile we feel ourselves in what by comparison is
a modern world. It makes our own fundamental religious
assumptions that there is one God and that He is good and
requires and helps men to be good also. It shows also the
familiar traits of theological speculation and ecclesiastical
controversy. The chief ecclesiastical question is that of sep-
aratism and comprehension still a living question. The chief
subjects of theological speculation are the transcendence of
God and how to reconcile it with His interest in man, and
the perennial problem of providence and suffering. Later the
question of immortality and the future life begins to agitate
the mind. It is all very modern. It is also for the most
part rather mediocre. During the whole period there is little
that reaches the religious level of the great prophets. Indeed
in many respects we must recognize a decline from their
heights of faith. After the tremendous proclamation of a
religion rising above all manner of ritual and ceremonial it is
a poor business to read in the Priestly Code a revival of primi-
tive ritual sometimes not far removed from magic. 1 Again,

1 We must here distinguish. The ritual of sacrifice may, in the primitive
stage to which it rightly belongs, be a real advantage to the religious life.
To revive it in a sophisticated age, when its primitive symbolism is forgotten
and it is performed simply because one supposes it pleases God, ia superstition.

From the Prophets to Judaism 253

from the moral idealism of Isaiah or Jeremiah it is rather a
descent to the utilitarianism of Proverbs.

Nevertheless if we compare the achievement of this period
not with the elevation of isolated genius, but with the general
level of religion, we must conclude that it represents a very
great advance. It is an advance accompanied by some loss.
Still if religion is to be a decisive factor in the common life
of men and not a prerogative of exceptional genius, then a
period of popular assimilation is required. The prayer of
Browning's Felix, "Make no more giants, God, but elevate
the race at once!" is nearer to an answer in such periods.
That the common man is struggling into his heritage of
religion in the post-exilic period is clear. His grandfather
before the Exile had been in all essentials a pagan, though
with higher aspirations striving for expression in his worship
of Jehovah. The grandson in Jerusalem and his successors
under the High Priests knew that Jehovah required of him
to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his
God. He tried to walk by the precepts which his spiritual
guides called the Law of the Lord, and he found peace and
joy in so doing. He believed in his people, the people of the
Law, and was generally content with brilliant hopes for its
future in which he individually could not hope to share. The
one God, he knew, was sovereign in the kingdom of men, and
one day His Kingdom would be revealed. He prayed in the
language of the Psalms, and let the priests do his sacrificing
for him, assuming that they knew best, and following the
ritual they prescribed, full of sound and colour as it was.

Thus there came into existence a society whose lay mem-
bers had a real religious life and experience of a relatively
high order, however limited in outlook. It was being made
ready for the next great outburst of religious genius.

"In the fulness of time" Jesus Christ came. Believing Him-
self called to be the "Messiah" of His people, He gathered

254 Progress in Religion

up their highest traditions, going back directly and consciously
behind the period of legalism to the great prophets, and setting
Himself to interpret them to His own contemporaries, men
brought up in post-exilic Judaism. But while doing so He
cut a path clean through all the uncertainties and limitations
of the tradition, and showed God to men in a new and com-
manding way "He spoke with authority and not as the
scribes".

At first sight early Christianity as represented by the New
Testament seems almost entirely hostile to the Jewish tradi-
tion. Only a close familiarity with both Testaments, and
some acquaintance with the non-canonical literature of post-
exilic Judaism, reveal how the piety of Judaism underlies
every part of the New Testament. The new departure is
firmly based in the religious life worked out by the post-exilic
community under the impulse of the classical prophets.

Yet Christianity dealt very drastically with the tradition
it inherited. It set out "not to destroy the Law but to fulfil". 1
Yet some parts of it were held fit only for destruction. The
sacrificial system of the Priestly Code, already out of vital
relation to the best piety of the time, went by the board.
If the law of conduct, as represented by the Deuteronomic
legislation and its developments, was to be "fulfilled", it was
not by the Pharisaic way of casuistry, but by going behind
Deuteronomy itself to the prophetic inspiration which its
authors had intended to express. In the conflict between sep-
aratism and comprehension, the close national separatism
which had been, growing in influence at the expense of the
broader tendency represented by "Second Isaiah" and the
Book of Jonah, was decisively repudiated. The full implica-
tions of ethical monotheism were for the first time drawn out
with uncompromising clarity.

Through the whole history of the Jewish community as

i Matt. v. 17.

From Judaism to Christianity 255

reconstituted after the Exile we can discern ideas and prin-
ciples which are the germ of Christianity, in conflict with
other tendencies. But it would be a misreading of the evi-
dence to regard the process of criticism and selection carried
out by Christianity as merely a continuation of the old contro-
versies. It was the inevitable result of the intrusion of a new
factor, the personality and the teaching of Jesus Christ. He
brought to men a definitely new conception of God, a defi-
nitely new experience of God, taking up into itself the highest
elements of past experience, but synthetizing them by the
impact of something different.

Taking now a retrospect of the biblical history we may
place on record certain observations which have a bearing on
the "evolution of religion". First, that within this history
there is a development is beyond doubt. We trace a process
of change, continuously linked together, and the final product
is definitely higher, richer, truer than the beginning, if such
terms of value have any meaning at all. Yet at the most
primitive level elements are already in existence which enter
into the final product.

On the other hand there is no uniformity in the forward
movement. Indeed some developments which at a point short
of the end seem to be progress are ultimately repudiated.
Thus the intense nationalism associated with Jehovah-worship,
in its earliest forms known to us, appears to be an essential
part of the advance Moses made upon more primitive religion.
The patriotic idealism of the Song of Deborah, for instance,
is linked to a conception of Jehovah the God of Israel, which
lifts Him above the level of local Elohim worshipped at every
spring and sacred tree. This nationalism is criticized by sev-
eral of the prophets, with small effect. After the Exile it
develops more vigorously than ever. If a good Jew of the
fourth century B.C. had been asked for tokens that his people

256 Progress in Religion

were "better than their fathers", he would surely have pointed
to the fact that the racial purity and the distinctive customs
of the Chosen People were more faithfully safeguarded than in
the half-heathen days before the Exile. Yet in the end
religious nationalism had to be disavowed root and branch in
the interests of a truer conception of God and His relation
to man.

Again, the earliest Jehovah-worship apparently possessed
only the simplest kind of ritual, so much so that Amos and
Jeremiah could declare that Moses never ordained any sac-
rifices at all. 1 The cult grew to great dimensions under the
monarchy, and in spite of the denunciations of the classical
prophets it continued to develop, until the post-exilic Priestly
Code provided a liturgy of sacrifice which for elaboration,
splendour, and expense has rarely been surpassed. Neverthe-
less the most vital religion of the time was largely independent
of it, and Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism alike dispense
with it. After seeming for centuries one of the main outward
marks of religious progress, it was finally discovered to be
replaceable without injury to religion.

We may take a third example, which lies nearer to the
heart of the whole matter. The development of the concep-
tion of God's character is by no means uniform. Jehovah of
Sinai was a God of terror, hurling the tempests of His wrath
upon the enemies of His chosen people, not for any moral guilt
in them, but because they belonged to other gods whom He
disliked. To His own people, however, He was kindly and
indulgent, taking delight in their sacrifices and giving them
victory and prosperity. It was the epoch-making discovery
of the prophets that the wrath of God is governed by the
strictest justice. Fierce and terrible He is in His wrath,
against sinners, native and foreign alike, and not to be molli-
fied by sacrifices or prayers. Mingled witii this, it is true, is
a conception of the grace of God, and His forgiveness of

1 Amos v. 25.; Jer. vii. 22.

Progress by Ebb and Flow 257

sin; but this conception is not organically harmonized with
the sterner doctrine. In the main the prophetic doctrine of
the justice of God was a definite advance upon earlier ideas
of His un-ethical "mercy" maintained by those whom Jere-
miah called "false prophets". 1 It remained for Christianity
to declare that God is a Father "kind to the unthankful and
the evil", a Shepherd who goes after His lost sheep until He
find it, one Whose "kindness leads men to repentance", and
Who "justifies the ungodly". "The righteousness which is of
the Law" in other words, legal or retributive justice, is
transcended in the loving righteousness of God as revealed in
Christ, "the Friend of publicans and sinners."

With these qualifications, then, we recognize in the Bible a
progressive development of religion. The various writers take
their place in a series leading up to a climax in the Chris-
tianity of the New Testament. Elements that we have noted
as limited or mistaken are to be viewed in relation to the
process of which they form part, not as isolated factors to be
judged in and for themselves.

We have thus deduced from the facts themselves a concep-
tion of development or evolution applicable to the history
of religion as presented in the Bible. We have now to observe
that we have here not merely a development of religious ideas,
but a development of religious life in a changing social en-
vironment. It is not like the development of ideas in a
"school" of philosophers such as the Peripatetic in ancient
times or the Hegelian in modern. Its goal is not the formula-
tion of a more valid system of beliefs, but the emergence of a
world-wide society possessing a religious life and religious
institutions of its own, the Christian Church.

1 It is implied in many of the great prophetic passages that false comforters
were proclaiming the mercy of Jehovah when the truth demanded a procla-
mation of His severity, e.g. Jer. xxiii. 16-17. It is thought by some interpreters
that the "penitential psalm" in Jer. xiv. 7-9 is a quotation from the contempo-
rary liturgy of prayer, repudiated by the prophet as too easily assuming the
indulgence of Jehovah.

258 Progress in Religion

The religious life in so far as it is inward and purely
spiritual, is necessarily individual; and the religious indi-
vidual is only partly to be explained by evolution. The sphere
in which religious development, properly speaking, takes
place is the community. It possesses a continuous history in
which individuals play their part before passing on to that
higher plane of being which is beyond history as we know it.
Now some religions lay such exclusive stress on the inward
and spiritual, and therefore individual, aspect of religion that
the social and historical aspect falls away. Christianity has
never been content with this. It would, of course, be absurd
to suggest that Christianity lags behind any other religion
in exalting the inward converse of the soul with God in that
"secret place of the Most High" which lies beyond time and
space. But it never allows its votaries to abide there undis-
turbed. It is concerned to make history. Much might be
said about the blunders it has made in the attempt; but what-
ever measure of failure it meets there is something in its genius
that keeps it to the task. Thus it is necessarily an historical
religion, and that is to say a social religion. There is some-
thing of this character about the other two great religions
standing in the biblical succession. The Jews to-day form a
society which, if it is not exactly a Church, is something other
than a nation like other nations. Islam is in some sense an
international society in a sense strange, for example, to
Buddhism, which has only its coteries of monks. Confucian-
ism, having some striking similarities to Christianity, suc-
ceeded in permeating a national civilization, but it has not
created a society like the Christian Church, which amid the
rise and fall of civilizations keeps a self-identity not incon-
sistent with endless adaptability. The Church is a distinct
and indeed a unique type of society, 1 and though by reason

1 See S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 41-51,
110-111. Freud takes the Army and the Church as the best examples of "highly
organized, lasting and artificial groups," and compares their psychological basis.

Christianity and Historical Religion 259

of its imperfections there are Christians outside the visible
Church in any of its communions, yet Christianity without the
Church is unthinkable. Divided as it is it remains conscious
of its unity, and keeps the sacraments as the principal signs
and organs of its continuous life. But behind the sacraments
lie historical events, by which indeed the unity they attest was
brought about. The history is preserved in the biblical
record. And as things are it is probable that the common
possession of the Bible by all branches of the Church is a more
effectual bond of union than the sacraments themselves. All
Christian communions must go back perpetually to the crea-
tive events to which the New Testament bears witness, and
these are themselves of one piece with the whole history re-
flected in the older Canon. The Bible is indeed not only a
history of the revelation of truth, but it is the record of a
history which itself, in Christian belief, was a divine revela-
tion. For the Hindu, things and events are a veil of illusion
which effectually conceals God from men. The individual
can penetrate to God only by cutting himself loose from his
social environment, forgetting time and space, and entering
eternity through the negation of everything which (as it seems
to us) makes human life distinctively human. For the Chris-

He finds that the former is based upon "replacement of the ego ideal by an object"
(viz. the Commander-in-Chief) ; but "it is otherwise in the Catholic Church.
Every Christian loves Christ as his ideal and feels himself united with all other
Christians by the tie of identification. But the Church requires more of him.
He has also to identify himself with Christ and love all other Christians as
Christ loved them. At both points, therefore, the Church requires that the
position of the libido which is given by a group formation should be supple-
mented. Identification has to be added where object-choice has taken place,
and object love where there is identification." In view of the importance
attached by Freud to these principles of "identification of the ego with an
object," and "replacement of the ego-ideal by an object," it would appear to
follow that where both are found in such peculiar relations as in the Christian
Church, the group is unique in its formation. He adds, "This further develop-
ment in the distribution of the libido in the group is probably the factor upon
which Christianity bases its claim to have reached a higher ethical level"
(Authorized Translation by James Strachey).

260 Progress in Religion

tian, things and events are a sacramental manifestation
of God. He finds God in historical events and in the things
about him, and sets out to deal with events and things that
fall within his range of activity in such wise as to make them
a clearer manifestation of the divine.

