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Understanding the Scriptures

F >> Francis McConnell >> Understanding the Scriptures




There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the Hebrews.
One characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a very early
date--the regard for human life as such and the aim to make human
existence increasingly worth while. It is a common quality of primitive
religions that they are apt to lay stress on merely ceremonial
cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone through for the sake of
pleasing a deity. There are abundant indications of this same purpose in
the ceremonies of the early Hebrews, but there is even more abundant
indication that the ceremonies were aimed at a good result for the
worshiper himself. It is impossible to read through the Mosaic
requirements concerning bodily cleanliness, the sanitary arrangements of
the camps, the regulations for cooking the food, and the instructions
for dealing with disease without feeling that there is a wide difference
between such requirements and merely formal ceremonials. The Mosaic
sanitary law aimed at the good of the people. It sought to make men
clean and decent and human. So it was also in many of the rules
governing the daily work, the regulations as to the use of land, the
prohibitions of usury, the relations of servants and masters--all these
had back of them the driving force of an enlarging human ideal. The
trend was away from everything unhuman and inhuman. It is not necessary
for us to remark upon the outbursts of the prophets against those who
would put property interests above human interests. It is a matter of
commonplace that the call of the prophets was for larger devotion to a
genuinely human ideal: that the fires of their wrath burned most
fiercely against old-time monopolists who joined land to land till there
was "no place," and against old-time corrupters of the law who sold the
needy for a pair of shoes.

Not only did the emphasis on the human ideal show in laws, but in the
training up of types of life which should in themselves embody and
illustrate the conceptions of the biblical leaders. At the heart of the
Christian religion is incarnation, or divine revelation through the
human organism. We are told that this incarnation came in the fullness
of time. The passage seems to refer not merely to the rounding out of
historic periods, but also to the fashioning of an ideal of human
character, and at least a partial realization of that ideal in Hebrew
heroes. If the final ideal was to stand incarnate before men, there must
be approximations to that ideal before the crowning incarnation could be
appreciated. We look upon the character of Jesus as the complete
embodiment of human excellencies. Such a revelation, however, would have
been futile if there had not previously been glimpses of and
anticipations of the ideal in the lives of those who were forerunners of
Jesus. The Scriptures teach, or at least imply, that the life of a good
man is in itself a transcendent value.

And yet it is perfectly clear that while the Scriptures exalt the
individual, they do not mean to wall individuals off in impenetrable
circles by themselves. It is true that the individual is the end toward
which the scriptural redemption and glorification aims, but individuals
find their own best selves not in isolation but in union with their
fellows--a union of mutual cooperation and service, a union so close
that the persons thus related come to be looked upon as a veritable Body
of Christ, making together by their impact upon the world the same sort
of revelation that the living Christ made in the days of his early life.
The ideals as to the supremacy of human values are realized, according
to the Scriptures, not in any separateness of individual existence, but
in a closeness of social interdependence. So true is this that it is
hardly possible to see how one can make much of the scriptural movement
without immersing himself in the stream of human life with highest
regard for the values of that life.

