USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 7
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Having this conception of religious education in mind, then, what has the modern historical study of the Bible to say on the general subject of religious education ? It has to say, first, that the Bible is the natural text-book for such study of religion. It is this natural text-book because it furnishes the mind with the facts of the reli- gious development of the people from whom we have our heritage, through whom there have come to civilized humanity the highest reach of the religious life and the finest culture of the spirit which we have yet attained. We are dealing with the highest development of religion when we study the Bible; it is, therefore, the natural text-book for education in religion. It furnishes the children whom we would instruct with the best material for understanding the facts of religious life, and those conceptions of God and duty and destiny which have hallowed the lives of other men, and which have led the many generations in the path of right and duty.
Furthermore, the modern historical study of the Scriptures offers the Bible as the natural text-book for religious education, because the Bible, more than any other agency, is competent to awaken in the child for himself those conceptions of God and duty and destiny which are really the aim and end of religious education. The religion of Israel, which has culminated in Chris- tianity, is a growth of the human soul in the experience of life with God. As we read the Bible we find that we
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are dealing with the lives of men, strong, passionate men, who by some process or other have come under the dominion of the thought of God, have been brought into the path of duty as they conceived duty; men who linked their souls with God in order to attain success in that path of duty, and who found their life's balance and compensation in the destiny which they believed was involved in their relation to God and their fidelity to the duty which they regarded as God's will. Such a record of life has in it the power to beget in the minds of those who become familiar with it a similar life. Modern his- torical study, therefore, says that in a religious education the Bible is the natural text-book, because it furnishes the facts, and it furnishes the stimulus, for the formation in those taught of the fundamental religious conceptions of God, of duty, and of destiny.
Modern historical study, let it also be said, in offering the Bible as a text-book, calls positive attention to the fact that our religion is not the religion of a book. This it emphasizes because of the very wide currency of the opposite opinion. The post-Reformation period set before man as his ultimate authority in religion an infal- lible book. It did this in order to have a final court of appeal before which all the ideas, theories, doctrines, and modes of life could be brought for judgment. It is a very convenient standard of judgment for questions con- cerning religious thought and conduct ; and the idea that Christianity is a religion of a book very rapidly took possession of earnest minds. Modern historical study of the Bible has discovered, however, that the religion of a book is precisely the thing which Jesus had to contend with in his controversies with the scribes. Pharisaism was a conception of religion marvelously parallel to the thought which very many men even now hold concerning Christianity. God has spoken once in the law; the business of the religious teacher is simply
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to interpret that law; the law stands for God; it mediates between the soul and God. That was the wineskin in which the old wine was held in Jesus' day, and it held the old wine to people's great satisfaction. The peculi- arity of the mission of Jesus and of his apostles was expressed in his declaration that the new wine is too strong for the old wineskins. The idol he had to shatter was the idea of the religion of a book. When the Phari- sees came to him asking, "Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?" they quoted a precept of the old law. He said, in reply: "Moses for the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives," and in those words tore apart all the theories of ultimacy which they attached to the book as the final word for their religious life. Jesus penetrated through to something underneath the letter of the book. He read the book in the light of a living personal response to the conceptions of God, of duty, and of destiny.
Modern historical study of the Bible brings clearly to the mind Jesus' constant opposition to, because of his relentless opposition by, the religion of a book. Such study puts us at the feet of Jesus in order to learn that the study of the Bible is not the ultimate thing in reli- gious education. We are not simply to cram the chil- dren's heads with interpretations, wise or foolish, of cer- tain past ages, nor with the facts of the story and of the development of Christianity, if you please, believing that there the end has been attained. The end is never attained until you have awakened in the individual life such conceptions of God, of duty, and of destiny as will enable the growing mind to look freely upon that book and understand it from the high vantage point of spirit- ual independence which Jesus marked out as the heritage of the human soul.
Modern historical study of the Bible lifts its voice in protest against the conception that Christianity is the
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religion of a book. Its protest is not negative, however, for it asserts as clearly that Christianity is a religion with a book. What do we mean when we say that Christianity is a religion with a book ? We mean, what was pointed out a moment ago, that the Bible furnishes the natural facts for. the awakening of the ideas of God, of duty, and of destiny, which are essential to the devel- opment of a religious life. It does this, because it is the record of religious life. What are those passages of the Bible which most often appeal to the human spirit ? In answer, there come before the memory Moses' vision of God; the Deuteronomic command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart;" Isaiah's vision; Ezekiel's word, "The soul that sinneth shall die;" the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians; nearly every word of Jesus. Do we care a whit [when these things were written, by whom and for whom they were written? They belong to the human spirit and they are the utterances of life. That is the reason why the Bible offers the natural sources out of which the true concepts of God, of duty, and of destiny will be developed in the soul that is given the opportunity to contemplate them. Such experiences out of the lives of these great leaders of Israel offer us the opportunity to understand some of the most subtle developments of the people's life; to see how the people as a people grew under the leadership of its masters in the knowledge of God and of duty and of destiny.
