Biblical studies

“ Of all the contributions to the study of the Scriptures with which research, scholarship and thought have enriched our age, none are more fruitful than those which belong to the province of Biblical Theology. Strange as it may appear, while the Bible has been the final authority appealed to in the teaching of dogmatic Theology all down the ages, Biblical Theology is a new science, undreamed of by all but comparatively recent [52] scholars. ”

“ They make it possible to study biblical history as an unbroken unit from the days of Moses to the close of the first Christian century, and thus concretely to emphasize the significant but often the forgotten fact that God was revealing himself unceasingly through the life of his people, and that the Bible which records that revelation consists not of two disconnected parts but is one book. ”

“ It is universally admitted that it ought to present what is taught in the Bible as to the origin, nature, faculties, states, processes, and future development of the human spirit, and also elicit the conceptions implied and pre-supposed in the Biblical statements on these points. ”

“ And that is the sort of truth which we find in the Bible. It is a textbook of religion, not a textbook of biology or astronomy or geology. Moreover, it is just exactly the Biblical spiritual truth concerning God which rings clearly and unmistakably through every theory of theistic evolution. With it modern science is in perfect accord. ”

“ The central truths of Christianity are always the same; but Biblical criticism, the comparative study of Hebrew or Christian epochs, the domain of doctrinal thought, are growths of the human mind, and every advance has been the fruit of experimental searching. ”

“ Of course, the defense, as lawyers, take no position on the truth of the stories of the Bible, but we wish to slate that we should be able to prove from learned Biblical scholars that the Bible is both a literal and figurative document, that God speaks by parables, allegories, sometimes literally and sometimes spiritually. ”

“ The man who really believes in the inspiration of the Bible ought not to be afraid of such a test. He may rest assured {163} that the comparative study of biblical literature and biblical religion will prove one of the things that work together for good to all those who have a living faith in God.
An exhaustive discussion of the subject of this chapter would involve a study of all the great historical religions, known better to-day than ever before, and a comparison of them with the religion of the Old Testament. ”

“ How strange that so few Christian people care to study these sublime revelations, which tell us how true and faithful our God is and which make it so clear and plain that the Bible is divine, the Word of God. May He teach us, who love these truths, who love Him and His appearing, who is not only Our Hope but Israel’s Hope as well, may He teach us more and more to know His thoughts and purposes and to find our delight in them. ”

“ These interpretations are really human inventions—the product of the ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and imaginatively ”

“ Let us recognise the important difference between the Bible subjectively and objectively—that is, between what the Bible really is and what men think it is. Let us be free enough, bold enough, and wise enough, to claim the Bible itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For all serious biblical study, the stages in the growth of the written traditions and the historical circumstances which they imply, must inevitably be carefully considered, and upon the result depends, directly or indirectly, almost every subject of Old Testament investigation. ”

“ A formal appeal to the Bible as the one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. ”

“ If we find in the Bible any plain, intelligible teaching of God, will it do to set up our reason against the teaching of Him, who is infinite reason and infinite wisdom?
If any truth is plain in the Bible, is it not that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in human flesh or in fashion as a man by his sufferings on the cross made atonement for the sins of the world? ”

“ The professor may now safely pass on to the use of Scripture in matters of theology. On this head it must be observed that, in addition to the usual reasons which make ancient writings more or less difficult to understand, there are some which are peculiar to the Bible. For the language of the Bible is employed to express, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, many things which are beyond the power and scope of the reason of man—that is to say, divine mysteries and all that is related to them. ”

“ The Bible, as a revelation from God, was not designed to give us all the information we might desire, nor to solve all the questions about which the human soul is perplexed, but to impart enough to be a safe guide to the haven of eternal rest. ”

“ The third theory, which is a modification of the second, is that of essential inspiration, which distinguishes matters of doctrine and conduct as closely related to God’s purpose in the Scriptures from the remaining contents of the Scripture, and claims for the Bible only such inspiration as was necessary to secure accuracy in regard to these. The theology and the morality of the Bible are inspired, but not its history, science, philosophy. ”

“ This new conception, thus answering to the historico-psychological reality of the development of the human mind, by distinguishing what in the Bible is religious and moral truth—the special object of its teaching—from what is merely explanation and development of it, avails providentially to save its veracity, its inerrancy, its inspiration. ”

“ We notice that the Bible, when speaking of God, never gives an opinion, never speculates. It always, in simple and majestic measure declares, as in the opening sentence of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” ”

“ In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. ”

“ Then I began the Bible, determined in my own mind to know whether God or man was the author. I spent the greater part of two years in reading and comparing scripture with scripture, prophecy with history, and I had not gone half through with the reading of it, before I was perfectly satisfied of its divine origin. No mortal man, or men, could have written with such harmony, wisdom, and truth, without inspiration. The Bible answered all my inquiries, settled all my doubts, established my faith, and gave me hope which has been nearly or quite twenty-seven years an anchor to my soul. ”