It has been insisted from the beginning that the Christian consciousness
is the only adequate interpretation of the Scriptures. By Christian
consciousness is meant not the consciousness of the body of believers
who are together trying to serve Christ. The interpretation of the
individual becomes final only as it is accepted by the mass of the
believers. Something of worth-while thought is conceived of as going out
from the life of every believer. The utterance of the seer is not
conceived of as complete until even he who sits in the seat of the
unlearned has said "Amen." The pronouncements which do not evoke this
wide human response fall by the wayside. For example, how was the canon
of the New Testament shaped? Was there a determination on the part of
individual leaders that such and such books should be included in the
volume of Scriptures? Very likely there was at the last such deliberate
selection, but before the final decision there must have been the
practice of the congregations which amounted in the end to the choice or
rejection of sacred books. Very likely the New Testament Scriptures were
collected by a process of trying out the reading of Epistles and Gospels
and exhortations before the congregations. As passages met or failed to
meet the human needs, there was call for the repeated reading of some
works and no call for the rereading of others. In use some documents
proved their sacredness and other documents fell aside into disuse.
Before the concluding deliberate choice was this selection in use by the
believers themselves; and the selection turned round the question as to
whether or not the documents helped people. If each member of the body
of believers is entitled to interpret biblical literature,
interpretation becomes a composite and diversified activity. There is
little warrant in the Scriptures for the notion that the biblical
revelation is to level men to any sort of sameness. There are
diversities of endowments and varieties of expression; but the united
judgment of the body of believers is the supreme authority in
interpreting the scriptural revelation. This is what we mean by saying
that the church is to interpret the Scriptures. We mean that no matter
how brilliant or interesting the utterances of any individual may be,
they are not of great value until they have received in some fashion the
sanction of the main mass of believers. It is the function of the
spokesmen of the church to gather up into distinct expression what may
have been vaguely, but nevertheless really, in the thought or half-
thought of the people. Gladstone once said that it is the business of
the orator to send back upon his audience in showers what comes up to
him from the audience in mist or clouds; so it is with the voice of a
biblical truth through any medium of interpretation. The spokesman
compresses or condenses into speech what has been dimly in the
consciousness of the people. Even in days less democratic than ours this
was abundantly true. It is the fashion to denounce some of the councils
of the old church which shaped the creeds. It is often said that these
creedal councils were moved by considerations of low-grade expediency.
The councils, however, knew what the people were thinking of, and
managed to get the popular thought into expression measurably
satisfactory to the people themselves.

In this doctrine of the church as interpreter of scriptural truth we can
be sure that the emphasis will remain on the elements which make for
enlarging human life if the church keeps true to the spirit of the Bible
itself. The aspirations of humanity, the longings of masses of men, find
utterance in the great popular spiritual demands all the more
effectively because such demands override and nullify the insistence of
an individualistic point of view which might easily become selfish. We
have said that this democratic interpretation is final so long as it
keeps itself in line with the biblical purpose. There are some dangers,
however, against which we must be on our guard. First is the danger of
identifying the church with those who actually belong to an
organization. When we think of the church we have in mind not merely
formal organizations, but all men who are really working in the spirit
of the biblical ideals. There are many persons who really act according
to the biblical revelation without technically uniting with a church. It
may be that such persons do not accept the intellectual puttings of
biblical doctrine, but that they nevertheless live in the spirit of that
doctrine. It might be conceivably possible that a church organization
would stand for an interpretation of truth which would be rejected by
the general good sense of a larger community. In such a case the larger
community would be the interpreter. Another danger in an interpreting
body is that of traditionalism. The native conservatism of many minds
stands against innovation. If, however, the innovation is in the
direction of enlarging human life, it will in the end win its way. A
third danger is that of institutionalism, where the organization as such
becomes an end in itself without regard to the human interests involved.
The Master's fiercest condemnations were for those who put any
institution before the fulfillment of the human ideals. In the parable
of the good Samaritan it is noteworthy that it was the priest and the
Levite who passed by on the other side. It is hard to resist the feeling
that the Master implied that the priest and Levite had been
institutionalized into a lack of humanity. Making allowance now for all
these dangers against which believers must guard, the chances are that
interpretation of a book so human as the Scriptures is not final until
it has received the real, though not necessarily formal, sanction of the
body of believers.