Thus the Bible as an historical record of events possesses
a truly religious value. For this purpose it must, of course,
be read as any other historical record is read, critically in
the fullest sense. Until criticism had restored to us the docu-
ments in something like their true chronological order, dis-
tinguishing where necessary the varying strata of composite
writings, the Bible was, historically speaking, a chaos. While,
for instance, it was supposed that the Pentateuch in its en-
tirety belonged to the period of Moses, it was quite impossible
to appreciate the true significance of the Books of Samuel
and Kings, or of the prophetic writings. Again, this source-
criticism must be accompanied by the comparative study of
the contents, with the aid of all we now know of the period
from non-biblical sources such as Assyrian, Babylonian, and
Egyptian inscriptions. These will often enable us to correct
mistakes or misunderstanding in the Hebrew records. It
must, however, be said that these records emerge from the
process with credit. In very many details they can be con-
victed of error, but they are none the less historical sources'
of a high order, quite indispensable as such to the secular his-
torian. In any case the details in which mistakes are demon-
strable are not, from our present point of view, of very great
moment. When once we have got the documents in their
true chronological order the broad rhythms of the history
stand out firm and clear, and we may without misgiving follow
the sweep of events, and -the development of the ideas that
interact with them, from age to age, recognizing our .records
as a true representation, in broad terms, of what actually took
place.

The Scriptures as Historical Documents 261

Thus we turn to the beginnings of Bible story, and trace the
Hand of God in the impulses that drove the clans to wander
natural conditions and economic pressure on the one side, and
on the other the spirit of adventure and of quest; the outward
and the inward interacting, and both related to the divine
purpose for humanity. Their wanderings bring the clans into
the orbits of two great civilizations, not without results for
their training, which we must regard as providential. Then
the strong sense of a divine calling to freedom and a dis-
tinctive life, mediated through the genius of Moses, implants
the consciousness of national unity rooted in religion. Through
generations of "Sturm und Drang" the impulse to unity con-
tends with the clannishness of these vigorous stocks, till des-
perate peril and the rise of strong leaders who worthily em-
body the religious ideals of the people bring them together.
There is a divine meaning here. The future did not lie with
the "short cut to unity" represented by the despotisms of
Assyria and Egypt. It was a harder and longer way that
must lead to a unity of positive value to mankind. The group
of men represented by the names of Samuel, David, Nathan,
and Gad created the distinctive type of Israelitish monarchy,
and it remained a regulative ideal, however its traits may have
become assimilated to foreign models. The Bible is clearly
right in saying that, in relation to his fundamental task at
the moment, David was "a man after God's own heart" (i.e.
purpose). 1 The part played by the prophets at this point,
representing the folk-aspirations on their higher side, was
determinative.

The national unity and distinctiveness so asserted had now
a hard, and in some measure a losing battle to fight. Israel
must learn to be civilized, and to do that without sacrificing
its essential characteristics was difficult. The kingdoms went
under. They had failed to solve their problem. Yet the ideal

1 1 Sam. xiii. 14.

262 Progress in Religion

of the kingdom of the House of David continued to provide
a mould for the aspirations of the people. Meantime the
great prophets arose, to snatch a "remnant" out of the wreck
of the secular Israelitish monarchies. Here, as we have seen,
creative religious genius comes on the scene. The sublime
utterances of the prophets are for all time, but in their time
they led directly to the remoulding of the people of destiny.
It was in strict fact the result of prophetic teaching that when
the monarchies fell a new community was organized on the
basis of Deuteronomy. It was a new thing in the world. The
national religion might have been expected to fall with the
political existence of the state. Instead, it created for itself
a new embodiment. The post-exilic Jewish community is a
fact of history simply because the prophets had their vision
of God. Whatever religious advance we have to record is
clearly enough not simply in the realm of unsubstantial ideas,
but in the realm of historic fact.

- History has thus created a "people of God", and hencefor-
ward we trace its vicissitudes. There is to be discerned a
certain alternation of driving forces. The spirit of adventure
and quest once more sends the people out into the wider world ;
its strong clannishness, now finding new forms through the
consciousness of religious isolation, drives it back upon itself.
Growing civilization tempts it into a larger use of the outward
things of life; oppression and persecution force its thought
inward, to deeper discoveries. The hard facts of a precarious
national existence break down hasty systems of belief and
compel the mind in travail to bring forth more worthy con-
ceptions of the largeness and mystery of divine Reality. If
when Rome came on the scene she found the Jewish com-
munity harder of subjugation and assimilation than any other
people she had met, it was not because the Jews were richer,
braver, more numerous, or more warlike, but because their
national life was moulded into firmness by ideas and spiritual

The People of God 263

beliefs. Unsubstantial indeed they might seem to the con-
quering Roman, yet by virtue of them Jewry continued to
exist, and its offshoot the Christian Church conquered Rome
and turned Rome's animating idea to its own uses.

The emergence of the Christian Church itself as a fact
to be reckoned with was one more example of the interaction
of outward conditions with spiritual forces. The time had
come when in the general situation of the world some such
new departure was due. The conquests of Alexander and the
triumph of a cosmopolitan civilization had antiquated all nar-
rowly national forms of idealism. The dispersal of the Jewish
race, and its immersion in the commercial and financial activi-
ties of this cosmopolitan civilization, had gradually drained
the local institutions of Jerusalem of their primary signifi-
cance. The Roman Peace, with its new security and its
removal of old economic and political barriers, both facilitated
and demanded some fresh expansion of spiritual life. The
bankruptcy of the older ethical systems called for fresh in-
spiration, which for the time Stoicism was seeking to supply,
but Stoicism lacked the elemental driving-force which only
religious emotion can give. The time was indeed ripe, when
Jesus spoke the new Word which emancipated the People of
God from the limitations of the past and created its new social
embodiment. The Church at once served itself heir to the
most vital spiriftial ideas of the time, and using to the full
the social, political and economic factors which favoured its
development, commenced to lead the spirit of man into the
new world to which it was aspiring. The writers of the New
Testament and of early Christianity in general are clearly
aware both of continuity and of newness; of their glorious
independence of outworn tradition and of their subjection
to a perpetual providential order now manifest anew in the
Church; of the transcendent destiny of the immortal soul and
of its calling in this world of time and space. They are aware,

264 Progress in Religion

in particular, of standing at an historical turning-point, when
the past is gathered up and transformed in a mighty present
fact which is to determine the future. The Kingdom of God
has been revealed, and the Church must live until all the king-
doms of the world have become the Kingdom of its God and
of His Christ.

If we ask, Is there progress here? the answer must be in
the affirmative for anyone who takes the Christian standpoint,
in view of the ultimate outcome of the process. But in a
more general way of looking at the matter there is one point
which seems worth making. The biblical history is the record
of a community which is facing successfully an ever larger
area of the total reality with which man is confronted. By
this total reality I mean both the inner world of the spirit and
the outer world in which we live. Both worlds are presented
in experience for the "essential ego" to make into the stuff of
personality. As one tract of reality is explored and occupied,
another opens to the view. There are periods in history, like
the golden age of Athens in the fifth century B.C., when the
spirit of man seems thoroughly to have mastered the world of
its experience. But by it's very success it comes face to face
with a larger world, as the success of the Greek city states
led them out into the world of "barbarians" and into strange
ways of the spirit which this new adventure opened. In some
respects such a new enterprise in its first stages often seems
to be accompanied by decline, but for the future of humanity
the struggle to appropriate a new tract of reality may be of
greater moment than the serene equilibrium of a limited
achievement.

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."

The biblical history reflects a process of this kind through
several crises. For example, we may look again at the

A Criterion of Progress 265

emergence of Israel from nomadic and pastoral conditions
into the settled life of a civilized state. The nomad lives in
a very simple world. He has few ties, only those.which bind
him to a handful of fellow-clansmen. His occupations make
small demands upon intelligence, while he follows his flock to
their feeding-ground and trusts to luck. His economic system
follows

"The good old rule, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can".

When he settles down to tillage, he is dependent on new factors
in his environment, on the uncertain behaviour of the weather,
on qualities of soil, on the goodwill of neighbours. These call
for new spiritual resources in himself technical skill, indus-
try, foresight, faith, tenacity all those traits of mind and
character which make the farmer in all ages a distinctive type.
As agriculture leads to other industries, to trade and com-
merce, the world becomes jstill more complicated. The atti-
tude to other peoples can no longer be confined to simple
defence and offence. Some way of co-operation must be found.
The religious conflict between Jehovah and the baals of the
land or the great Baal of mercantile Tyre is an aspect of the
problem of reconstructing the ideas and institutions of society
in relation to a wider environment. When the earlier prophets
succeeded in convincing the people that not the baals of the
land but Jehovah with His known character and relation to
Israel, was the Lord of rain and of crops, and that it was He
who "giveth the power to get wealth", 1 it was, however com-
monplace it seems to us, an important step in the development
of ethical monotheism; but also, by making it appear natural
to centralize worship at a single national sanctuary, it led
to a new kind of social and political organization, which was

1 Deut. viii. 18. Cf. si. 10-12.

266 Progress in Religion

a reply to the challenge of the whole situation. 1 This reor-
ganization was, however, not completed before the horizon
widened once again.

When in the last days of the monarchies Israel became
involved to its cost in the large "Realpolitik" of the time, it
meant once again an expansion of the world, a wider range of
facts to deal with, and an answering development of institu-
tions through the reaction of religious impulses upon the actual
situation. The organization of post-exilic Judaism was a
very remarkable social phenomenon. It was not deliberately
planned; it emerged as the response to the facts of the situa-
tion. At the centre was the little community at Jerusalem,
inheriting the traditions of the reformed monarchy, but with
no visible political head to compete with the world-powers
with which the Jews had now to make an accommodation. It
even came to be held that monarchy itself had been apostasy
from Jehovah. The post-exilic redactor of the early tradi-
tions makes Jehovah say of the people who asked for a king,
"They have rejected me, that I should not be king over them". 2
Thus in the post-exilic community Jehovah was regarded as
the "invisible King", whose deputy was the High Priest. A
community which is neither a republic nor the realm of a
visible king clearly possesses peculiar elasticity and power of
adaptation. The majority of the Jewish people at this time
lived outside the limits of the little Judsean state. In the
provinces of the Persian Empire, particularly in Babylonia,
lived thousands of Jews, including the wealthiest, the most
civilized, and many of the most learned members of the race.
In Egypt, in the Seleucid colonies of Asia Minor, and later
throughout the Roman Empire, Jews played a prominent part
in the economic life of the world; so much so that Roman
legislation accorded them preferential treatment in many re-

1 2 TTingR xxii xxiii.

2 1 Sam. viii. 7. The earlier view is that expressed in 1 Sam. is. 15-16.

The Shaping of History from Within 267

spects. All these were bound to the central body at Jerusalem
by the closest ties, religious, legal, financial. The Jewish Dis-
persion, in fact, with its centre at Jerusalem, was a "far-flung"
society of an entirely new type. It was neither an empire nor
a federation. In it a strong social solidarity existed apart from
political unity or independence. It provided a model for a
truly international society. And through and through it was
the creation of a religious impulse. The Temple and the High
Priest were its visible symbols of unity; the pious pilgrimages
were its chief means of communication; the "law of Jehovah"
codified in the Pentateuch was the universal norm of its ethi-
cal life.

On the other side, the inner life of Judaism was enlarged
and enriched by contact with the wider world. The faith
of Zarathustra, the philosophies of Plato and Zeno, the
mysticism of Egypt, have helped to shape the thought of
later Judaism, yet in such a way that these outside influences
are completely assimilated and transmuted by the inherent
power of the religion of Jehovah. It is doubtless partly as a
result of these wider contacts that in this period the concep-
tion of a spiritual world and a future life begins to play a
part in Jewish thought partly so, but perhaps more as a
result of the shattering blows that the nation suffered. Hard
experience revealed the insufficiency of the robust "this-world-
liness" of the classical Hebrew religion. Judaism begins to
recognize that man must find himself at home in another world
besides this world of time and space if his communion with
God is to be secure and real.

Thus the post-exilic stage of development, while in some
respects it shows a falling-off from the level of the great
prophets, comparable to the decline from classical Athens
to the Hellenistic culture of the third and following centuries
before Christ, yet represents a wider exploration of the inner
and outer worlds of experience, and so prepares the way for

268 Progress in Religion

Christianity, which for the first time exhibits a religious life
and religious institutions inherently universal in their scope.
We seem to have here a real criterion of progress, so far as
it goes. Whether we .will or no we have to adapt ourselves
to our environment as 'a whole, and clearly the more of it
we can effectively deal with the better. In the Bible we find
a development in religious life and ideas which accompanies
a progressive widening of the inner and outer horizons of the
spirit of man, and expresses itself in an ever more effective
dealing with the expanding world.

CHAPTER XIII

"PROGRESSIVE REVELATION"

THE Bible, we have seen, records a development in men's
notions of God, and in the forms of religious life asso-
ciated with such notions; and it is a development in which
progress can be recognized. How are we to think of this
development? Is it purely a change in men's speculations
about God? or is it (to use a current phrase) a "progressive
revelation", in which God makes Himself gradually known to
men?

The idea of a "progressive revelation" is not altogether
without difficulty. Progress means an advance from some-
thing worse to something better. In any science it means an
advance from beliefs partly erroneous to beliefs corresponding
more fully to truth. Now God, if He wills to reveal Himself,
may well reveal one aspect of Himself to one person, and
another to another person; but, it may be said, the one can-
not be superior to the other, for nothing which is revealed
by God can be in any degree erroneous. Thus there may be
successive revelation, but can there be in the strict sense
progressive revelation? If, on the other hand, the term "pro-
gressive" is allowed its full ordinary meaning, is it not
progressive discovery of which we are speaking, rather than
revelation? In discovery men do advance from the erroneous
to the true.