“ God designed the Bible to be a lesson-book to all mankind, in childhood, youth, and manhood, and to be studied through all time. He gave His word to men as a revelation of Himself. Every new truth discerned is a fresh disclosure of the character of its Author. The study of the Scriptures is the means divinely ordained to bring men into closer connection with their Creator, and to give them a clearer knowledge of His will. ”

“ For, if this were so, if science spoke true that, the miracle of life set a-going, there had been no further intervention on the part of the Creator, then the very head-and-corner stone of the Christian faith, the Bible itself, was shaken. ”

“ It is true that we do well to emphasize the strictly religious and practical purpose of the Bible; that the Bible is interested in both nature and history so far and only so far as either reveals God and inspires to godly living. It is true that in all Christian thinking Christ is our ultimate appeal. ”

“ Speaking practically, and looking at the very large part of human life engaged by the Bible, at the comparatively small part unengaged by it, we are quite willing, like the churches, to call the Bible and its religion all-important. ”

“ Though the Bible is not mere history or mere literature, it nevertheless has to do with history, and it is literature in the highest sense of the word. It has a human element as well as a Divine element; and how far the books are human and how far Divine is the great Scripture problem. ”

“ This is all that doubt and investigation have done to the Bible. They have cleared away the things that no sane and earnest and devout mind wishes to keep; and they have restored to us in all their dignity and beauty and sweetness and power the real human Bible, the Bible which poured out of the heart of the olden time, and which is in all its truth and sweetness, so far as they go, a revelation of the divinest things in human thought and human dream. ”

“ The New Testament comes to stand, thus, in no merely external and mechanically authoritative relation to the life and faith of the church, but in the most interior and vital relation. And Bible study gets a new significance for us, as we see it, as at one and the same time our chief way to our own vision of God's actual, concrete self-revelation, and our deliverance from our merely subjective dreaming. We come to share in some living way the vision of these others who have seen most directly and most largely. ”

“ For the old-time friends of the Bible, the night of darkness and doubt is rapidly passing; the morning of a fuller knowledge and a fuller confidence is at hand. Gone are those agonies of doubt regarding the truthfulness of the Bible's history and the adequacy of its ethics for the needs of our modern world. ”

“ The many-sidedness of the Bible, its appeal to man's whole nature, is one of the most marked proofs of its superhuman origin. While it addresses itself continually to man's moral nature, to his sense of right and wrong, while it appeals to his intellect and heart, it also speaks to his fears and hopes. ”

“ We believe that the study of the New Testament in this way is the true road by which men can arrive at the truth concerning God's justice, holiness and mercy, and concerning human sin and salvation from sin. It is also the road by which we can arrive at such knowledge of the mode of the Divine existence and God's one revelation of Himself to the human understanding as our finite minds are able to grasp. We may well press home the question. What are Jesus Christ's claims ? ”

“ The fuller knowledge of our age, in evanishing the unreal Bible restores the real Bible. It is the record of the visioning and embodiment of the Human Ideal, the Divine Image—The Christ. It is the Providentially prepared Hand Book of religion in whose rich and varied phases of ethical and spiritual thought all men may find the nourishment they need. ”

“ Before any of the New Testament Scriptures existed, there were a great many Christians in Judaea, Samaria and the pagan world, for the Christian faith was not spread by the reading of the Scriptures, but by the living word and teaching of the apostles and their disciples, or, in other words, by the Church as a teacher. 2. If the infallible Church were not at hand to enlighten us, we could not know for certain what books belong to the inspired Scriptures, nor could we be sure that the Bible, as we have it, is complete and unfalsified. ”

“ This is the Gospel which has been taught to us to-day, in a plain and simple manner, and in that simplicity that it was taught by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, and by many others who were ordained by them. The people profess to believe the Bible; the whole Christian world profess to believe that book—to believe that it is the Bible, but do they believe what is in that Bible? ”

“ Reason is the guide that leads to the temple of revelation. There is an overwhelming mass of evidence, external and internal, to convince any unprejudiced mind that the Bible is the word of God. Prophecies accomplished, types fulfilled, the divine Spirit breathed through the pages, the unearthly perfection of One character there portrayed, with superhuman knowledge of the frailties and requirements of man ”

“ No book has spread more discord than the Bible. Every sect in the world quotes the Bible as the source and justification of its existence. Men, equally learned, devout, prayerful, deduce the most opposite conclusions from the very same words. Two men, we will say, honestly and earnestly seek to know what the Bible teaches about Baptismal Regeneration, or the Blessed Sacrament. ”

“ Ye have taken from us a Bible which we reverenced to idolatry but in many parts did not understand, and have given to us a Bible which, with undiminished claims to reverence, awakens in our minds a real, rational interest to which hitherto we have been comparative strangers. ”

“ He that cannot watch the God of the Bible, and the salvation of the Bible, gradually and on an immense scale discovering themselves and becoming, will insist on seeing them ready-made, and in such precise and reduced dimensions as may suit his narrow mind. ”

“ Laying aside all prejudices, if we look into the Bible in a general way, as into other books, we find facts which force the conclusion upon us, that the Bible is a human work, as much as the Principia of Newton or Descartes, or the Vedas and Koran. Some things are beautiful and true, but others no man, in his reason, can accept. ”