So thoroughly does the biblical revelation turn around the supremacy of
the distinctively human values that we must insist that anything which
would run counter to these values is alien to the spirit of the
revelation, and, therefore, to comprehension of that revelation. We do
not wish to be extreme, but it is hard to see how, in our day, for
example, any who fail to put human rights in the first place can really
master the scriptural revelation. We have spoken of the Master's rebukes
of any form of institutionalism which stands in the way of human rights.
Institutions at best are instruments; they exist merely for the purpose
of bringing men to larger life; but these institutions sometimes get
petrified into custom and become glorified by long practice, and even
made sacred by adherents who look upon them as ends in themselves. Then
there is no recourse except to break the institutions in the name of
larger human life. If we could put ourselves back in the times of Jesus
and feel something of the sacredness with which the Jews regarded the
Sabbath, we would know the tremendous force of the Master's daring when
he declared that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the
Sabbath. The Master was also insistent upon the priority of human rights
as over against property rights. It is perfectly true that Jesus did not
encourage any propaganda for social reform. It is a mistake to try to
read any form of modern Socialism into his teaching. Socialism is the
theory of a particular time. Many of its outstanding features will no
doubt one day be adopted; and the world will then move forward toward
something else. Very likely three centuries from the present date the
well-advanced communities of the world will be living under systems
which will make Socialism itself look like the most hopeless and
reactionary conservatism. The scriptural revelation, however, has not to
do with the details of any particular scheme. It aims, rather, at the
setting on high of the human ideal, an ideal which will, if given a
chance, work itself out into the concrete forms best suited to each age,
and which will not have exhausted its vitality when all that is good in
the programs of our particular day shall have been incorporated into
social practice.

But let us linger for a moment around the blighting effect of placing
property rights in front of human rights. If anyone at this juncture
becomes nervous and insists that we are likely to introduce the new-
fangled notions of the present day into a discussion where they are out
of place, let us remind such a one that the danger of putting the
material before the spiritual has always been the chief stumbling stone
in the path of the biblical revelation. It may be too much to say with
the old version that the love of money is the root of all evil, but the
Scriptures place the sin of greed in the forefront among the evils that
block the revealing process. Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of God." With God a morally miraculous redemption is entirely
possible; but Jesus declares that there is no need of our trying to
minimize the power of the present world to blind us to visions of the
spiritual world. For many forms of wrongdoing the Master had a
willingness to make allowances; for the sin of placing material desires
above human welfare he had unsparing condemnation. In the day of Jesus
the world had an opportunity such as it never had before confronted to
learn spiritual truth. What manner of opposition was it which prevented
that truth from running its full course? Largely the opposition of money
interests. The Pharisees had need to keep alliance with the temporal
powers. It is not without significance that Jesus was betrayed for
money. It is not without significance too that Jesus's picture of the
Judgment Scene concerns itself largely with the rewards for those who
discharge the tasks of simple human kindness. It means much to find
Jesus hinting at an unpardonable sin on the part of those who call deeds
of human relief works of Beelzebub. It is certainly food for reflection
that the fiercest condemnations in his parables are for those who miss
the human duties in their regard for the possessions of this world. We
repeat that we would not be extreme, but when we see the disregard of
human life in modern industrialism; when we behold the attempts of
property interests to get control of all channels for the shaping of
public opinion; when we see rent, interest, and dividends more highly
rated than men, women, and children, we cannot help feeling that the
deeper penetration into the Scriptures cannot arrive except through an
emphasis upon fundamental human rights so mighty that all institutional
creations of industrialism or ecclesiasticism shall be put into the
secondary place and strictly kept there. This is not railing against
wealth. It is simply calling attention to the fact that the man who
possesses the wealth-tool cannot be allowed to use it or even to
brandish it in such fashion as to endanger the unfolding of human
ideals. It is only through the enforcing of these ideals that the
Scriptures can be adequately apprehended. Until a social kingdom of God
comes on earth the light of revelation cannot shine in its full
brightness. Any social preacher of larger human rights is working for
the dawn of a new day of biblical understanding.