Now the view taken here is that there is progress, in the
full sense; that is, that the Bible contains, not merely a
succession of statements about God, all equally true, and
forming a harmonious whole, but a progressive series, includ-

269

270 "Progressive Revelation"

ing partly erroneous ideas of God, which are in time changed
for ideas approximating more and more closely to the truth.
We have, therefore, to meet the charge that we are abandon-
ing belief in a real revelation by God of Himself to men, and
substituting a gradual process of discovery.

What is discovery, in any field of research? In Mathe-
matics perhaps (though some mathematicians would not
agree) it is simply the progressive unfolding of abstract con-
ceptions within the human mind. However that may be, in
any science which has regard to a world of phenomena it is
in some measure a response to a stimulus from beyond our-
selves. Nature provokes us to know her. Whatever "nature"
may be, whether the term stands for a world of things ulti-
mately independent of mind, or for a spiritual system, this
is certain, that the "given" from which we start is not of our
own making. Before we can discover, something has revealed
itself. Where the object of our investigation is living, this fact
becomes of practical importance. The matter studied by the
chemist or the mineralogist is (relatively, at least) inert; it
"abides his question". He may force it into such postures for
experiment as best suit his purpose. But if the thing we
study is alive, all is different. Experiment in these fields is a
more delicate and difficult operation. Any high-handed
method of force destroys the thing we want to observe. The
study of stuffed birds in museums, the dissection of dead birds
in the laboratory, must yield to the patient observation of
birds living their own life, if ornithology is to make real ad-
vance.

There is a story of three men who set out to write a book
on the camel. The German went to his study, closed door
and window, lit his pipe and meditated until he had evolved
from his inner consciousness the "Sein und Wesen" of the
camel. The Frenchman went to the Bibliotheque Nationale
and read up the subject thoroughly. The Englishman packed

Revelation and Discovery 271

his portmanteau and looked up sailings to where the camel
lives. National prejudice apart, it is clear that the last way
is the true way of discovery. If we would discover life, we
must allow life to reveal itself.

Where life is personal, this is still more obviously true.
Every psychologist knows that if he is to go far his subject
must be willing to provide the data required. The investigator
may find a great deal more in the data than the subject ever
intended to give away, but knowledge of the human mind
must await upon self-revelation.

Now if the last Reality is personal, as religious people be-
lieve, then Its discovery will certainly wait upon self-revela-
tion. This is the universal postulate of the Bible. From the
most primitive to the most advanced stage it is never doubted
that God takes the initiative. All knowledge of God starts
with His will to reveal Himself. In the most primitive stories
it is so. Abraham in his wanderings came to the terebinth
of Mamre, and there God appeared to him; whereupon Abra-
ham built an altar, and the terebinth became a sacred place.
Jacob sleeping at Bethel, was surprised by a dream which
showed him that "this is the house of God and the gate of
Heaven". Moses keeping sheep was arrested by a call from
God, which call he obeyed with momentous results. The
prophets, however one is to explain their experience, were
distinctly conscious that a word came to them from beyond
the limits of their conscious personality and brought them new
truth "thus spoke Jehovah". Psychology may do much to
explain this consciousness; but we should be chary of explain-
ing it away. The experience, after all, as it is given and
recorded in history, is an experience of revelation and not
merely of discovery.

Now if we take the view that all increase in knowledge is
in a real sense revelation the self-revelation of the universe
to men then we may observe that such self-revelation is

272 "Progressive Revelation"

necessarily relative to the development of our faculties in
time. The child receives true impressions of the world, but in
his interpretation of them there is an element of what we must
call illusion, inseparable from the undeveloped condition of
his faculties. As he grows he records and interprets more
accurately the impressions he receives. The facts the uni-
verse sets before him do not alter; his perception of them
does. Adult knowledge of course is not free from illusion,
but it is relatively a more adequate apprehension of the facts.
The analogy between the growth of the individual and the
development of the race is certainly not to be pressed too
far. Yet it does exist. In the first place, although it is very
doubtful whether the essential faculties of human nature have
improved since prehistoric times, yet the accumulated knowl-
edge of the past gives a better perspective. Further, in all
his views of the world a man is in some measure subject to
the stage of development in time at which his society has
arrived. Thus the nomadic state carries with it certain rela-
tions within society, and certain relations between man and
the rest of the world the soil, plants, annuals, the sky and
the weather, and so on. These necessarily affect the way in
which man interprets his experience. The nomadic may pass
into the agricultural state, and then into various kinds of
political, commercial, and industrial states, in all of which
these relations, among men and between men and the world,
are altered, and man's interpretation of his experience alters
too. As we have seen, these changes, as they occurred in the
history of the people of the Bible, involved relations with
an ever widening area of reality, If we believe that the ulti-
mate Reality is revealing itself to the child as he grows to
manhood, we may also believe that this Reality reveals Itself
to human society in its changes of condition, "in divers parts
and by divers manners", without either over-estimating or
under-estimating the element of necessary illusion involved in

Stages of Revelation 273

the process of knowledge. In any historical presentation of
the development of the knowledge of God, such as we have in
the Bible, these temporal stages are reflected as a matter of
course, and we may think of God, if we will, under the anal-
ogy of a skilful teacher who proportions his instruction
to the development of the child. Any reasonable interpreta-
tion of the Bible will take account of this alteration of con-
ditions as time advances.

We must not, however, exaggerate the importance of this;
for although all men are to some extent subject to these tem-
poral conditions, it is characteristic of genius, as we have seen,
to emancipate itself from them to a startling degree and to
utter things which are not for an age, but for all time. Cer-
tainly the biblical development as we have traced it is by
no means a steady accumulation of data, building up a system
of knowledge "line upon line, precept upon precept". Great N
personalities burst upon the scene, with something essentially
new in what they have to say, often imperiously setting aside
the gains of centuries of "progress". The continuity of human
thought is indeed not broken. We can trace with some ful-
ness the antecedents of the prophetic teaching. We can in a
measure explain what led to it, what previous ideas entered
into it, or affected it by way of reaction. But the precise
thing in it that is new that which constitutes the discovery
of the prophets we cannot so explain. We can only trace it
to some kind of insight resident in personality, and raised to a
high power in genius. Now these men of genius themselves
have some account to give of this unexplained insight. It is
for them a result of communion with God. 1 When we further
observe that the thing which they think they received from

1 This sense that something "conies to them" seems characteristic of
genius in various spheres. The poet's address to his muse was not at first
a mere literary convention. A great living architect told a friend of the writer
that when he designed a well-known public building he "saw" the plan as
though in a vision, complete in all its parts. A facile explanation about emer-

274 "Progressive Revelation"

God acts creatively in human life, enables men to deal more
effectively with an ever larger area of reality, then we may
fairly conclude that they are not wholly self -deceived in think-
ing so.

Yet even in these pioneers of the knowledge of God, who
in many ways stand so independently of their time-environ-
ment, we have found ourselves obliged to admit error. At
least, we have instances where the teaching which a prophet
gives as from God is contradicted and superseded by some
later prophet, whose judgment is corroborated by history and
by the general consent of religious people. Is there any sense,
in such cases, in speaking of a divine revelation? Is God so
capricious as to say and unsay?

It has often been observed that man makes God in his own
image, as the fish in Rupert Brooke's poem

"trust there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin
The littlest fish may enter in".

There is obvious truth in this. It does not follow that God is
a figment of the human imagination. But it is a fact, and
an important fact, that a man's notion of God depends largely
upon what he is as a man.

God in His full essence cannot be. known by a finite being.
Upon this there is a general agreement in the Bible. From
Moses, who knew he was not permitted to see the face of
God, to Paul, who cries, "How unsearchable are His judg-
ments and His ways past finding out!" 1 the men of the Bible

gence from the subconscious still leaves one feeling that something is unexplained.
Men of genius in action have the same sense. We who have no inward knowl-
edge of genius should be chary of thinking we have explained it away.
1 Rom. xi. 33.

Revelation Relative to Human Faculties 275

/

acknowledge the limitations of possible knowledge of the Eter-
nal. Whatever knowledge we do, by God's own grace, possess,
is necessarily relative to human faculties and human needs.
That which a man is in himself, by innate endowment and by
experience of life, makes him open upon that side to what
God has to reveal. The innate endowment is something that
always baffles us. It belongs to the "essential ego" which the
psychologist has to postulate as a starting-point. We can
often see how, given this original endowment, experience of
life fits a man for some new apprehension of God. Hosea,
when his married life ran to disaster, did not act as the homme
moyen sensuel has acted in countless similar cases. There was
in him a deep, ineradicable principle of loyalty which held
him to the woman he had loved. He was surprised at him-
self, but he could not do otherwise, for a divine voice com-
pelled: "Jehovah said to me, 'Go again and love an adul-
terous woman, in love with a paramour as Jehovah loves
the Israelites, although they turn to other gods' ". 1 His own
sense of absolute obligation to a certain course of action, we
observe, is at the same moment a revelation to him of what
God is. Out of his own experience he dared to proclaim God's
loyalty to His people "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?" 2
Hosea is making God in his own image. But who made Hosea
such a man? His own reply is that the same mysterious act
of grace made him such as he was and made him see that God
is such as He is. Some of the conditions which went to the
making of Hosea and of his prophecy we can recognize. Thus
he would hardly have felt as he did if the society in which
he was brought up had not developed the institution of mar-
riage to a relatively advanced stage. Nor, probably, would
this particular figure of the divine relation to Israel have
suggested itself if a degraded sexuality had not been an obses-

i Hos. iii. 1 (Moffatt). 2 Hos. xi. 8.

276 "Progressive Revelation"

sion in the religion he attacked. But there remains something
explicable only out of the individuality of the man and his
communion with God. If we further ask, What reason have
we for supposing that this view of God is not just a pleasing
fantasy of Hosea's? the first answer is that we ourselves know,
when once it is put to us, that this sort of thing is divine,
and that if there be a God at all He must be like this. The
second answer is that historically, in spite of all temptation
to think the contrary, Hosea's conception of God won its way
into the mind of man, and made history. Because God was
seen to be like this, the Jewish "Church" came into being; and
because that "Church", with all its limitations, gave some
expression to this view of God, Jesus Christ appeared within
it, and brought Hosea's conception of the divine character to
full clarity and consistency.

This is an instructive example of the method of revelation.
God reveals Himself by giving a man grace both to see his
own life aright and in doing so to apprehend something of
what God eternally is, and is always showing Himself to be to
those who can perceive it. By grace we do not mean an irre-
sistible power overriding personality, nor merely the gift of
an extraordinary faculty unrelated to what a man is in him-
self. We mean a form of communion between God and man,
in which the act of God and the spontaneity of human per-
sonality are inextricably interrelated. Into the ultimate prob-
lem of grace and free will we need not probe. But if person-
ality remains inviolate in communion with God, as we cannot
but maintain, then there is a contingent element in revela-
tion, namely, that which is derived from human freedom; and
yet this contingency does not impugn its divine origin. Not
even the greatest of the prophets can be supposed to have
been perfectly harmonized with the divine will, and yet their
response to God's grace in their communion with Him was
such as to give them insight beyond common men. Why they

Grace and Revelation 277

did so respond, while other men do not, is a question which
cannot be answered. 1

Our justification therefore for using the term "progressive
revelation" is as follows: We observe a process which as a
whole must be called progressive. At each stage of the process
we observe individuals who gathered up in themselves the
tendencies of the process, criticized them by some spon-
taneous power of insight, and redirected the process in its
succeeding stages. That which these individuals contributed
was a vision of God, determined by what they themselves
were. This they were by grace of God, for we cannot give
any other account of their experience. Whether we say that
men progressively discovered a revelation which in God's
intention is eternally complete and unalterable, or that God
Himself proportioned the measure of His revelation to the
stages of human progress, is perhaps no more than a matter
of verbal expression. That progress is there, and in the
progress revelation, is the double fact we wish to establish.

From this point we may approach the consummation of
the historical process in the New Testament. One dominant
Personality controls the whole of this stage of the "progres-
sive revelation". The other minds of the New Testament
revolve like planets round a central sun, and shine with bor-
rowed light. Now a reader who approaches the teaching of
Jesus freshly is probably struck first with its originality.
When, however, we study its antecedents we are struck with
its organic continuity with earlier revelation. This is so far-
reaching that some students, intent on similarities and par-
allels, and distrustful of any claims to "uniqueness" in history,
have denied that there is anything in this teaching strictly
new. Yet in fact Christianity was a new thing in the way
of religion. Perhaps since man began to be religious there

1 See J. Oman, Grace and Personality, pp. 145-151.

278 "Progressive Revelation"

has been no such momentous new departure. It would be
paradox to deny to the Founder the originality which His
religion has actually displayed.

The originality of Jesus and the continuity of His teaching
with what had gone before are both facts, and both impor-
tant. He was conscious of both. Thus in the earliest tradi-
tion of His teaching we find sayings which seem to imply the
permanence of "the law and the prophets", 1 and others which
imply that they are superseded by something new. 2 Source-
criticism does not justify us in setting aside the one or- the
other. Among His followers, the Aramaic-speaking section
of the Church at Jerusalem seems to have emphasized the
former, its Greek-speaking section, followed by Paul, the lat-
ter. One explanation that has been offered is that the teaching
of Jesus was in fact more destructive of the traditional re-
ligion than He supposed or desired. The clarity of His think-
ing makes one feel this explanation unsatisfying. May not
the truth be that in the depth and range of His insight He
was more fully aware of continuity with the tradition than
His most conservative followers, and more aware of the new-
ness of what He brought than the most radical? His criticism
of the Sadducees is very pointed: "You are mistaken because
you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God" 3
i.e. you are deficient both in understanding of the tradition
and in personal intuition of divine things. His own reply
to the problem they raised lights up the whole history of re-
ligion: "God is not a God of the dead but of the living". 4
Why did no one think of that before? is the question that
rises to our minds. Apparently no one had thought of it,
though as we look back we see that it penetrates to the heart
of the old religion with a sureness born of fresh intuition. That

Matt. v. 18; Luke xvi. 17 (Q) ; Mark vii. 9-13, x. 17-19.
4 Matt. xi. 13; Luke xvi. 16 (Q) ; Mark vii. 14-15, x. 3-5.
* Mark xii. 24. * Mark xii. 27.