The historical study of the Bible, however, is not a study of archæology; it is not investigation of things that are past and belong to museums; it is the study of life; and it is because a life breathes there, the past life, which by the providence of God was led into the deepest knowledge of the things unseen, that the Bible is the natural and best means of developing in the conscious- ness of ourselves and of our children those conceptions
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of God, duty, and destiny which are essential to religious education.
Christianity is a religion with a book, because the Bible supplies the natural stimulus for the awakening of these conceptions personally in the minds of those who study it. It is one thing to put religious facts objec- tively before the mind, and examine them as a scientist examines his specimens. That is a natural phase of religious education ; but it is true, as Dr. King has just said, that the response of a soul to another soul is the most powerful means of calling out a living religious experience. The fact that the Bible brings us into close contact with the most significant religious experiences of the godliest human spirits makes it second only to such personal contact with a soul that walks with God, the best means of awakening in a child those personal responses to the thought of God, of duty, and of destiny which make actual religion.
Then, too, the Bible is so intimately identified with Christianity that we can call our religion a religion with a book, because the book furnishes to us still a standard. If it is true that modern historical study has led to the recedence of the theory of inspiration, it is equally true that that study is furnishing us with a vastly more effect- ive conception of competent spiritual authority in the Scriptures- not the authority of an infallible standard over us, but the authority of a spiritual, actual, masterful life set forth before us. That authority works, as I under- stand it, in two ways. It furnishes us with a check to those many vagaries into which the religious life most naturally wanders. If there is anything that is manifest in the study of religions all over the world, it is that the impulses which we call religious, our response to the totality of existence, oftentimes follow tangential lines. They go out into strange desert places, as has oftentimes been the case with Christianity. The record of the mani-
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fold eccentricities of thought and practice, which church history furnishes, gives abundant evidence of this tangen- tial tendency. The Bible is a standard to check such vaga- ries, because it sets before us constantly the development of the well-balanced religion. The record in the book shows many vagaries, many extremes. But the tendency of development throughout is steadily and clearly toward the sanity and balance of Jesus. It is this which makes the book to be a standard for us, not simply the fact that it gives us in the final revelation of Jesus Christ that by which we can check our thoughts and impulses, but also because it shows us in their folly some very natural con- ceptions and practices which have been disclosed as not contributing to the true, well-balanced, progressive reli- gious life.
The Bible is offered by modern historical study as the standard for religious education, because it is the doorway that opens for the soul the way of escape from those crystallizations of religious thinking which are the cause of all formulated religion. It is most sig- nificant that when Martin Luther moved out for himself into "the freedom of the Christian man," it was by fol- lowing the guidance of a light that broke upon him from the words of the apostle Paul : "The just shall live by faith." So the Bible from the beginning, in all ages, whether to Catholic or to Protestant, through its ideals of religion and its exhibition of the soul's fellowship with the living God, has furnished the way out of formalism and shown the human spirit how it may come again into the free sunshine of the life of God in the soul.
Modern historical study of the Bible, therefore, offers the Bible to modern religious education as the record of God's development among men of a religious life, and therefore as the best stimulus for exciting in individuals a corresponding religious life ; as the standard to which the impulses of all religious life may be brought for test-
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ing, to inquire whether they are on the line of real progress ; and as the guide to which we may turn when- ever we are oppressed by the arrogance or tyranny of human thinking, to escape into the free places of the soul's liberty in the presence of the Most High.
