THE CHURCH'S CALL TO THE STUDY

OF THE BIBLE

CHURCH HOUSE. TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 23

THE BISHOP OF ELY IN THE CHAIR

THE WORD OF GOD

By WILLIAM PORCHER DU BOSE, M.A., S.T.D., Professor of Exegesis in the University of the South.

The permanence of Christianity, the fulfilment of our Lord's promise that He shall be with us to the end of the world, rests or depends, as the case may be, upon four conditions. That is to say, these four conditions are matters of contingency or of certitude according as we look upon them from the standpoint of speculation or of faith.

In the first place, the permanence of Christianity rests upon the amount of truth or reality that belongs to it in itself. If He Who is the embodiment and expression to us of Christianity is in fact all that He is in our faith, the Incarnate Word of God-the divine expression to us, not only of both God and ourselves, but of the consummated oneness of God and ourselves-then in that truth we have the ground of our assurance that He is a permanent part as of ourselves, so also in the life of the world. Our Lord entrusted His truth to its own power of self-verification; the work His Father had given Him to accomplish in the world, the work actually accomplished by Him in the world, that was to be His witness that He was from God. After two millenniums of trial, we do not admit that Christianity still awaits the results of further experimentation to settle the question of its truth. We do not doubt the future of Christianity, because we do not question the truth of Jesus Christ.

What we need now is not, in behalf of Christianity, to know that it is essentially and eternally true, but, in behalf of ourselves, better to understand and more fully to agree wherein it is true essentially and eternally.

There are certain ideas or conceptions that are now to us so inevitable and necessary parts of religion as to appear a priori self-evident. We could no longer conceive of religion otherwise than in terms of Incarnation. The consummated relation between God and man, man and God, will be henceforth unthinkable apart from that unity of both realized for us and manifested to us in the Divine-human Person of Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation of God is not in Christ alone, but in humanity in Him. There could be no Incarnation including us and our

part in it, which should not involve a process of bringing us into the spiritual and moral oneness with God necessary to His being one with us. There could be no incarnation without atonement, in the New Testament sense, God in Christ reconciling us to Himself, and equally we in Christ reconciled unto God.

The end of incarnation and atonement can be none other than, negatively, our redemption from sin and death; and, positively, our completion in holiness and life.

These four truths or facts of human experience, incarnation, atonement, redemption, completion, may be taken as constituting the process of human salvation, and so realizing and expressing the function of religion; which is, not alone theoretically to reveal, but practically and actually to effect, or to enable us to effect, the whole truth of life and destiny.

Now Jesus Christ is the perfect symbol to us of all these realities of spiritual experience. We accept Him as the divine revelation or manifestation to us of them, because, as a matter of fact, we find in Him the human realization and fulfilment of them. The only immediate and direct, all-expressing and all-effecting word of God is the Incarnate Word of God. To know the living and true God, and Jesus Christ Whom He has sent, in Whom He has not only fully revealed but wholly given Himself, is the substance of divine truth, as it is the sum of eternal life. Jesus Christ recapitulates in Himself the whole evolution of human nature, life, and destiny. We should need no word of God beyond Him, if without further word He could be livingly presented to the intelligence, the affection, and the acceptance of us all.

But, as things are, we do stand in need of further word from God, and that can be furnished no otherwise than through the personal witness or testimony of those to whom the Incarnate Word was first and immediately given and revealed. The truth .and consequent permanence of Christianity depends then or rests, in the second place, upon the claim of the Written Word, or the Scriptures, to be the true and the sufficient record of the Incarnate Word-Whom we know, and can know, only through it. I have nothing to say here of past or future criticism of our Christian Scriptures, except to know that it must, and to desire that it shall, have its perfect work, and accomplish that for which it is sent. But, whatever that may be, faith can surely, at this stage, have no fear as to the truth and the sufficiency of the witness of the Gospels, of St. Paul, of the New Testament as a whole, to the historical reality as well as to the spiritual and divine truth of Jesus Christ. Our knowledge of Him now rests upon too much more than only even that testimony to admit of serious fear for it. We have criteria of the inherent and essential truth of Christ and Christianity, which are now, to a certain extent, independent of their records; however, they were, in the first instance, and are still also, otherwise dependent upon them. To the spiritual consciousness that knows Christ, and

in proportion as it knows Him, the self-evidence and necessity of the truth as it is in Him, and as it is reflected from the pages of the New Testament, ceases to be only the evidence of the records, and becomes itself an evidence of the substantial truth of the records. The proof is itself proved by the tested and self-evidencing truth of that which it proves. Criticism makes the most of the diversity of voices, and the variety of points of view in the composite Record of Christianity. The spiritual unity and wholeness that underlie all this variety and diversity, only need and await adequate understanding and exposition to make them evident to the faith open enough and large enough to receive them.

The evidence, then, for the whole truth of Jesus Christ is a cumulation of reasons, meanings, and experiences, which so stand together and mutually confirm and verify one another that the true essential faith of Christendom is not going to be permanently shaken except in the minds of those who do not adequately know or sufficiently possess it. I do not mean to say that the faith of us all will not again and again be shaken, and shaken to the fall of all of us who have not the divine security against falling. I have no doubt but that the faith of the time needs to be shaken, in order that much that does not truly belong to it may be shaken off, and only that which cannot be shaken may remain. But the real truth of Jesus Christ and of Christianity stands upon too many distinct grounds of corroborative evidence and verification to be disturbed by the temporary questioning or uncertainty of any one or more of them.