Old and New in Christ's Teaching 279

is a single instance of the way in which Jesus "came to fulfil
the law and the prophets", as the first evangelist has it. "Mat-
thew" stands in the main for the more conservative inter-
pretation of Christianity. Paul, the "radical", equally lays
stress on the fact that Jesus came "in the fulness of the time", 1
i.e. at an historical crisis when His message and work won
significance from what had gone before.

If indeed Jesus Christ is anything like what His followers
have believed Him to be, then we should expect to find in His
teaching a large continuity with all that the Spirit of God
has revealed to men everywhere. And we do in fact find this,
not only within the biblical revelation, but, as the early Chris-
tian apologists were quick to point out, in other religions also.
If Clement could recognize with enthusiasm the Christian
element in the teaching of Socrates and Plato, we need never
hesitate to do full justice to the affinity of Christianity with
the best in Confucianism or Mahayana Buddhism. Within
the Bible, however, the continuity is more significant, because
it is a conscious participation in a tradition. Jesus is, and
wished to be, the true successor of the Hebrew prophets. He
gathers up into His teaching the most vital elements in the
religion of His people, while He relentlessly repudiates many
things sacred to His predecessors and contemporaries. The
prophets had done the same.

Nothing in the long history we have briefly traced is ir-
relevant to the work and teaching of Jesus the primitive
religion of Israel, with its tension between the "otherness" and
the familiarity of God; the prophetic movement; the popular
piety and social discipline of Judaism after the Exile, with its
controversies and its groping after unfamiliar truth; Pharisa-
ism, "Wisdom" books, and Apocalyptic. No less than the
prophets He was concerned about problems raised by the out-
ward events of His time, for the "Roman question" is in
view in the Gospels just as the "Babylonian question" is in

Gal. iv. 4.

280 "Progressive Revelation"

view in Jeremiah. Religious minds among the Jews were
grappling with that question, and some of them were offering
answers to it which up to a point approximated to the solu- <
tion Jesus presented, but failed to go to the root of the mat-
ter in universal spiritual principles. 1 Tradition and the course
of outward events provided the material on which He worked.
He spoke the word that shaped it into living truth. As we
have seen, the truth came disguised in particular forms. It .
possesses a high power of throwing off the disguise and re-
clothing itself in forms native to other times and other places.

Indeed from the beginning the impulse communicated in the
teaching of Jesus sought fresh forms of expression. Already
in the New Testament Paul is not content to know Christ
after the flesh, 2 and John is aware that there were many things
that Christ could not say to his disciples in His lifetime, so
that His Spirit must still lead them into all truth. 3 The Spirit
is indeed His Spirit, and when we move forward to remoter
periods we find that the same Spirit still speaks in startling
ways. Yet it is worth while to go back again and again to
the record of what Jesus actually said. He said it in answer
to particular questions raised for Him by His environment,
and He said it partly in the thought-forms of His age, but
this only enables to see more clearly how He consummates
the "progressive revelation" in the biblical history. If we
believe in the reality and significance of history at all, then
these facts go far to provide something like an "objective"
ground for the impression of unique authority that His words /
produce.

But over and above all this there is the unexplained spon-
taneity of personality, which is sovereign over the material
that history supplies, and is the ultimate medium of revela-
tion. The new thing that the prophets communicated we

1 See V. Simkhovitch, Towards the Understanding of Jesus.
* 2 Cor. v. 16. s John xvi. 12-13.

Revelation and Incarnation 281

found to be essentially something in themselves. Because
they were the men they were, and reacted to their experience
in the way they did, they were open to certain aspects of God
unsuspected by other men. God, who is always revealing
Himself as men are able to receive it, imparted something of
Himself to these men in personal communion. Because of
that grace of God they both became men of a certain sort
and saw and uttered truth about God. Now it is even more'
fully true that the new thing Jesus gave to men was bound
up with what He was. It is not to be formulated in propo-
sitions about God, but discerned in the whole new outlook,
the new attitude, the new essential relation to God and the
universe which He possessed.

We saw that in the prophets the personal "somewhat" which
made them vehicles of truth could best be described by saying
that God imparted to them something of Himself, thereby
making them the men they were. This determined their at-
titude to experience. If now we discern in Jesus an attitude
to experience which is unique in quality, we cannot but say
that God imparted Himself to Jesus uniquely, and that the
whole of what Jesus was expressed that self-impartation of
God. This is formulated theologically in the doctrine of the
Incarnation. Just what it implies is a difficult, perhaps an
impossible, question to answer. In religious genius we have
to reckon with an inexplicable innate endowment prior to
experience and the conscious reaction of the will towards it.
For a prophet is not just a very good man or a very wise one.
What this innate endowment was in Jesus is a question to
which all doctrines of His person attempt to find an answer.
Any doctrine which denies to Him His place in history as a
man of a particular race and age does less than justice to His
historical importance. Yet any doctrine which does not ex-
press His transcendence of history in a unique relation to
God and to life fails to satisfy the religious impression He

282 "Progressive Revelation"

produces. As this book is not concerned with doctrines of the
Person of Christ we may leave it at that. We observe, how-
ever, that the authority of Jesus Christ for us does not spring
from a prior acceptance of any particular theory of His Per-
son, Nicene, Chalcedonian or other. It is, as Father Tyrrell
defined it, "the authority that truth exercises over the mind,
and goodness over the conscience, and love over the heart and
affections; the authority that true Manhood exercises over
men, true Personality over persons". 1 We cannot find even
in Christ an authority so external to ourselves as to absolve
us from the inexorable responsibility for our own beliefs. If
we ask for anything more "objective" we can only find it in
the impressive witness of history the history in which we
ourselves stand, and which indeed we are helping in our meas-
ure to make.

For what He said stood the stringent test of "hard facts".
No facts could be "harder" than the disaster in which the min-
istry of Jesus was involved; yet instead of going under, His
gospel reshaped human history. Of no mere fantasy could
that be said, but truth is a mighty thing that takes facts by
storm.

Moreover, the decisions at which He arrived, in their fun-
damental principles, hold good against all lapse of time.
When moral and religious advance is made, it is not true to
say that it antiquates the teaching of Jesus; on the contrary,
it presents itself as a fresh unfolding of what Jesus meant.
The more His Gospel goes out into the wider world, the more
clearly does it exhibit its universal character. 2 As it once
showed its inherent continuity with the highest in human
thought by taking to itself the finest traditions of Judaism
and Hellenism, so in later times it has found ways of laying
hold upon Eastern religions. Whatever may be their future.

1 MedicBvalism, chap. IV.

1 Note the way in which in H. G. Wells' Outline of History " the Spirit of
Jesus" is inseparable from the narrative when once the Christian era is reached.
Mr. Wells started with no Christian bias.

The Lordship of Christ 283

there is no doubt at all that Hinduism and Buddhism in some
of their forms are permanently affected by the impact of
Christianity; and the Christian belief is not all "in the air",
that ultimately Christ will be found to have spoken the Word
for all the world and for all time. That is as yet faith, not
knowledge. For our present purpose it is enough to record
that after many centuries of historical vicissitudes His word
is still current, and fertile of new truth.

The relation which Jesus Christ bears to the Bible is a sym-
bol of the relation which Christians believe He will at last
be seen to bear to the spiritual history of mankind as a whole.
If we take our stand at any point in the Old Testament, we
see that the spiritual life there portrayed is tending along
different lines towards something, which does not become
clear until in Jesus Christ the various lines reach fulfilment.
So the spiritual life of peoples, within and without Christen-
dom, shows anticipations which are fulfilled when Christ
comes. In Alfred Noyes' Forest of Wild Thyme there is a
fantastic representation of the world of the spirit under the
figure of a village fair, in which the swings and roundabouts
play a medley of the old rhymes of man's infancy:

"For it seemed as if that mighty din
Were no less than the cries of the poets and sages
Of all the nations in all the ages;
And if they could only beat out the whole
Of their music together, the guerdon and goal
Of the world would be reached with one mighty shout,
And the dark dread secret of Time be out . . .
And madder and merrier, round and round,
The whirligigs whirled to the whirling sound.
... ay, wilder and yet more wild
It maddened, till now full song it was out!
It roared from the starry roundabout

A child was born in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem,
A child was born in Bethlehem; ah, hear my fairy fable;

For I have seen the King of Kings, no longer thronged with angel wings,
But croodling like a little babe, and cradled in a manger"

284 "Progressive Revelation"

We may now bring together the two aspects of the process
we have been studying. On the one hand we have the move-
ment of events on a large scale, beyond the control of any
individual the migrations of peoples, the clash of empires
and civilizations, and behind them natural factors like popu-
lation and food-supply, all these shaping from without the
history of a community. On the other hand we have the
spiritual impulse in powerful individuals, from the half-
mythical Abraham or the legendary Moses to Jesus and His
followers, shaping it from within. These two factors are
seen in the biblical history perfectly interacting. The outward
aspect of the process we may call providential, though it is
seen to be so only because individuals responded to it in a
creative way. The inward aspect of the process exhibits the
undeniable spontaneity of personality functioning at its high-
est, in conscious communion with God. But at each point
this spontaneity is both conditioned by the outward factor,
and directly reflected in its changes and fresh departures.
Through the interaction of the outward and inward factors
the biblical community is led into ever more comprehensive
relations with the entire world of human experience, and at
each widening of the field individuals are raised up to inter-
pret the situation in spiritual terms and to absorb more and
more of the data of experience into the religious life in its
corporate expression.

This twofold process is even to-day by no means at an end,
for the geographical expansion of Christianity in our own
time, with the accompanying enrichment of its life and
thought, is an extension of the history reflected in the Bible.
But in the prospective of the twentieth Christian century we
can see more plainly than ever how with the culmination of
the biblical process in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and
the experience of Him that came to His earliest followers, the
conclusive step was taken. It is He who gave to the whole

"To Sum Up All Things in Christ" 285

process its absolute meaning, and it is He who shapes and
controls its remoter issues down to our own day. For the
Christ revealed in the New Testament does shape and control
the spiritual movements of our time, even those which cannot
be said to have taken their origin from Christianity, as in the
first century He shaped and controlled the spiritual move-
ments of the Hellenistic world and as in an earlier age the
religion of the prophets had put its stamp on elements derived
from ethnic religions.

We take therefore the work and influence of Jesus Christ in
their full scope as the climax of that whole complex process
which we have traced in the Bible, and we conclude that the
process itself is so intimately and dynamically related to all
that we cannot but hold to be of the highest spiritual worth,
that we must recognize it in the fullest sense as a revelation
of God, a revelation whose unique quality is measured by
the uniqueness of Jesus Christ Himself and His relation to the
human race.

CONCLUSION
THE BIBLE AS "THE WORD OF GOD"

CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSION: THE BIBLE AS "THE WORD OF GOD"

WE started from the position that authority in the ab-
solute sense resides in the truth alone, or, in religious
language, in the mind and will of God. In so far as the Bible
possesses authority in religion, it can be only as mediating the
truth, or as "the Word of God". 1 Our enquiry has indicated
certain ways in which it does in fact mediate truth: first,
through the "inspiration" of individual genius, conferring not -
inerrancy but a certain cogent persuasiveness; 2 next through
the appropriation of "inspired" ideas by a whole community,
whose experience through many generations tests, confirms
and revises them; 3 and finally through the life of One in whom
His followers found so decisive an answer to their needs that
they hailed Him as the Wisdom of God incarnate. 4 We fur-
ther saw that these three stages form a continuous history in
which as a whole, even more clearly than in its several parts,
a divine process of revelation can be discerned. 5 All through,
our study it has been clear that anything we can say about)
revelation is relative to the minds that receive it. Nowhere
is the truth given in such purely "objective" form that we
can find a self-subsistent external authority. Even where
it might appear that if Christian belief is true we should have
such absolute authority, namely, in the words of Jesus Christ,
we have been forced to conclude that we must still accept
responsibility for our judgments. For the report of His

* Chap. I, pp. 16-17. 2 Part I.