PROFESSOR HERBERT L. WILLETT, PH.D., -
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
One of the most helpful and revealing of our posses- sions in the educational field is the historical spirit which has wrought such notable changes during the past cen- tury. This spirit, in its radical contrast with the type of mind which conditioned the approach to the study of history, literature, and even science in an earlier time, may be justly called the determining element in the edu- cational attitude of our age. In order to define, or to approach a definition, of the historical spirit, it needs first to be observed that the natural impression produced by phenomena upon the observer is that of their static condition. The world, mankind, religion, and the Bible all make upon the untrained mind the impression of being ready-formed and complete at the moment of obser- vation. No suggestion is received as to the long pro- cesses by which the present state of each has been reached. It is a long and arduous discipline which has taught the race that the physical world which it tenants has been brought to its present condition through centu- ries and millenniums of ceaseless change; that in the quiet laboratories of nature have been matured, through untold generations, the geological forms which seem to the present beholder to be as fixed and ancient as the sun. It is scarcely less than a revelation that comes to the mature mind with the knowledge of the processes by which the world has been, and continues to be, changed in its ceaseless progress toward a goal at which science only guesses in our day. The words of Jesus,
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"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," hint at the same sublime fact of the unceasing labors of the Eternal in the development of the universe.
The study of man as a tenant of the world is attended with the same results. Here, no doubt, a certain histori- cal view is almost necessary, because the slightest ac- quaintance with history reveals the rapid changes which have been wrought in the relations of different races. Yet the earlier view of society was practically static. It took into consideration only in the slightest degree those forces, moving within the organism of society, which molded it in accordance with ends and purposes only partially revealed at any particular moment. It may be said to be an essentially new view which recognizes man as a developing and maturing being ; and in this concep- tion of growth great assistance has been obtained from the study of the development of animal life which is seen to relate itself with some degree of certainty to the physical growth of mankind.
A similar process is seen in the history of religion. Here, perhaps, the untrained mind is least likely to per- ceive the evidences of growth. The common impression produced upon the casual observer of the phenomena of religion in any given period is that of a fixed body of truth, ritual, or methods of organization and activity, committed at some particular time in the past to human- ity or to that particular section of it which possessed the religion under consideration ; and that the recognized duty of cach being within the range of that religion is not so much to study its characteristics -still less to at- tempt in any manner to modify its essential features - as to submit himself to its guidance and become its faith- ful exponent. On the other hand, the historical spirit investigates the actual facts of human life, and perceives that, while religion is a well-nigh universal characteristic of the race, finding its expression in all types of human-
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ity, it nevertheless presents everywhere the evidences of change from one generation to another. These eviden- ces are less clear the lower the inquiry is prosecuted in the scale of intelligence. Nevertheless even among the rudest tribes there is evidence of modification in reli- gious belief and ritual. Among those races where reli- gion has reached its highest expression the growth is most marked, and careful scrutiny reveals astonishingly interesting proofs of the changed aspect which the reli- gious spirit assumes in different periods of a people's life. The conception of a deposit of truth, divinely communicated and always maintained in an unchanged form, proves inadequate, and incapable of explaining the facts abundantly observed in the domain of religious ex- perience.
Not less interesting and vital is the change that the modern spirit has wrought in the popular view of the Bible. An earlier age, with its transcendental view of God, conceived the Bible to be a revelation given through such a system of supernatural agencies as left the human instruments practically devoid of share in the task. God, who was postulated as infinitely removed from the scene of human life, communicated his will to the race through especially prepared media-men and institutions ; the former all but divested of personality, the latter super- naturally created and sanctioned as the final expression of the divine will. The Bible as conceived in terms of this character is a book of absolutely divine origin, whose characteristics cannot be those of humanity, since against the imperfections of the human workmen engaged in its production supernatural safeguards have been set. More- over, all parts of this book are equally divine and authoritative. The ontological view of God as infinite and transcendental leaves no room for differences of degree in the inspired volume.
On the other hand, the modern spirit perceives in the
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Bible a book which is most interesting when studied his- torically, and which through many centuries attained its growth. The careful study of those phenomena which the Bible freely exhibits tends to quicken enormously the interest in the study of this revelation, maturing through many generations of history ; and to reveal, along with the unquestioned evidences of the divine life therein presented, the equally patent marks of human and imper- fect workmen through whom it was mediated to the world. It is not too much to say that at the present moment we are in possession of a Bible unimpaired by the processes of historical criticism, but enormously enhanced in interest and value by the labors so freely bestowed upon it by earnest and painstaking students.
The causes that have wrought this change in the view of the Bible are found in the growth of the new spirit produced by the revival of learning, the Reformation, and the rise of the critical philosophy. The beginnings of a philosophical conception of history are declared by Professor Flint to be not more than a century old. Indeed, it might be said that the historical movement began with Lessing and Herder. The principle of development presented by these illustrious chiefs of modern German philosophy wrought an enormous change in the interpretation of history from that which had previously prevailed. Under the guidance of this prin- ciple of growth, mysteries hitherto thought insoluble have been cleared up; variations or contradictions which were either denied or explained away have fallen casily into place as the products of different stages in the same process.