Some one will ask, however, why we single out one type of evil as
especially thwarting the understanding of a biblical revelation. Why not
speak of the evils of appetite and of envy and jealousy? The answer is
that such evils, devastating as they are toward the spiritual faculties,
are so definitely personalized in individuals that their nature is
quickly recognized. The difference is that under present organization
the evils of materialism are preeminently social. There is everywhere
the heartiest condemnation for the man who personally is conspicuously
greedy. A social evil can manifest itself in outstanding startlingness
in a single person, but the plain fact is that under modern industrial
organization we are all caught in the same snare. We are all tarred with
the same stick. Great as is the improvement of our present system over
anything that has preceded it, nevertheless the distribution of this
world's goods is so unequal that we walk in the presence of injustice on
every hand. The poor man often does not receive the product of his own
work. Large material prizes go to men who toil not. Now no one in
particular is to blame for this social plight. Nobody has yet arisen to
show us the way out. We cannot act except as we all act together; and it
is doubtful even if one nation could act alone. If, however, we should
all recognize the evils of the present system, if we should condemn the
wrongs of that system instead of trying to justify them, we would be on
much better spiritual ground, for the attempts to justify the system
lead to uneasy consciences, and to the searing of those consciences, and
to the softening down of harsh truths, and finally to an inability to
see things as they are. Though we have come far along the path toward
industrial justice, there is still very much in the system under which
we live that makes for an inability to understand some of the most
elementary phrasings of Christian truth. The only way out is to see the
system as it is and to take such steps forward as can be taken now. Only
thus can we keep our souls saved, and only thus also can we follow the
flashes from above.

Jesus preached the highest ideal for individual righteousness. Men are
to strive to be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. But the
perfection is to show itself in social impartiality in the use of
material opportunities. God sendeth the rain to fall and the sun to
shine on the evil and the good. How many Christians of the present day
could be safely intrusted with the distribution of rainfall and
sunshine? Those of us who dwell in lands that must be irrigated know
that the type of Christianity that can be trusted to deal fairly with
our irrigation system is somewhat unusual.

We take the injustices of the present social order too much as a matter
of course. We ought to see them as making against humanity, and
therefore against the scriptural revelation. When these injustices
culminate in a war like the present, the only safety is thought that
deals honestly with the inhumanity of the war. Granted that war in self-
defense is justifiable, we keep ourselves open to divine revelations
only as we refuse to glorify the inhuman. Only that nation can succeed
in war and remain open to revelation from above which recognizes the
inhumanity of war and refuses to glorify it.

Closely related to the blight of the spirit of this present world is the
failure to perceive the need of missionary spirit for a full grasp of
scriptural truth. Though the Bible was given to a peculiar people, self-
centered and exclusive, it nevertheless abounds in suggestions that its
content can be appreciated the full only by those whose sympathies run
out to men at the very ends of the earth. In the eyes of the Scriptures
a human being is a human being anywhere. The differences between men are
as nothing compared to the likenesses. Every revelation must begin
somewhere and must attack its problems in proper sequence, one after the
other; but mere priority of approach does not mean that one problem is
inherently more important than another. Leaders among the Jews early
tried to impress this upon the Jewish mind. Considered in its historical
setting, the book of Jonah is one of the most spiritually daring books
ever written. Jonah stands as a type of Jew who would not admit anything
of worth in human beings outside of Judaism. Rather than carry the word
of the Lord to Nineveh he would leave his country and go to Tarshish;
rather than turn back and resume the journey to Nineveh, he would
consent to be cast overboard in a storm. Forced at last to deliver his
message, he announced it with the grim satisfaction of expecting to see
Nineveh destroyed. And the final text of the book is that Jonah must
learn not merely to proclaim his message to the Ninevites, but to
proclaim his message with sympathy and genuine human interest. The Jews
were a long time learning the lesson, but not longer than other peoples
have been. Just because of the human interest involved, the missionary
impulse is necessary to a spiritual seizure of the biblical revelation.

It is important that we keep the missionary motive on the right basis.
It is true that the Scriptures will never be adequately appropriated
until all kindreds and peoples and tongues bring their contributions.
Some phases of the truth the Oriental mind must seize before the
Occidental mind can be brought to appreciate them. When the final
revelation comes it will be adapted to the understanding of any kindred
under heaven. It is worth while to spread the Christian revelation for
the sake of the return which the Christianized peoples will one day
bring to our studies of the truth. But the better motive is deeper than
this--the passion for human beings as human beings. Any human being is
entitled to any truth which another human being can reveal to him.