3 Part II. 4 Part III. 6 Part IV.

289

The Bible as "the Word of God"

Selling is not inerrant, and the criticism of it calls for spir-
itual insight in the last resort; and further, even supposing
we had before us His own undoubted words, they would need
"translation" out of their historical setting before they could
be directly applied to our own case, and that again calls for
spiritual insight. Nor again does the impressive evidence of

v history attain to complete objectivity, since for its interpre-
tation we must assume a certain estimate of the end towards
which its development tends. Thus in every way we are
brought back to the importance of the "subjective" factor.
Granted that religious authority somehow resides in the Bible,
how does it become authoritative /or mef_
x If the Bible as a whole is a revelation of God, and the
crown of this revelation is the life and teaching of Jesus
Christ, then we may start by asking, How did Jesus reveal
God? He seems to have made very few general theological
propositions, and those of the simplest, as that there is none
good but One, that is God, 1 that all things are possible to
God, 2 that He is kind to the unthankful and the evil. 3 Nor
does He appear to have imparted ineffable secrets concerning
God and the spiritual world, in the manner of the apocalyptists
or of Greek mystagogues. 4 Some of His followers, indeed,
mistook His parables for allegorical mystifications; but when
they had done their worst with them the parables still con-
veyed their own meaning to simple sincerity. The parables
in fact, as we have seen, are pictures of life as it is, and

in telling them Jesus challenged men to find God in life. That
is characteristic of His method. In a sense we might say

1 Mark x. 18. * Mark x. 27, aiv. 36. Luke vi. 35 (Matt. v. 45).

* Those who would maintain that He did so must refer to apocalyptic pas-
sages; these contain statements (among others) which in their plain meaning
are not true (see p. 233). Either therefore the tradition is at fault, or such
revelations were not inerrant, or their interpretation remains an open question.
Apart from these, it is only possible to refer to a supposed esoteric tradition
for which there is no historical evidence.

How Jesus Revealed God 291

that Jesus never told men anything about God but what they
could see for themselves, when He had brought them into
the right attitude for seeing Him.

As we have said, the ability to see and to speak of the things
of God is not an extraordinary faculty communicated apart
from what a man is, but a function of the personality recon-
ciled to God. The work of Jesus was primarily this of reconcil-
iation. He released men from falsehoods and perversions of
affection and will which obscured their view of God and
then they began to know God. Jesus is Saviour and Recon-
ciler even before He is Revealer. The first disciples clearly
failed to understand much of what their Master said._ But_
they caught from Him the way of living, and grew intq _a_more_
just and valid apprehensio^n^l^sjpjritual things_ as they fol-

~

We may study the process even more clearly in the two
outstanding "prophets" of the New Testament Paul and the
anonymous author of the Fourth Gospel (whom we call for
convenience, after an old tradition, John, not meaning thereby
the son of Zebedee, or any member of the original group of
disciples) .

Paul was a man of religious genius and shows in all his work
the originality of genius. Like all prophets, he is conscious
of being directly guided by the divine Spirit. Yet he is also
aware' that this guidance has been made possible for him by
Jesus Christ. It is not that he habitually quotes Jesus as an
"authority". He does indeed so quote Him explicitly two
or three times, 2 and in his writings there are more reminis-
cences of the teaching of Jesus than the casual reader observes.
But Christ had "apprehended" him, had given him a new re-
lation to God and to life. Christ had "saved", had "recon-

3 The significant term applied to the Christian religion in Acts ix. 2, six.
9, 23, xxii. 4.

2 In 1 Cor. vii. 10, ix. 14, and perhaps in other less unambiguous places.

292 The Bible as "the Word of God"

ciled" him. He speaks of his own experience when he says,
"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation". 1 The phrase
"in Christ" is the expression of a mystic, and we must not
water down its significance. Yet it means, among other
things, that through contact with Jesus he had found a new
centre from which to contemplate life and the world. Look-
ing from that new centre he found that God revealed Him-
self in all experience in new and surprising ways.

John speaks of the way in which Jesus revealed God partly
in more intellectual terms. He starts from the highly philo-
sophical idea of the Logos or "uttered Thought" of God:
and identifies Christ with the Logos in that He has "declared"
the invisible God. But this intellectualism is not the deepest
thing in his teaching. He is fully aware of personal and
moral conditions which must be present before one can re-
ceive a revelation of God. He has faced the question, How
can I know that Christ speaks of God with authority? He
replies "He who is willing to do God's will can recognize
whether the teaching (of Jesus) is from God or not". 2 That
is, a personal reconciliation to God is the condition of knowl-
edge of God; even the authority of the Logos is not inde-
pendent of that. Further, when he comes to tell what Christ
actually does for men, he makes it clear that He does some-
thing more than speak to us about God with authority. What
would be the use of showing a light to a blind man? His
eyes must first be opened. This Christ does for us. He does
not ask us to believe on His authority; He puts us in a con-
dition to see for ourselves. To John this is prior to any
decision about the Person of Christ: "Whether He is a sin-
ner or not, I do not know; I only know that whereas I was
blind, now I see". Then follows the inference, "If this man

1 2 Cor. v. 17: the whole context is illuminating.
a John vii. 17.

Revelation through Reconciliation 293

were not from God, he could do nothing". 1 The divine au-
thority of Christ is inferred from His power to enable men to
see God. Now John accepts in the fullest way the mystic's
presupposition that "like is known by like", 2 so that there is
no knowledge of God apart from a measure of participation in
the life of God. What Christ does for us is to communicate
to us the life of God. Through Christ we are "born anew"
into a divine life. 3 This may fairly be described as mys-
ticism: yet it is not so far removed after all from experience
such as the non-mystic may have. For "God is love: and
he who abides in love abides in God". 4 The discourses of
the Upper Room set us in the midst of a circle of "friends"
of Christ; 5 and we shall not be wrong in concluding that the
author had learnt in the company of friends of Christ that
way of living by love that He communicated, and through it
had found unity with God. When once he had found that,
then the demand his soul had been making all his life
"Show us the Father" was satisfied. "He who has seen Me
has seen the Father." 6

K we are to follow the leading of this evangelist, even to see
God in Christ is not the first step in the Christian revelation.
That "God is like Christ" is often commended to us to-day as
an entirely non-dogmatic statement which anyone might ac-
cept as a starting-point. As a matter of fact it is a colossal
assumption, for anyone who has not first accepted Christ's
attitude to life. We may more modestly and more sincerely
start by recognizing, as people aware of disharmony within
ourselves, of non-adaptation to our environment, and of es-
trangement from God, that Christ stands for a thoroughgoing

iJohn ix. 24-33. Whatever historical event may or may not lie behind
the narrative, the evangelist is telling, in his own intention, the story of the
illumination of the spiritually bund.

2 Corpus Hermeticum (ed. Scott), XI. ii. 20b.

3 John iii. 5-8. * 1 John iv. 16.
s John xv. 14-15. 6 John xiv. 8-9.

294 The Bible as "the Word of God"

reconciliation, and offers such reconciliation to us. When we
accept His way, then we come into a position in which we
can begin to see the truth of God in our own experience as
interpreted by what He said and what He was.

From what the New Testament shows us of the manner in
which Jesus revealed God to men, we may learn something
about the way in which the Bible as a whole may become
the "Word of God" to us. Jesus was primarily concerned
not with delivering "doctrine", but with making men anew,
so that they could receive the revelation of Himself which
God is always seeking to communicate. Similarly, the most
important thing we find in the Bible is not "doctrine" but
something that helps us into a new attitude to God and to
life. Of course, no mere reading of books could make anyone
good or religious, if he did not wish to be such. There are
indeed many cases on record where the casual reading of a
portion of Scripture awakened a desire for God which seemed
to be completely dormant. Perhaps, if fuller data were avail-
able, it would be found to have been more awake than the
subject himself realized. In general we may take it that if
the Bible is to do its work it makes certain demands upon its
readers at the outset. In the same way Jesus Himself could
not save men without their own goodwill. There was a vil-
lage where "He could not do any deed of power, and He was
astonished at their lack of faith". 1 Still less can the Bible
do anything for a reader who does not satisfy such minimum
requirements, which may be summed up as sincerity, open-
ness of mind, and that fundamental reverence that is a will-
ingness to be commanded. To ask how a man who is radically
insincere can become sincere is to raise ultimate questions
about personality which cannot here be discussed. No one is
born insincere, and probably no one is without his moments
of sincerity.

1 Mark vi. 5-6.

/x x--- 2Vie AppeaZ o/ the Bible 295

For those who approach the Bible in this spirit (which
Jesus described as that of a child) , it is capable of awaken-
ing and redirecting the powers of mind, heart and will, so
that- a man's whole attitude and relation to the last realities
is shaped anew. It can do this only because it is the sincere
utterance of men who were themselves mightily certain of
God. For the one sure way God has of finding men is through
the impact of other men. "The true Shekinah is man."

The written word is the medium through which we reach
the personality and its experience. It is never a perfect
medium,

"For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within".

But it is the best we have. In almost all parts of the Bible
we can feel ourselves in touch with religious personalities,
some of them displaying exceptional inspiration, all of them
men of insight and sincerity. They write out of their ex-
perience of God in the soul, or of God's dealings in what
happened to them and their people. Because they were "men
of God", their experience is a valid representation of divine
reality. It profits us as we "live ourselves into it". 1 As we
have seen, the range of experience reflected in the Bible is
amazingly wide, and to share it by yielding ourselves to the
guidance of its writers is to expose our souls on all sides to
the divine action.

The Bible has suffered from being treated too much as a
source of information. The traditional theory valued it as
.giving authoritative information, in the form of dogma, upon
matters known only by special revelation. The critical
method has too often issued in treating it as a collection of
information for the antiquary. Its place as a whole is rather

"If we may borrow from the Germans their expressive phrase "aich
eirdeben."

296 The Bible as "the Word of God"

with the masterpieces of poetry, drama and philosophy, that
is, the literature which does not so much impart information
but stirs the deeper levels of personality. "Tragedy", said
Aristotle, "effects through pity and fear the purgation of such
passions". 1 The dramatist has experienced life in terms of the
suffering that besets it and the spirit that triumphs over the
suffering. The compassion and awe that the experience
arouses in him he succeeds in conveying to his audience or
his readers. Through identifying themselves with his per-
sonages in their pitiful and terrible experiences, they undergo
an emotional awakening and cleansing. Thus King Lear or
Tess of the d'Urbervilles does not instruct us in a theory
of life, but makes us sharers in an experience of life more
intense and profound than our normal level. We are greater
men, potentially, for reading such works.

It is here that we find the best analogy to that which the
reading of the Bible should do for us. Its writers are men
who had an experience of life both deep and intense. They
felt with sincerity, and express what they felt with strong
conviction. As we identify ourselves with them in our read-
ing, we top may come to a deeper and more intense experience
of life. And as God touches us in all great literature, wherein
is "the precious life-blood of a master-spirit", so He touches
us supremely in the literature of the Bible, because of the
intrinsic sublimity of its writings and because the experience
they transmit is so organically related to history and to the
divine Incarnation in Christ, in which we recognize the su-
preme act of God in history. The criterion lies within our-
selves, in the response of our own spirit to the Spirit that
utters itself in the Scriptures. The Reformation theologians,
who appealed from the authority of the Church to the author-
ity of the Scriptures, sought confirmation for the latter in the

Poetics, 1449 b . 27.

The Teaching of the Bible 297

"interior witness of the Holy Spirit". This is in effect the "sub-
jective" criterion of which we are speaking. 1

Thus the religious authority of the Bible comes home to us
primarily in inducing in us a religious attitude and outlook.
The -use that may be made of the Bible as a source of doc-
trine is secondary to this. It is, however, by no means unim-
portant. The reaction against the old dogmatic use of the
Scriptures has perhaps in some quarters gone too far. Any-
one, of course, can find in the Bible materials for a "history
of dogma". As we have said, the first question we must ask
in our study is, What did this writer actually say and what
did he mean by it? It is the conscientious putting of that
question that has so greatly advanced our knowledge of the
actual contents of the Scriptures during the period of critical
study. But anyone who takes the matter with full serious-
ness will not be content to stop there. When he has discov-
ered what the writer actually said and meant, he wants to ask
further, Is this what I am to believe about God? Is it true?
Probably no one who reads this book will think that this
question has the self-evident answer, Of course it is true,
because it is in the Bible. We must take responsibility for
our beliefs. But supposing we have found that by approach-
ing the Bible in that "child-like" spirit of openness and sin-
cerity our outlook on life has been altered, our experience

1 In a sense this may be said to involve a circulus in probando: we look to
the Bible for guidance towards religious truth; we recognize this truth by
reference to our own sincere religious standards. It is in some sense parallel
to Aristotle's attempt to define moral good. After all his attempts to find an
"objective" or quantitative standard for virtue he has to fall back upon the
test Jis &v & tppovifios 6p[ffeit virtue is that which the roan of moral insight
judjros to be such (Eth. Nic. 1107 B ). In morals and religion no purely objective
evidence is obtainable. But Christianity recognizes a "somewhat not ourselves "
in the most inward form of experience: that is the testimonium Spiritus Sancti
intcmum. The ultimate "fact" is the unity of experience in which "subjective"
and "objective" are one. See H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Experience
ofi-ie Holy Spirit, pp. 95-96.

298 The Bible as "the Word of God"

deepened, and our sense of God made stronger, then the beliefs <
enunciated by the writers to whom we owe this will carry
weight with us. We shall not lightly dismiss any theological
propositions they may put forth. And after all there are '
some very dogmatic beliefs indeed which stand out boldly
from the pages of the Bible, as for instance the prophetic
maxim that there is one God and He is good, and the New
Testament definition, "God is love". Neither is at once self-
evident, or always easy of belief. Both are challenged to-day, ,
as they have been in the past, on grounds which no serious
person can treat with contempt. In our best moments, it
may be, we see that the world of our experience as a whole
will not make sense on any other hypothesis. But there are
times, it may well be, when doubts are stronger than our
faith. It would not be honest at such times simply to silence
our questionings with a text. Nevertheless we may well turn
away from the narrow scene of individual experience at the
moment, to the spacious prospect we command in the Bible. 1
Here we meet with men whom we must acknowledge as ex-
perts in life, and find them asserting with the firmest con-
viction that God is of such a nature. Here also we trace the
long history of a community which through good fortune
and ill tested their belief in God, and experimented too in
varieties of belief, with the result that the "logic of facts"
drove deeper and deeper the conviction that while some ways
of thinking of God are definitely closed, this way lies open
and leads on and on. We can go forward if we will till we
come to the great denouement of the story in the evangelical
facts of the life and death of Jesus Christ and the emergence
of the redeemed society. When we have "lived ourselves
into" all that, we may well see our doubts and difficulties in

1 "Though it is morally certain that we are wiser than our fathers, it is
doubtful whether we are more profound than all the ages" (Keith Felling in
The Times, Feb. 9th, 1928).