What was at first applied to external objects only has been transferred to the world of thought. Ideas are seen to have a history, as well as institutions ; philosophies have their genealogy as well as individuals. Nothing is stationary. All things are changing. Con-
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stitutions, beliefs, habits, systems, all are in a state of flux. In the highest things, as in the lowest, growth is the law of life. A principle of such importance could not well fail of universal application. What has been tried with success in the study of history was certain to be attempted in the field of religion. The biblical critic, coming to the study of the Scripture with impartial eyes, observed variations and differences which an unscientific dogma of inspiration had obscured, and the attempt was made to retrace the steps through which the Bible assumed its present form. The same principle was applied to the study of the institutions, laws, and religious teachings of the Hebrew people, and the development of doctrine in the Christian church. From the recognition of such a principle most important results might be expected, and in this the church has not been disappointed. The sciences of textual and historical criticism, the discipline of biblical theology, and the beginnings of a truer and more satisfactory dogmatic, have already received recog- nition as products of the historical and scientific spirit, destined to enrich permanently the Christian faith.
It must not fail to be pointed out that even in the days before the growth of the historical spirit there was a recognition of the necessity for some explanation of the changing phenomena of biblical history. Irenæus pointed out the fact that the Bible did not everywhere present the same level of truth ; that there were differ- ences in its teachings. He therefore set forth the principle of distinct covenants made by God. These covenants were variously reckoned as four (Adam, Noah, Moses, Christ), or more frequently as two (the old and the new). Still later, Nicholas of Cusa was not with- out appreciation of the diversities of biblical teaching, and these varieties were explained upon the same prin- ciple, or rather upon that of successive religions which he denominated "the religion of nature, the religion of
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the Old Testament, and the way of grace, which is Chris- tianity."
Perhaps the best expression of this sense of the in- equality of different portions of the Bible is found in the well-known covenant or federal theology of Cocceius, in which we have an honest, if not very suc- cessful, attempt to conceive the biblical history as a series of ascending stages of different revelations. Here two covenants are described-one of works, and one of grace; and the latter is traced in its unfolding through three great historical stages-the patriarchal period, before the law; the legal period, or Old Testament proper; and the period of the gospel. This covenant theology was a characteristic feature of the early English Puritanism.
It will be seen, however, that all these views were partial and anticipatory. The real explanation of the phenomena presented by the Bible does not lie merely in the domain of covenants or stages of revelation, but rather in that of the growth of the religious life of Israel and the early church under teachers led by the Eternal Spirit, and this divine direction is witnessed in a history in which God was notably manifest.
Among the important results of the historical spirit as applied to the Bible, a few only may be mentioned:
I. It is seen that from the time at which the first evidences of religious interest are traceable through the sources of the Jewish and Christian faiths, there has been a continuous movement outward and forward. No two generations present the same phenomena. There is action and reaction, but never pause. The picture which the modern study of the Old Testament field presents is that of a complex and ever-changing life, moving onward under the dominion of certain principles and by means of forces resident either in the organism, in the persons of prophets and teachers, or in the environment as expressed
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in the will of God mediated through such instruments as the age afforded.
2. This movement presents constant progress. The earliest stages of religion in Israel afford many striking parallels with the religious life of other nations. Israel was true to its Semitic origin. It expressed everywhere the life of which it was a part. There were, no doubt, certain favoring elements in its environment and loca- tion, but all of its earlier history exhibits those charac- teristics which are found in common among peoples of that great family of nations. The rude and barbarous features of this primitive life express themselves freely on the pages of the Old Testament. But they become, instead of an obstacle to our understanding of the divine purposes, as expressed through Israel, actual aids to the understanding of the growth of this people to a place where it was prepared to become a prophet of righteousness among the nations of the world.
The mere student of history is interested in tracing these analogies between Israel and the surrounding na- tions. He may even point with a certain triumph to the similarity of their civil and religious institutions ; but he stops perplexed when he attempts to explain that ele- ment in the life of this people which differentiates it from all other races of that age, and gives to it a reli- gious significance such as was possessed by no other. That likeness to other nations which the untrained Christian believer is apt to deny, and to regard as a jeopardizing element in the modern view of the Bible, turns out to be the most notable proof of the divine origin of those essential features of biblical revelation which are everywhere apparent, which inform the out- ward organizations of Israel's life, and which throughout that history manifest their molding influence upon its institutions. Thus a valuable apologetic is furnished for the defender of the divine character of biblical history.
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