The Written Word is the ever necessary and ever valid testimony of those to whom we owe our knowledge of Christ. But it is the word of men who have been long dead, and which itself lives still only in the perpetuation of their life in us who are at any time alive. There is always the Living Word of the Church; and the permanence of Christianity depends, in the third place, upon the continued truth of that utterance, its fidelity to the Written Word, and through that to the immediate and Incarnate Word of God. The truth of the Church-as Organized or Organic Christianity, as Christ in humanity, and equally not alone in Himself, and not only in individual human souls-is a condition, quite on a par with the others, of the fulfilment of the promise to be with us always. The question, Where is the Church? may be a real one, and even, for the time, a difficult if not an unanswerable one. But, nevertheless, the Church exists, and exists as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. There is truth and reality, as there is hope and promise, in the growing instinct and disposition among us to be weary and ashamed of our superficial and individualistic differences and separations, and to come back together upon our essential oneness and agreement in Christ and in God. There is an actual One Truth, and a possible One Order large enough to include all holy diversities of gifts and operations; and a real

One Life and Worship in which all our voices may join and our hearts beat together in a common current with God and one another. We may be looking for the Church in diverse directions, behind us or before, on the right hand or on the left, in submission to authority or in the freedom of consent. The thing is that we shall be looking for it; and if we are really looking, and looking for really It-the unity of the Body, which is the only actuality of the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peaceif, I say, we are really looking for this, and just so truly as we are looking for it, it will come, and come more or less speedily and completely. Meantime, the Church is here, and we are in it, and not only in our own little section or sect of it. We are Churchmen, not in the sense of a particular Church, but of the Church which is the Body of Christ, and which Christ fills with Himself, Who is our Life. Baptism into Him is a divine reality of unity with Him and with one another in Him. And communion with Him in the oneness of the common life of God and us is a verifiable act and reality of experience, too old, too universal, too proved and accepted by Christian consent, to be haled at this late day before the bar of a judgement which, so long as it is itself outside of it, is alike incapable of knowing and of judging it.

There is one other aspect or stage of the Word of God, stopping short of which it will have been Incarnate, Written, or Spoken in vain. It is the Word not only Spoken, but Heard and Done; not only Living and Life-giving, but Lived. And that involves a condition of its permanence which would seem to be much more contingent and uncertain than those we have been considering. However the Word may have been admitted to be true in Christ, in the Scriptures, in the Church as the outward and authoritative Institution of it, what assurance can we have that Christianity shall continue to live always in the inward faith and life of men in the world? However formally and potentially true and life-giving in itself, may not the Church be or become actually dead through lack of correspondence and response on the part of those who are its proper and only material and subjects? May there not be a time, and that time very soon, when if Christ should come He would find no faith upon the earth?

The answer to these questionings will, I think, if deeply enough considered, set our minds at rest upon this last point also. After all, Christianity comes to its true end and place only in the heart and life of humanity, in the men of this world for whom Christ lived and died, for whom the Scriptures have preserved their record of Him, to whom the Church speaks and ministers in His name. The truth and life of Christ are the truth and life of humanity, and of every man. So long as we look for God or Christ, or the eternal Spirit, Who is the only true life of men, only outside ourselves and outside what we ourselves are in and through them, we shall never

find the certitude we desire. Our assurance that the world will never lose Christ and Christianity is to be found in the imperishable humanness and truth of the cry, which is that of humanity and not only of one man: "O Lord, Thou hast made me for Thyself, and my heart will not find rest until it rest in Thee!"

THE DEVOTIONAL STUDY OF THE BIBLE

By the VERY REV. A. F. KIRKPATRICK, D.D., Dean of Ely.

1. What do we understand by "The Devotional Study of the Bible"? Is it not such a study as will teach us to know God and to know ourselves, that we may have fellowship with God, and gain from Him the power to order our lives according to His holy will, bringing mind, affections, will, in fact our whole selves, into harmony with it? It is a pursuit of truth, worthy and desirable for its own sake; but it has also a most practical aim. Such knowledge is power. Truth known and believed must find expression in life.

2. The central and final revelation of the knowledge of God and the destiny of man has been made in the Person of Jesus Christ. We must study not only how that revelation was recorded and interpreted by those who "beheld His glory", but what was the antecedent preparation which made it possible. All holy Scripture is written for our instruction, not the New Testament only. The New Testament is rooted in the history, the thought, the language, of the Old Testament. The New Testament is the verification of the Old Testament; but without the Old Testament the New Testament would be an isolated and unexplained phenomenon. And so our devotional study must include the Old Testament. But not a few are asking anxiously nowadays, whether modern views of the Old Testament have not destroyed or at least seriously impaired this use of it. To some of us it seems that the message of the Old Testament has become far clearer and more intelligible than it once was; but I want to try to point out how the broad features of that message are not and cannot be affected by research into the character of its records.

3. It is well to distinguish the devotional and religious study of the Bible from the historical and theological study of it. They are indeed most intimately connected together, for devotional study must depend on and gain from theological study, and theological study must, if it is worth anything, be devotional. But the methods are different. For theological study it is essential to trace development; for devotional study we may begin with results. Thus, for example, theologically the first chapter of Genesis may have to be regarded as the result of many centuries of thought; from the devotional point of view, it places us at once in the right position for the study of all that is to follow: it furnishes the key to the whole, and it is not necessary for us to retrace the steps by which the result has been attained.