Past and Future 299

a different perspective; and so belief raises itself afresh upon
a deeper and wider basis. The impressive witness of religious
genius and of history has not indeed overborne our individual
judgment, but it has delivered us from the tyranny of prox-
imate impressions, made us free of a larger experience, and
helped us to a true objectivity of judgment. Such is the "au-
thority" of the Bible in its true and legitimate sense.

The appeal to biblical authority in this sense does not bind ?
Christian thought to a tradition of the past. Its effect is to
associate the Christian mind of to-day with a tradition of
life and experience rather than of dogma, of religion rather
than of theology. To refuse such an association is to deny
something which belongs to the genius of Christianity itself,
for an irresponsible individualism in religion is not Christian;
and when once the corporate factor in Christian experience is
admitted, the factor of historical tradition cannot be ex-
cluded. But one element in the life and tradition so trans-
mitted is progressive movement. The attempt to find a static
finality in religion, as for instance in the fixing of the Torah,
never succeeded. 1 The prophets and their successors placed
finality in the future, not the present. The last of the great
prophetic writers in the canon, the author of the Fourth Gos-
pel, makes Christ take leave of His followers with the words,
"I have much still to say to you, but at present you cannot
bear the weight of it. When however He comes, who is the
Breath of the Truth, he will lead you into the whole truth".
If his contemporaries in the scribal rather than the prophetic
tradition attempted to fix in a "form of sound words", 2 the
"faith once delivered to the saints", 3 we must judge of their
attempt as the New Testament in general judges of the "tra-
dition of the elders". It is not in the nature of an historical
religion to be static, and the "faith once delivered" has ac-

1 After the Torah was completed, the Mishna was created to bring it up to
date, and the Gemara of the Talmud to bring the Mishna up to date!
* 2 Tim. i. 13. 3 Jude 3.

300 The Bible as "the Word of God"

tually grown and developed as any faith which springs out
of life and experience in a changing world must develop.
Catholic Christianity has its organs for recording and formu-
lating such development, in spite of its traditional conserva-
tism. On the other hand, it was a representative of a type of
Protestantism most rigorous in its appeal to the Scriptures
who declared, "The Lord hath more light and truth yet to
break forth out of His holy word". 1 If the Bible is indeed
"the Word of God", it is so not as the "last word" on all re-
ligious questions, but as the "seminal word" out of which new
apprehension of truth springs in the mind of man.

1 John Robinson to the "Pilgrim Fathers."

INDEX

(A.) NAMES

AABON, 173, 249

Abd-hiba, 142

Abel, 99

Abercrombie, L., 84

Abingdon Commentary, The, 208

Abraham, 114, 271

Abrahams, I., 169

JSschylus, 66

Ahab, 51, 53

Ahaz, 111

Ahura-mazda, 188

Akhnaton, 26

Alexander the Great, 196, 263

Amarna Tablets, 142

Amaziah, 57, 90

Angro-mainyu, 188

Antiquity, 246

Archimedes, 126

Aristotle, 296, 297

Aaklepios, 48

BACON, B. W., 225, 229
Baiame, 108
Balaam, 52
Bar-Cochba, 197
Barnabas, Epistle of, 196
Beethoven, 22
Beranger, 124
Bernard of Clairvaux, 6
Brahma, 46
Bridges, R., 2
Brooke, Rupert, 274
Browning, 231, 253
Brutus, M., 150
Burkitt, F. C., 230
Burne-Jones, 63-64
Burns, R., 124

CAIN, 99

Charles, R. H., 168

Cicero, 150

Clarendon Bible, The, 250

Clement of Alexandria, 279

Collingwood, R. G., 246

Confucius, 92
Cromwell, O., 124
Cyrus, 114

DANTE, 29, 124
Darwin, C., 19
David, 50, 99, 108, 261
Deborah, 47, 50, 246, 250, 255
Didache, 196
Dougall, Lily, 97
Duhm, B., 77
Duhm, H., 48

EASTON, B. S., 228

Einstein, 19

Elephantine Papyri, 250

Elijah, 28, 51-54, 99, 108, 109, 144,

251

Elisha, 55-56, 109, 251
Euripides, 145
Eusebius, 152, 195-196
Ezra, 3, 154, 175

FEILING, Keith, 298
Eraser, J. G., 108
Freud, Sigmund, 259

GAD, patriarch, 168
Gad, prophet, 261
Galen, 18
Galsworthy, 7
Gautama, 26

Goethe, 42, 126, [136], [141]
Gray, G. B., 78, 120
Gressmann, H., 101

HABNACK, A. von, 29

Hazael, 55

Hebrews, Gospel according to, 128

Hotter, F., 122-123

Hennas, 3, 196

Hermetica, 293

Hesiod, 26

Hezekiah, 249

301

302

Index

Hilld, 169, 173
Homer, 26, 96, 124

IGNATIUS of Antioch, 62

Inge, W. R. (Dean of St. Paul's), 245

Isaac, 41

JACOB, 40-41, 271
Jehu, 55

Jeroboam II, 125
Jerome, 128

Jesus Christ, 28, 36, 173
and Eschatology, 236-238
and national religion, 208-209
and Rabbinic Judaism, 169
and the Cross, 216-217
and the Sadducees, 219, 278
Authenticity of sayings, 193-194,

227, 233, 238
Authority of, 231-233, 239-240,280-

285

dominating History, 195, 239
Eternal Christ and Jesus of His-
tory, 231-232

Historical Relativity, 234-239
Imitation of, 236
in the Synoptic Gospels, 231-241
Messianic Consciousness of, 216
Methods of teaching, 234, 290-

291

on children and animals, 227-228
Originality and Continuity, 277-

279

Parables of, 147-150, 234
Records of, 224-231
Relation to Bible, 277-280, 283-

285

Resurrection of, 218, 219
revealing God. 213-214, 290-291,

293-294

Sinlessness of, 240-241
Universality of, 237, 279-280, 282-

285

Jezebel, 53, 144
"John" (Author of IVth Gospel), 27,

193

Jonadab ben Rechab, 251
Joseph, 29
Josephus, 160

Josiah, 112, 156, 247, 249, 252
Judas Macoabseus, 173
Julicher, A., 234

KANT, 40

Keats, 83
Krishna, 96
Kubla Khan, 64

LABAN, 41
Levi, 48, 173
Lofthouse, W. F., 250

Macbeth, 146

MacFadyen, J. E., 156

MacMurray, J., 83

Manoah, 41

Marcion, 206

Masefield, J., 7, 67, 145

Melchizedek, 142

Melkart, 98

Mesha, King of Moab, 57

Meynell, F., 74

Micaiah ben Imlah, 51

Micklem, N., 59, 65, 76

Millais, 63-64

Milton, 81, 83

Moffatt, J., 52, 57, 58, 60, 69-70, 80,

89, 90, 91, 109, 110, 183, 184,
' 185, 275
Moses, 26, 41-42, 44-45, 87-88, 99,

249, 250, 255, 261, 271, 274
Muhammad, 248
M urat orian Canon, 3

NABOTH, 144
Nathan, 50-51, 261
Nehemiah, 156
Newton, I., 18, 19
Noyes, A., 283

OMAN, J., 277

Omar Khayyam, 72

Onias, 173

Otto, Rudolf, 38-40

Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 148, 150

PAUL, 12, 27, 61-62, 145, 169, 193,
200, 206, 208, 211, 212-213, 215-
216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 232, 274,
279, 291-292

Peake, A. S., 79, 156

Peel, A., 230

Pelatiah, 59

People and the Boot;, The, 79, 150

Peter, 227, 229

Pharaoh, 45

Pheidias, 22

Philo, 198, 199, 222

Plato, 197, 200, 222, 267, 279

Puny, 145

Plutarch, 146

Prothero, R. E., 166

Psalmists, The, 187

Ptolemy, 18

Index

303

QUILLBB-COTTCH, A., 2

ROBINSON, H. W., 16, 79, 127, 138,

199, 297

Robinson, J., 300
Robinson, T. H., 69, 187

ST. PAUL'S, Dean of (see Inge, W. R.)

Samuel, 49-50, 100, 261

Satan, 188

Saul, 50, 99

Scott, W., 293

Selbie, W. B., 4, 136

Shakespeare, 22, [30], [64], 145, [296]

Shang-ti, 46, 108

Shear-jashub, 105

Silas Marner, 4

Simeon, 210

Simkhovitch, V., 280

Simpson, D. C., 187

Skinner, J., 58, 60, 67, 72, 121-122.

Smith, G. A., 80

Socrates, 279

Soderblom, N., 108, 245

Solomon, 89, 144, 247, 250

Stephen, 210

Streeter, B. H., 82, 83, 187, 227, 229

TACITUS, 145

Teaching of the XII Apostles. See

Didache

Tess of the d' UrbermUes, 296
Theology, 238
Theophrastus, 146
Thompson, F., 73-74
Thucydides, 26
Times, The, 7, 165, 298
Tyrrell, G., 282

UNGNAD, A., 250
Uzzah, 86-87

Village that voted the Earth was flat, The

(Kipling), 18
Virgil, 66, 124

WATSON, W., 124

Wellhausen, J., 88

Wells, H. G., 76, 137, 184, 282

Whittier, 137

Whyte, A., 146

Wordsworth, 39, [71], 81

XENOPHON, 26

ZABATHUSTBA, 26, 267
Zedekiah, King, 110
ZedeMah ben Chenaanah, 51
Zeno, 267

(B.) SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
(INCLUDING APOCRYPHA AND PSBTTDEPIGHAPMA)

(A.) OLD TESTAMENT

Genesis i., n., 159; n. 4-25, 108;

IV. 4-5, 99; xii. 1-4, 10, 142;

xrv. 142; xvm. 44; xvra. 25,

108; xxii. 13, 88; xxrv. 142;

xxvm. 17, 40; xxxi. 29, 41;

xxxi. 53, 41; xxxn. 24-32, 41,

178
Exodus, in. 1-6, 45; in. 13-15,

44, 108; rv. 1-9, 45; iv. 24, 99;

vn. 18, 20-21, 108; vn. 20, 45;

rx. 22-34, 45; xrv. 21, 108; xv.

3, 45; xvm. 5, 45; xrx. 21-22,

41; xrx. 23, 42; xx. 2, 45;

xxn. 29, 88; xxxn. 2-6, 249;

xxxin. 20-23, 42; xxxrv. 14-28,

88
Leviticus, 158. xvi. 177; xrx. 18,

27, 158
Numbers, n. 98; xrv. 18, 211; xxi.

9, 249; xxrv. 15-17, 52
Deuteronomy, 156-157. rv. 5-7,

164; rv. 7, 157; rv. 19, 162;

v. 12-15, 156; vi. 1-3, 4-25, 157;

vi. 4, 97; vn. 6-11, 157; vra.

157; vni. 18, 265; x. 12-15,

157; x. 17, 47; x. 19, 156; xi.

304

Index

10-12, 265; xvm. 10, 88; xx.

19-20, xxi. 10-14, xxn. 1-4, 6-9,

xxni. 156; xxiii. 3, 175; xxiii.

17, 249; xxm. 15-16, 19, xxiv.

5-6, 10-22, 156; xxvm. 157;

xxvin. 32, 41; xxx. 11-20, 164;

xxx. 11-14, 157, 170; xxx. 15-

20, 157

Joshua, 143, 158. x. 1, 142
Judges, 143. v. 47, 250; xi. 30-40,

88; xiii. 5, 98; xm. 22, 41;

xvi. 17, 98
Ruth, 146-147. n. 12, iv. 11-12,

17, 175

1 Samuel, vni. 7, 266; rx. 50; ix.
6, 76; ix. 15-16, 266; x. 5-6,
49; x. 10-13, 49; xm. 14, 261;
xv. 29, 100; xrx. 23-24, 49;
xxvi. 19, 99, 108; xxvin. 11-20,
50; XXVIH. 13, 45

2 Samuel, I. 19-27, 50; vi. 6-9,
13-15, 17, 87; xii. 1-9, 51

1 Kings, vii. 21, 249; rx. 10-28,
144; xi. 5-8, 251; xn. 1-20,
144; xn. 25-31, xiv. 24, 249;
xvn. 1, 53, 108; xvii. 20-22, 99;
xvm. 1-2, 108; xvin. 12, 53;
xvm. 17-18, 108; xvin. 18-21,
144; xvra. 28, 108; xvra. 32-35,
53; xvra. 36-45, 108; xvm.
41-45, 53; xvin. 46, 53; xrx.
1-2, 144; xix. 8-18, 53; xxi.
53; xxi. 1-20, 144; xxn. 1-28,
51

2 Kings, n. 16, 53; m. 4, 57; TV.
32-37, 38-44, 55; v. 22, 49; vi.
1-7, 18-20, 55; vra. 7-15, 55;
rx.-x. 55; ix. 4, 49; rx. 11, 49,
251; x. 15-17, 98; x. 15-16,
251; xvi. 3, 88; xvin. 4, 249;
xix. 112; xxir.-xxrn. 265;
xxiii. 7, 249; xxm. 10, 88

1 & 2 Chronicles, 10, 158.

