William Robertson Smith

“ So it is with the Bible. The supreme truths which speak to every believing heart, the way of salvation which is the same in all ages, the clear voice of God's love so tender and personal and simple that a child can understand it these are things which must abide with us, and prove themselves mighty from age to age apart from all scientific study. But those who love the truth will not shrink from any toil that can help us to a fuller insight into all its details and all its setting ”

“ But, on the other hand, you must remember that all truth is one, that the God who gave us the Bible has also given us faculties of reason and gifts of scholarship with which to study the Bible, and that the true meaning of Scripture is not to be measured by preconceived notions, but determined as the result of legitimate research. Only of this I am sure at the outset, that the Bible does speak to the heart of man in words that can only come from God that no historical research can deprive me of this conviction, or make less precious the divine utterances that speak straight to the heart. ”

“ Yet the history of Israel, when rightly studied, is the most real and vivid of all histories, and the proofs of God's working among His people of old may still be made, what they were in time past, one of the strongest evidences of Christianity. It was no blind chance, and no mere human wisdom, that shaped the growth of Israel's religion, and finally stamped it in these forms, now so strange to us, which preserved the living seed of the Divine word till the fulness of the time when He was manifested who transformed the religion of Israel into a religion for all mankind. ”

“ To try to suppress the human side of the Bible, in the interests of the purity of the Divine Word, is as great a folly as to think that a father's talk with his child can be best reported by leaving out everything which the child said, thought, and felt.
The first condition of a sound understanding of Scripture is to give full recognition to the human side, to master the whole situation and character and feelings of each human interlocutor who has a part in the drama of Revelation. Nay the whole business of scholarly exegesis lies with this human side. ”

“ But it would be absurd to suppose that the men who refused to accept the authority of Christian tradition as to the number of books in the canon, the best text of the Old Testament, or the principles upon which that text is to be translated, adopted it as a principle of faith that the Jewish tradition upon all these points is final. ”

“ The Bible was never wholly withdrawn from the laity, and the preaching of the Word was the characteristic office of the Friars, and the great source of that popular influence which they strained to the uttermost against the Reformation. The real importance of Luther's work was not that he put the Bible into the hands of the laity, but that he vindicated for the Word a new use and a living interest which made it impossible that it should not be read by them. We are not disciples of the Reformation merely because we have the Bible in our hands, and appeal to it as the supreme judge. ”

“ In a word, it is the business of the critic to trace back the steps by which any ancient book has been transmitted to us, to find where it came from and who wrote it, to examine the occasion of its composition, and search out every link that connects it with the history of the ancient world and with the personal life of the author. ”

“ In all true religion the new rests upon the old. No one, then, to whom Christianity is a reality can safely acquiesce in an unreal conception of the Old Testament history; and in an age when all are interested in historical research, no apologetic can prevent thoughtful minds from drifting away from faith if the historical study of the Old Covenant is condemned by the Church and left in the hands of unbelievers. ”

“ This point of view is a survival of the mediaeval exegesis which buried the true sense of Scripture. Of course, as long as you hold that the whole worth of Revelation lies in abstract doctrines, supernaturally communicated to the intellect and not to the heart, the idea that there is a human life in the Bible is purely disturbing. But if the Bible sets forth the personal converse of God with man, it is absolutely essential to look at the human side. The prophets and psalmists were not mere impassive channels through whose lips or pens God poured forth an abstract doctrine. ”

“ All that earthly study and research can do for the reader of Scripture is to put him in the position of the man to whose heart God first spoke. What is more than this lies beyond our wisdom. It is only the Spirit of God that can make the Word a living word to our hearts, as it was a living word to him who first received it. ”

“ The ecclesiastical canon—the standard of doctrinal interpretation based on the supposed consent of the apostolic churches—had, as we have seen, been first invented in order to get over the ambiguities of the allegorical method of interpretation. When Luther taught the people that the Bible can be understood like any other book, that the true meaning of its words is the natural sense which appeals to ordinary Christian intelligence, it was plain that for him this whole method of ecclesiastical tradition as the rule of exegesis no longer had any meaning or value. ”

“ Historical criticism may be defined without special reference to the Bible, for it is applicable, and is daily applied without dispute, to every ancient literature and every ancient history. The critical study of ancient documents means nothing else than the careful sifting of their origin and meaning in the light of history. The first principle of criticism is that every book bears the stamp of the time and circumstances in which it was produced. An ancient book is, so to speak, a fragment of ancient life ”

“ Every Christian takes home words of promise, of comfort, or of warning, by putting himself in the place of the first hearers of the Word, and uses the Bible devotionally by borrowing the answer spoken by the faith of apostles or psalmists. And the diligent reader soon learns that the profit of these exercises is proportioned to the accuracy with which he can compare his situations and needs with those underlying the text which he appropriates. But the systematic study of Scripture must rise above the merely instinctive use of sound principles. ”