The approach must be the human approach. We must speedily get away from
the Jonah-like conceptions of the biblical revelation as intended
particularly for any one nation. One great danger from the present war
is the loss by the religious nations involved of the ordinary New
Testament point of view. Many of the fighting nations have lapsed back
into the pre-Jonah era. But the present war aside, the thought of
supreme truth as intended chiefly for a particular race or nation, leads
to a patronizing, condescending bearing toward other peoples which
thwarts the finer spiritual achievements. The contacts between the
so-called higher and so-called lower nations in military, diplomatic,
and commercial relations have thus far for the most part been
abominable. Too often missionary effort itself has based itself on these
same assumptions of racial superiority. A people may indeed receive
blessings from the Scriptures in whatever spirit they are bestowed, but
damage is wrought in the souls of the bestowers by the attitude of
superiority. The only genuinely biblical approach is one of respect--
respect for the peoples as peoples, respect which will have regard for
their growing independence in spiritual development, respect which will
not force upon them particularistic interpretations of the universal
Scriptures.

Now, all of this may seem like a long distance from a treatment of
understanding of the Scriptures in the ordinary sense. It would not have
been worth while, however, to discuss this problem merely from the point
of view of exegesis or professional commentary. The essentials about the
Scriptures are their relations to life, their views of human beings and
teachings concerning the forces of the spiritual kingdom. We shall
proceed in the other chapters to speak of God, of the revelation of God
in Christ, and of the spirit of Christ as revealed in his cross. Before
we enter upon that study we must again remind ourselves that only life
in harmony with the point of view of the Scriptures and only an interest
in the same human problems that engross the attention of spiritual
writers can avail us for vital interpretation of the teachings
concerning the Divine, or make intelligible to us the hold of the
Scriptures on the life of the world. The Bible is conceived in a spirit
of respect for men. Only those who enter into that same spirit can hope
to make much of the biblical revelation.




CHAPTER IV

THE BOOK OF GOD

We have remarked upon some points of view from which the student must
start in order to reach a sound understanding of the Scriptures. It is
time for us to ask ourselves, however, as to the dominant notes of the
Scriptures which make the Book so dynamic. The purpose of this chapter
is to show that the essentials of the Book are, after all, its teachings
about God. The Bible is the Book of God. Due chiefly to the ideas about
God are its uniqueness and its force.

Before advancing to the consideration of the Bible as a book about God
it will be well for us to glance for a moment at other grounds on which
supremacy for the Scriptures is sometimes claimed. There are those who
maintain that the value of the Bible lies in the wealth of information
which it gives us concerning the first days of the world's life. The
Bible helps us to regard sympathetically the view of the universe by the
ancient Hebrews. It is a repository of knowledge as to early science and
philosophy. Now, all this is true, but relatively unimportant. Had it
not been for the religious teachings of which the old-time view of the
world was the vehicle, that vehicle itself would long since have been
forgotten. Only archaeologists are to-day greatly interested in ancient
theories of the world as such.

There are, again, those who avow that the Bible deserves all praise
because of the literary excellence of its style. There are, indeed,
sublime passages to be forever cherished as entitled by their very
sublimity of expression to permanent place in the world's literature.
All this we most gladly admit. Oratory like that of the book of Isaiah,
some of the sentences of the patriarchs, passages from the Psalms or
from the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the thirteenth chapter of
Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, are sure of permanency in
literature no matter what may be anyone's opinion of their religious
content. Nobility of conception is very apt to tend toward nobility of
phrase. The expression may be admired for its own apart from the
substance; but to say that the Bible holds its throne as the Book of
books simply because of the superiority of its artistic form is woefully
aside from the mark. Lamentable as it may be, masses of men do not rank
artistic literary skill as highly as they ought. While a lofty idea is
not likely to make its full impression until wrought into lofty beauty
by a master of style, the worth must nevertheless inhere in the
substance rather than in the form if the statement is to make lasting
effect upon the passing generations. Moreover, it is very easy to
overemphasize the literary excellence of the Scriptures. There are
scores of passages which, as we say, "go through one," but this
marvelous effectiveness is quite as likely to belodged in the idea
itself and in the associations which that idea arouses as in the form of
the passage. In some instances the literary mold in the Authorized
Version is such as to hinder rather than to help; so that the prophet
who seeks to add to the force of the idea breaks the mold for literary
recasting.

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