Ezra, x. 175

Nehemiah, vn. 156; xm. 1-8, 175

Esther, 160

Job, 27. xrx. 25-27, 183; xxxi.

13-35, 167; XXXVUI.-XLI. 162;

XLII. 5, 182
Psalms, 161-166, 181. xiv. 1, 184;

xxxrv. 7, 178; xxxv. 5-6, 178;

xxxvi. 6, 45; xxxvii. 181; LI.

16-17, 172; tin. 1, 184; LXVII.

175; LXIX. 19-28, 167; LXXII.

175; LXXIII. 181, 219; LXXIII,

11-17, 184; Lxxin. 17-19, 181;

LXXIH. 23-26, 183; LXXVU. 7-10,

184; LXXIX. 175; LXXX. 10, 45

Lxxxni. 175; xci. 11, 178; xcn.

6-7, 184; xcrv. 7, 184; cix.

167; cxi. 10, 166; cxrx. 67, 71,

181; ex xx. 4, 212; cxxxvii.

175
Proverbs, 166. I. 22-33, 167; vm,

167; vm. 22-30, 179; rs. 10,

166; xxiv. 17, XXV. 21, 167
Ecclesiastes, n. 24, v. 2, vi. 10-12,

185; vii. 15-17, 184
Song of Songs, 6, 147
Isaiah, 27, 28. i. 3, 95; I. 10-15,

91; I. 15, 100; i. 19-20, 102;

n. 10-m. 15, 75; in. 16-24, 144;

v. 13, 94; v. 16, 91; v. 20, 94; vi.

1-8, 74; vi. 1, 59; vi. 3-5, 43,

vi. 7, 79, 105; vi. 9-12, 105; vi;

11, 15; vii. 3, 105; vn. 10-14,
vm. 10, 111; vm. 11, 60;
vm. 16-18, 105; vm. 16-17,
120; ix. 8-x. 4, 101; rx. 17,
91, 128; x. 5, 110; x. 21, 47,
105; xix. 19-25, 175; xxi. 11-

12, 78; xxn. 1-14, 111; xxrv.-
xxvn. 188; xxvi. 19, 188;
xxvin. 7, 57; xxvin. 15, 94;
xxvin. 16, 111; xxvm. 22, 60;
xxrx. 1-8, 111; xxrx. 13, 94;
xxrx. 23, 91; xxx. 15, 120; xxx.
19, 15; xxxi. 112; xxxi. 2, 100;
xxxi. 3, 46; xxxi. 4-9, 15; xxxi.
6, 105; xxxvn. 112; XL. 6-8, 80;
XL. 28, 114; XLI. 8-14, 114; XLII.
5-9, 115; XLII. 18-XLin. Ill, 115;
XLin. 3-4, 115; XLIV. 6-20, 114;
XLIV. 21-XLv. 7, 115; XLIV. 21-
22, 106; XLV. 21-23, 116; XLV.
21-22, XLVI. 9, 114; XLIX. 14-15,
106; XLIX. 22-26, 115; LI. 4-6, 7,
115; LHI. 182; LV. 7-9, 107; vn.
1-8, 175; LVI. 2, 6, 174; LVI. 7,
173; LVH. 15, 177; LVII. 19, 210;
LVIII. 13, 174; LX. 1-6, 175;
LX. 12, 128; LXIII. 1-3, 77;
LXVI. 1-4, 177; LXVI. 18-23, 175;
LXVI. 23, 174

Jeremiah, 27, i. 4-10, 78; I. 11-
12, 72; iv. 15; rv. 15-17, 23-26,
29, 31, 67; vn. 3-15, 112; vn.
9, 249; vii. 11, 173; vn. 16,
100; vn. 22-23, 93; vn. 22,
256; vn. 31, 88; vm. 7-8, 15;
ix. 11, 110; rx. 23-24, 95; x.
22, 110; xi. 1-8, 15; xi. 13,
250; xn. 1-2, 181; xn. 1, 103;
xiv. 7-9, 257; xiv. 11-12, xv.

1-2, 100; xv. 17-18, 19, 121;

xvi. 19-20, 112; xvn. 2, 2SO;

xvn. 9-10, 121; xvn. 14, 17-

18, 122; xvm. 1-4, 72; xvm.

13-17, 110; xx. 7, 15; xxm.

13-14, 58; xxm. 16-18, 76;

xxm. 16-17, 257; xxm. 28-

29, 60; xxrv. 4-7, 112; xxrv.

8-10, 110; xxvi. 18, 110; xxrx.

1-15, 112; xxrx. 4-7, 144; xxxi.

3, 113; xxxi. 31-34, 105, 112;

xxxn. 6-16, 112; xxxn. 18,

47; xxxn. 36-44, 112; xxxv.

1-10, 251; xxxv. 2-11, 98;

xxxvii. 3-xxxvin. 28, 110; [xuv.

15-19, 250
EzeMel, 27. m. 23-27, 59; iv.

4-8, 59; rv. 4-6, 120; vin. 249;

vm. 1-2, 59; vm. 3-18, 59;

vm. 3, 59; xi. 1-13, 59; xi. 1,

59; xm. 3, 6, 58; xvi. 75;

xvm. 102; xvm. 26-30, 102;

xx. 26, 88; xxrv. 1-5, 59;

xxrv. 15-24, 120; xxvi.-xxvin.

15; XXVII. 1-25, 146; xxvn.

3-6, 25-34, 66; xxrx. 18, 15;

xxxm. 6-7, 120; xxxrv. 23-24,

113; xxxvi. 106; xxxvn. 77;

xxxvn. 1, 59; XL.-xLvm. 113;

XL. 1-2, 59
Daniel, 11, 160, 161. m. 28, 178;

iv. 17, 25, 32, 188; vi. 22, 178;

Index

305

vn. 13-14, 187; vn. 22-27, 188;

vm. 15-16, x. 11-21, 178; xii.

2-3, 188
Hosea, i. 104; i. 4, 55; n. 2-23,

75; n. 2-8, 104; n. 5, 8-9, 108;

n. 11, 93; n. 12-14, 104; n. 12,

108; n. 21-22, 108; in. 1-3,

104; m. 1, 275; m. 4, 93; iv.

6, 11, 94; vi. 6, 91; vn. 14, 108;

vm. 11, 94; xi. 1, 8-9, 104;

xi. 8, 275; xn. 4, 178
Amos, 27. i. 1, 57; i. 3-n. 16, 110;

n. 7-8, 90; n. 11-12, 98; m.

8, 60; iv. 4-5, 89; iv. 6-12, 101;

v. 4-6, 89; v. 18-20, 109; v. 18,

76; v. 21-23, 89; v. 24, 91; v.

25, 90, 93, 256; vn. 1-9, 69;

vn. 7, 59; vn. 10-13, 90; vn.

12, 49; vn. 14, 57; vm. 1-2, 69;

vm. 4-7, 90; ix. 1, 4, 89; rs. 7,

109

Jonah, iv. 10-11, 175
Micah, 27. m. 4, 100; m. 5, 49,

57; m. 8, 119; m. 11, 49; m.

12, 110; vi. 6-8, 91; vi. 7, 88
Habakkuk, n. 1-3, 80
Zephaniah, 27. I. 4-5, 249; m. 4, 58
Haggai, 161.
Zechariah, 161. i. 8-17, 178; n.

11, vm. 20-23, 175
Malachi, i. 11, 175; n. 6, 173; m.

7-10, 174

(B.) APOCBTPHA

2 Esdras, vn. 45-74, 212; xm. 1-6,

187; xrv. 19-48, 155
Tobit, i. 3-14, 174; iv. 15, 169; v.

4, 178
Wisdom, 217. vn. 22, 179; vn.

24-27, 180
Ecclesiasticus, 160, 166. I. 14, 16,

18, 20, 27, 166; x. 6, xn. 4-7,
xxiv. 167; xxrv. 3-6, 179; xxrv.
23, 169; xxv. 7, 167; xxvn.
25-29, 181; xx vm. 1-7, 167;
XL. 15, XLI. 6, 181
2 Maccabees, xv. 12, 173

(C.) PSEUDEPIGRAPHA

(References are to Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha, edited by R. H.
Charles. Vol.11.)

Jubilees, xxxn. 8-15, 174
1 Enoch, XLVI. 1-6, 187

Testaments of the XII Patriarchs,
168. Levi, xvm. 173; Gad, vr.
3-7, 168; Joseph, m. 4, 174

4 Maccabees, xvn. 22, 215

Psalms of Solomon, m. 9, 174

Pirke Aboth, i. 12, 173

(D.) NEW TESTAMENT

Matthew, 209, 279. i. 5-6, 175; n.
15, 205; v. 15, 148; v. 17, 254; v.
18, 278; v. 25-26, 40, 41, 149;
V. 43-48, 213; v. 45, 290; vi.
19-20, 149; vi. 26, 227; vn.

9-10, 148; vn. 12, 169; vn. 24-
27, 150; vm. 5-10, 145; x. 29,
227; x. 38, 235; x. 39, 216; xt.
13, 278; xi. 16-17, 152; xi. 19,
149; xn. 11, 148; xn. 28, 219;

306

Index

xm. 16-17, 220; xn. 43-45, 237;

xiii. 24-30, 148; xin. 25, 152;

xin. 27, 149; xin. 33, 148;

xin. 44, 149; xra. 45-46, 147,

ISO; xni. 47-48, 150; xvra. 1-

6, 10-14, 227; xvm. 12-13, 147,

150; xvra. 23-34, 149; xx. 1-

16, 149; xx. 1, 148; xxi. 28-30,

148; xxn. 2, 151; xxii. 4, 148;

xxn. 7, 151; xxii. 9-10, 150;

xxn. 11-13, 151; xxra. 2-3, 23-

24, 169; xxiv. 41, 148; xxiv. 43,

149; xxiv. 45-51, 149; xxiv. 48-

49, 152; xxv. 1-12, 151; xxv.

14-30, 150; xxv. 24, 152
Mark, 209. i. 1, 14-15, 225; i. 15,

203; i. 22, 27, 234; n. 17, 150;

n. 19, 151; n. 21, 149; m. 23-

27, 237; in. 27, 149; iv. 3-8,

148; rv. 9-20, 234; rv. 26-29,

31-32, 148; vi. 5-6, 294; vi, 15,

209; vii. 9-15, 278; vra. 11-12,

221; vra. 34, 235; vra. 35, 216;

EC. 12, 216; rx. 36-37, 227; rx. 42,

228; x. 3-5, 278; x. 13-16, 227;

X. 17-19, 278; x. 18, 27, 290;

X. 45, 216; xi. 12-14, 20-21, 227;

xi. 17, 173; xn. 1-9, 150; xn.

18-27, 219; xn. 24, 27, 278;

xn. 28-34, 169; xn. 36, 237;

xin. 233; xni. 28-29, 227;

xin. 34-36, 149; xiv. 9, 225;

xrv. 24, 216; xiv. 25, 219; xiv.

36, 216, 290; xv. 38-39, 209
Luke, 209-210. i. 1, 225; n. 29-

32, in. 1, 210; iv. 23, 150; vi.

29, 149; vi. 31, 169; vi. 35, 290;

vi. 47-49, 150; vn. 1-10, 145;

vn. 32, 152; vn. 34, 149; vn.

41-48, 214; vn. 41-42, 149;

vm. 16, 148; rx. 23, 235; x.

23-24, 220; x. 26-28, 169; x.

29-37, 150, 234; x. 31-32, 150;

xi. 5-8, 147, 151, 152; xi. 20,

219; xi. 24-26, 237; xi. 21,

149; xn. 6, 227; xn. 16-20,

150; xn. 33, 149; xn. 36, 151;

xn. 39, 149; xii. 42-46, 149;

xn. 45, 47-48, 152; xn. 50, 216;

xn. 57-59, 149; xn. 57, 234;

xra. 6-9, 148; xra. 15, 19, 148;

xra. 20-21, 148; xiv. 5, 148;

xiv. 8-10, 151; xrv. 13, 150; xrv.

17-21, 151; xrv. 18-19, 148; xrv.

21-23, 150; xrv. 27, 235;

xrv. 31-32, 150; xv. 4-6, 147,

150; xv. 6, 151; xv. 8, 149; xv.

9, 151; xv. 11-32, 213; xv.

13, 152; xv. 17, 149; xv. 22-32,
151; xv. 23, 148; xvi. 1-8, 147,
149, 152; xvi. 16, 17, 278; xvi.
19-21, 150; xvn. 7-9, 149, 152;
xvn. 33, 216; xvn. 35, 148;
xvra. 2-5, 149; xvm. 11-12,
150; xrx. 12-27, 150; xrx. 12,
151;xrx. 21, 152

John, 10, 193, 200-201, 218-219,
221-222, 228. i. 1-18, 220; I. 1-

14, 222; i. 9, 222; i. 18, 221; n.
3-10, 222; n. 11, 221; m. 3-8,
203; in. 5-8, 293; ra. 5, 222; m.
16, 215; rv. 10-16, 222; vi. 1-63,
222; vi. 26, 221; vn. 17, 292;
rx. 24-33, 293; xn. 31, 203;
xra. 8-10, 222; xrv. 193; xrv.
8-9, 293; xrv. 9, 222; xv. 1-10,
222; xv. 14-15, 293; xvi. 11,
203; xvi. 12-13, 280; xvn. 3,
218; xxi. 12-17, 222

Acts, 209-211. n. 24, 220; n. 39,

vi. 13-14, vn. 2-53, 55-60,

210; vra. 29-35, 215; rx. 2,

291; x. 9-16, xi. 1-18, 210; xn.