“ We are aware that some passages are obscure, and we do not claim divine certitude for the interpretation that we put on them. But we are apt to forget that the influence of human and traditional interpretation goes much further than a few obscure passages. Our general views of the Bible history, our way of looking, not merely at passages, but at whole books, are coloured by things which we have learned from men, and which have no claim to rest on the self-evidencing divine Word. ”

“ Accordingly, the first business of the Reformation theologian is not to crystallise Bible truths into doctrines, but to follow, in all its phases, the manifold inner history of the religious life which the Bible unfolds. It is his business to study every word of Scripture, not merely by grammar and logic, but in its relation to the life of the writer, and the actual circumstances in which God's Word came to him. ”

“ All means of grace, all sacraments, have value only in so far as they bring to us a personal Word, that Word which is contained in the gospel and incarnate in our Lord. The supreme value of the Bible does not lie in the fact that it is the ultimate source of theology, but in the fact that it contains the whole message of God's love, that it is the personal message of that love to me, not doctrine but promise, not the display of God's metaphysical essence, but of His redeeming purpose ”

“ The ordinary laws of evidence and good sense must be our guides. For the transmission of the Bible is not due to a continued miracle, but to a watchful Providence ruling the ordinary means by which all ancient books have been handed down. And finally, when we have worked our way back through the long centuries which separate us from the age of Revelation, we must, as we have already seen, study each writing and make it speak for itself on the common principles of sound exegesis. ”

“ It is limited for every individual by the limitations of his own religious experience. Reading the Bible in this way, a man comes to a very personal appreciation of so much of God's truth as is in immediate contact with the range of his own life. But he is sure to miss many truths which belong to another range of experience, and to read into the inspired page things from his own experience which involve human error. No man's inner life is so large, so perfectly developed, in a word so normal, that it can be used as a measure of the fulness of the Bible. ”

“ All the books of the Apocrypha are comparatively modern. There is none of them, on the most favourable computation, which can be supposed to be older than the latest years of the Persian empire. They belong, therefore, to the age when the last great relicrious movement of the Old Testament under Ezra had passed away when prophecy had died out, and the nation had settled down to live under the Law, looking for guidance in religion, not to a continuance of new revelation, but to the written Word, and to the interpretations of the Scribes. ”

“ Not, as is sometimes superficially imagined, by placing the infallible Bible in room of the infallible Church, but by a change in the whole conception of faith, of the plan and purpose of revelation, and of the operation of the means of grace.
Saving faith, says Luther, is not an intellectual assent to a system of doctrine superior to reason, but a personal trust on God in Christ, the appropriation of God's personal word and promise of redeeming love. ”

“ And for a different reason the same thing is true of many passages of the prophetical and poetical books, where the language is so obscure, and the train of thought so difficult to grasp, that even the best scholars, with every help which philology can offer, will not venture to affirm that they possess a certain interpretation. Difficulties of this sort are not confined to a few corners of the Bible. They run through the whole volume, and force themselves on the attention of every one who desires to understand any book of the Bible as a whole. ”

“ The current treatment of the Old Testament has produced a widespread uneasy suspicion that this history cannot bear to be tested like other ancient histories. The old method of explaining difficulties and reconciling apparent contradictions would no longer be tolerated in dealing with other books, and men ask themselves whether our Christian faith, the most precious gift of truth which God has given us, can safely base its defence on arguments that bring no sense of reality to the mind. ”

“ In a word, the Bible is a book of Experimental Religion, in which the converse of God with His people is depicted in all its stages up to the full and abiding manifestation of saving love in the person of Jesus Christ. ”

“ It is of the first importance that the reader should realise that Biblical Criticism is not the invention of modern scholars, but the legitimate interpretation of historical facts. I have tried, therefore, to keep the facts always in the foreground, and, when they are derived from ancient books not in every one's hands, I have either given full citations, or made careful reference to the original authorities.
The great value of historical criticism is that it makes the Old Testament more real to us. Christianity can never separate itself from its historical basis on the Religion of Israel ”

“ This is exactly what Protestant principles direct us to do with the several parts of the Bible. We have to go back step by step, and retrace the history of the sacred volume up to the first origin of each separate writing which it contains. In doing this we must use every light that can be brought to bear on the subject. Every fact is welcome, whether it come from Jewish tradition, or from a comparison of old MSS. and versions, or from an examination of the several books with one another and of each book in its own inner structure. ”

“ It is the inner history of the converse of God with man that gives the Bible its peculiar worth. The story of God's grace is expounded to us by psalmists, prophets, and apostles, as they realised it in their own lives. For the progress of Revelation was not determined arbitrarily. No man can learn anything aright about God and His love, unless the new truth come home to his heart and grow into his life. ”

“ I leave it to the consciences of those dignitaries and leaders of the English and Scottish churches who have refused and still refuse to study the modern criticism, to determine whether their lofty indifference to matters that have been to every diligent student of the Scriptures the cause of great searchings of heart, is indeed a fruit of surer faith and truer insight than is given to those who bear the burden and heat of the day in the field of Biblical study ”