STUDY IX. FUNDAMENTALS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. "From a babe thou hast known the sacred writings which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work." (2 Tim. iii. 15-17.) PART 7. WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A STUDENT at the University of Iowa came to ask how he could reconcile certain statements in the Old Testament which seemed to him to have a comparatively low moral standard with the statement that the Bible is a revelation from God. This student represents a very large class who are deeply troubled over this question. First, of course, I asked him to forget that he had ever thought of verbal inspiration. A verbal inspiration would be absolutely useless unless God had made a provision for a perfect preservation of the original documents and the stationary meaning of the original words. This had troubled him in former years, but not then. My judgment is that few who study these pages will find any one troubled about verbal inspiration. Then I asked him to set aside the idea that the Bible was absolutely infallible. By this I meant that we are not required to believe that no mistake can be found in the Bible. In order to have an infallible Bible we should have to have not only the infallible writers but infallible copyists and, what is very much more, infallible interpreters. There can be no absolute infallibility so long as every man interprets the Bible for himself, for no man is infallible. To meet this difficulty the Catholic Church has set up an infallible interpreter, but most of us think that interpreter intensely fallible. "What we need," I said to my questioner, "is not an infallible outward standard of truth in formal words, but such a picture of a Loving God and a Divine Saviour that men shall be able to believe in them and hence become new creatures. It is not necessary that every word in the Bible shall be rightly translated in order to set forth such a person." The main thing I wanted him to see was the God in the book, not the form of the book. In the third place, I tried to show him that the Bible is a progressive revelation. It grows brighter and better step by step. Christ said he had many things to tell his disciples, but they could not hear them yet. The purpose of God's revelation is to teach men, and you can no more begin teaching men final and ultimate religious truth than you can begin in the kindergarten teaching calculus and astronomy. "In other words," I said to my student friend, "God is as sensible as a kindergarten teacher, and begins with man where he finds him. Hence we cannot expect to find the highest and purest revelation in the Old Testament. The Bible is, it seems to me, the simple, beautiful record of the search of the hungry soul of man for the soul of God, and on the other side it is the strivings of the eager heart of God in the attempt to make himself known to men. If men have fallen short again and again in the attempt to find God, this does not make any less sacred the search. Or to put it a little differently, the Bible is the report of the great souls who have been experimenting in the field of God. Men in the Bible have gone to God, have tried to find out who he is and what is his character, and they have simply related to us their experience. Viewed in this way the Bible is the most marvelous book of experience in all the records of the world. In it the Jewish people have shared with us their sense of God, and in it men have reported to us their experiences as they searched for him. The Bible therefore does not stand or fall by some theory of inspiration; it has within itself its final and complete vindication. It vindicates itself because it has an advancing moral standard which culminates in the final principle of love. It vindicates itself because it increasingly reveals a person which finds its culmination in the complete and perfect person of Jesus. It vindicates itself in that it sets forth the reports of men who, having accepted these standards of morals, have found power to live in them through this perfect personality with whom they found themselves drawn into an ever closer fellowship. The Bible is the one unique book, because in it we live with men who have found God. STUDY X. HELPING MEN SOLVE DIFFICULTIES ABOUT CHRIST. "Which of you convicteth me of sin? If I say truth, why do ye not believe me?" (John viii. 46.) "But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats." (Matt. xxv. 31, 32.) PART 1. CHRIST THE PERFECT MAN. In an earlier study I have referred to a relative of Robert Ingersoll who came to talk about the facts of Christianity. It was necessary to go into detail with him about the person of Christ, and you will remember the result was that a year later he said he was intellectually persuaded that Christ was the Son of God. Here was a man who took nothing for granted, so what helped him may serve you in dealing with men who are unsettled about the person of Christ. First of all, I set forth to this student the fact of Christ's sinlessness. Morally he was the one perfect man. He was convinced that the nations would be judged in accordance with their attitude toward his person. This would be impossible to any save a perfect person. But not only was Christ himself conscious of being without sin; the disciples believed him to be so. St. Paul speaks of him as "him who knew no sin." St. Paul, better than any man of his time, knew the thought of all Christ's disciples, and he was fully persuaded that Christ was a perfect man. The whole world has united in the verdict that he was sinless so far as act goes. Renan, the great French skeptic, |