12, 229; xin. 1-2, xv. 1-29, 210;

xrx. 9, 23, 291; xxn. 4, 291;

xxvra. 31, 211
Bomans, 208. i. 16, 225; n. 4, 213;

n. 14-15, 200; m. 25, 215; ra.

26, v. 6-11, 212; v. 5, 213; v.

8, 216; vra. 18-23, xi. 32, 208;

xi. 33, 274; xm. 1-7, 218

1 Corinthians, i. 9, 100; i. 22-24,
221; i. 24, 221; u. 4-5, 62; m.

1, 227; vn. 8, 10, 12, 25, 15;
vn. 10, 291; vn. 29-31, 218;
vra. 7-12, 200; rx. 9, 227; rx.
14, 291; x. 13, 100; x. 21, 199;
x. 25-29, 200; xc. 23-26, 223;
xi. 23, 224; xn. 10-11, 61; xra.

2, 62; xra. 11, 227; xrv. 62;
xv. 1-3, 223, 224; xv. 3, 215;
xv. 4-8, 220; xv. 12-58, 217

2 Corinthians, v. 16, 280; v. 17,
292; vra. 18, 225; x. 3, 218;
xn. 1-6, 62; xra. 3, 62

Galatians, 208. n. 20, 218; ra.

2-6, 212; rv. 4, 279
Ephesians, 208. i. 3, 218; i. 10,

208; n. 6, 218; n. 13, 210; ra.

6-10, 208; rv. 14, 227; rv. 28,

v. 21-vi. 9, 218
Philippians, ra. 9, 212; rv. 11-12,

200
Colossians, i. 13, 203; i. 15-18,

Index

307

221; i. 20, 208; n. 15, 203;

m. 1-3, 203, 218; m. 18-iv. 1,

218

2 Thessalonians, i. 6-10, 208
2 Timothy, i. 13, 299; n. 13, 100;

m. 16, IS
Hebrews, 200. i. 2-3, 221; rv. 14-

V. 10, 173; v. 12-14, 227; vi.

4-6, 203; si. 8-10, 13-16, 143

1 Peter, i. 2, 23, 203; n. 21-25,
215

2 Peter i. 21, IS; m. 16, 9

1 John, IY. 12, 218; iv. 16, 218,

293; IT. 19, 213
Jude, 3, 299
Revelation, 11, 189, 196. i. 10, 13-

20, iv. 2, xvii. 3, 187; xxn. 6, 16,

18-19, 15

(C.) SUBJECTS

AGE TO COMB, 188, 202-203, 212, 218,

220

Agriculture, 146-147, 265, 272
Angels, 41, 177-178, 220
Anthropomorphism, 44, 46, 97, 100,

178, 215
Apocalyptic, 63, 77, 78, 178, 186-190,

202-203, 212, 218, 237-238
Architect's "Vision," 273-274
Art, 22-25, 63-64, 134
Audition, 60, 77-81
Australian Aborigines (Religion of),

108
Automatism, Psychological, 63-65,

67
Aztec Religion. See Mexico .

Baalim, 43, 46, 54, 97-98, 104, 108,

266

Babylonian influence, 74
Baptism. See Sacraments
Buddhism, 247, 258, 279, 283

CANON OP OLD TESTAMENT, 3, 154-

155, 160

of New Testament, 3, 15, 189, 195-
196, 202

Catholicism, 9, 300

Chasidim, 174, 185

China, Religion of. See Confucian-
ism, Shangti.

Christology, 180, 231

Church, Authority of the, 9, 15-16,
194

Church, Historical Significance of the,
202, 204, 207-208, 258-259, 263-
264

Clairvoyance, 48, 51, 52, 59

Comparative Study of Religion, 140

Confucianism, 92, 258, 279

Creation-stories, 108, 159

Criticism, Biblical, 2, 5, 7, 139, 154-

155, 157, 193-194, 227-231, 236-

238, 247-248, 260
Cross of Christ, The, 215-216, 235-

236
Cultus. See Ritual, Sacrifice

DAT OP JEHOVAH, 100-102, 109-110
Dervish, 48, 49, 59
Deuteronomic Recension, 49, 157

" Reformation, 93, 156, 249, 252,

262, 266
Devil, 188

Devotional literature in the Bible,
161-166

use of the Bible, 5-8, 161
Dispersion, Jewish, 198, 267
Dreams, 67, 78, 79, 140

ECONOMICS, 144, 146, 261, 263

Ecstasy, 51, 59-60

Egyptian influence, 178, 267

El, Elohim, 40-41, 43, 45, 97, 108,

255

El Elyon, 44
El Gttbar, 47
El Shaddai, 44
Eschatology, 101, 186, .187^199, 202-

203,218,236-238
Eucharist. See Sacraments
Evangelical Revival, 134
Evolution, 245-248, 255-257, 258
Exile, 102, 112, 114, 154, 156, 256
Experience, 18-21, 83, 133-137, 152
Expert, Authority of, 21-26

308

Index

FALSE PROPHETS, 56, 115, 257
Fulfilment of Prophecy, 11, 205-206
"Fundamentalism," 10

Gemara, 299

Genius, 25-27, 63, 273-274

Gospels, 12, 29-30, 169, 185, 194, 224-

231. See Synoptic Gospels
Grace and Revelation, 275-277, 281

HALLUCINATION, 51, 59, 68, 70, 74,

79

Hellenistic Civilization, 196-197, 265
" Elements in New Testament,

197-201

" Judaism, 178, 197-198, 217
Hinduism. See Indian Religion
History
. . and Sacraments, 204, 222-223, 259-

260

as divine "judgment," 101, 180
as revelation, 111-117, 157, 163,

224, 260
Biblical records as sources for, 144-

145, 261

-- - continuity of, 136
. dominated by Jesus Christ, 195,

239, 283-284
-of a single culture-unit in Old and

New Testament, 246-248
particularity of, 113
progress in, 245-268
reality of, 138
religion as a function of, 127, 136-

137, 258-259
~* spiritual aspects of, 141-145

- the Jesus of, 224-241

- the New Testament in, 202-204
time-relativity of, 124, 127
Holiness, 40, 74, 86-96, 104, 158-

159, 177, 222

IDEAS, PLATONIO DOCTRINE OP, 200,

222

"IUumination,"The, 8
Illusion, 272-273
Imagination, 7-8, 65-69, 73-74, 79,

81-82, 84-85, 102
Immanence and Transcendence, 176-

180, 220-223
Immortality, 182-184, 188, 217-220,

267, 268
Incarnation, 138, 201, 221-223, 234,

281-282

Indian Religion, 92, 93, 102, 249, 259,

283. See also Brahma
Infallibility, 8-18
Inspiration

a function of religious genius, 29-

31
definition of prophetic, 83-84, 123-

124

in New Testament, 193
moralizing of, 51-52
not dependent on ecstasy, 60-63
not excluding relativity, 124-127
not inconsistent with error, 127-129
not of words but of men, 30
primitive notion of, 36, 48
psychological phenomena of, 51-

52, 59-60, 83-85

Iranian Religion. See Persian Re-
ligion

Islam, 248, 258-259. See Muham-
mad

"J E". See Prophetic Element in

the Pentateuch
Justification, 212-213

Karma, 102

Kingdom of God, 203, 219-220, 238,
253, 264

LAW. See Torah

Literary quality of the Biblical writ-
ings, 2-3, 27, 28
Liturgical use of the Bible, 3-5
Logos, 199, 201, 220-222, 292
Love of God, 104-107, 113, 211-214,
215-216, 218, 257, 293, 298

MACCAB-SJAN PSALMS, 161, 162, 237

Mana, 41, 45, 47, 86, 93

Man of God, 45, 47-48, 52-53

Mathematics, 30, 83, 270

"Medium," Psychic, 64-65, 118

Messianic Idea, 114, 198, 216

Messianic Prophecy, 11, 114

Methodism, 134

Mexico, Religion of, 93, 95

Migrations of Peoples, 141-144

Mishna, 169, 299

Mithraism, 197

Monotheism, 107-115, 207-211, 252

Mysterium tremendum, 40, 43, 44, 46,

100
Mystery-religions, 197, 199

Index

309

Mythology, 140, 204, 216-216, 238

Nabi, 48, 61, 98

Nationalism in Religion, 109-116, 174-

176, 207-211, 255-256
Nazirites, 98
Nehushtan, 249
Nomadic State, 246,. 251, 261, 265,

272
;' Numinous," The, 38-47, 63, 86,

90, 93, 96, 97, 101

PARABLES OP JESUS CHRIST, 147-152
Patriarchal Narratives, 44, 142-143,

250

Pentateuch, 156-160
Persian Religion, 177, 188
Pessimism, 184-187
Pharisaism, 169, 174
"Philistinism," 22, 25, 81
Pietism, 134

Platonism, 197, 200, 217, 219
Poetry and Prophecy, 65-69, 71, 81-

84
Prayer, prophetic, 122-123

replacing sacrifice in later Judaism,

172-174

Prediction, 11, 75-76
Priesthood, 47-48, 157-159, 172-173
Priestly Code, 158, 252, 254, 256
Primitive Religion, 38-41, 140-141,

176, 249
Progress, 54, 245-268, 269-270, 273-

274, 299-300
Prophetic element in the Pentateuch

(J E), 54, 246
Prophets

as agents of religious progress, 262,
273-274

as experts in Religion, 22-28

as poets, 65-69, 71, 81-83

corpus of, 37, 154

Errors of, 127-129, 240, 274

Ignatius as prophet, 62

hi early Israel, 47-51

in history, 124-126

Jesus the Successor of the, 234,
279-280

Misunderstanding of, 10-11

of the classical period, 57-129

of the ninth century B.C., 51-56, 98

Paul as prophet, 61-62, 291-292

Personal religion of, 30-31, 118-123

Post-exilic, 161, 174, 176
i Psychology of the, 59-85

Teaching of the, 86-117, 251-252

Protestantism, 4, 9-10, 15, 231, 300

Psycho-analysis, 63

Psychology, 59-85, 135-137, 140-141,

203, 258, 271, 275
Puritanism, 174-176

"Q" 229-230, 233, 235
Qadhosh, 42, 86. See Holiness, The
Numinous

RABBINIC JUDAISM, 160, 169, 248,

256

Rationalism, 134
Reason and imagination, 81-83
Rechabites, 98. See Jonadab ben

Rechab
Reformation, Deuteronomic. See

under "D"

Reformation, Protestant, 9, 296-297
Relativity

in science and theology, 19-20, 128-

129

of prophets, 124-129
of the teaching of Jesua Christ, 233-

239

Renaissance, 9
Retribution, Doctrine of, 101-104,

181, 184, 186, 188, 214-217
Revelation, 8, 17
and grace, 275-277
and inspiration, 82-85
and reconciliation, 291-294
Discovery and, 269-273
Inward and outward factors in,

284-285
Method of, in Jesus Christ and in

Bible, 290-297
Progressive, 269-285
Progressive, consummated in Jesus

Christ, 280, 283-285
relative to human faculties, 272-

275

through history, 245-268
through illusion, 126-129, 271-273
through religious genius, 273-274
Ritual, 86-89, 92-93, 157, 164-165,

172-174, 177, 252

Roman Empire, 144-145, 148, 197,
263, 266

SACBAMENTS, 199, 204, 219, 222-223,

259-260
Sacrifice, 88-89, 172-173, 215-216,

249, 254, 256

310

Index

Sadducees, 219, 278
Scepticism, 184-186
Science, Natural, 18-25, 82, 134, 200,

270

"Second Sight," 75-76
"Seer," 48, 50, 76
Septuagint, 159, 179, 197-198
Sex and Religion, 105, 147, 275-276
Shaman, 45

Sinlessness of Jesus, 240-241
South Sea Islanders, 42-43, 45
Spirit, 6, 9, 46, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62,

119, 220-221, 279, 280, 296-297
Spiritualism, 35, 64
Stoicism, 197, 200, 263
!' Subconscious," 63-64, 73, 84, 273-

274
Suffering, Problem of, 181-182, 188,

214-217

"Suffering Servant," 182. 214-216
Suggestion, 51
Symbolism, 70-73, 140
Syncretism, 53, 177
Synoptic Gospels, 12, 193-194, 209,

213-214, 216-217, 219-220, 227-

230

Tabu, 42, 48, 86-87, 90, 91, 101, 158

Talmud, 160, 198, 299

Telepathy, 59, 85

Ten Commandments, 87-88

Testimonium Spiritus Sancti Internam,
296-297

Tongues, Speaking with, 61

Torah, 48, 159-160, 169, 179, 220,
253, 254, 299

Tradition, 3-4, 6, 10, 206, 247, 278-
280, 299-300

Tragedy, 75, 296

Transcendence. See under Imma-
nence

UNTVEBSALISM, 114-117, 174-176,
207-211

VISIONS, 51, 53, 59-60, 69-76, 186-
187, 273-274

WAR, 5, 13, 97, 110, 120
"The Way," 291

Wisdom, 167, 170, 178-180, 220-221
Word. See Logos

Word of God, 8, 16-17, 80-82, 127,
289-300

BS
490
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