GROUNDS ON WHICH WE RECEIVE THE BIBLE AS THE WORD OF GOD, AND THE ONLY RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE (PART ONE)

By J. W. McGarvey

DEFINITIONS

IN order to free the terms in which our theme is expressed from all apparent ambiguity, and to make perfectly clear its meaning, we commence with a few definitions.

In saying that we receive the Bible as the word of God, we distinguish between the word of God and the words of God. We do not mean that all of its words are words of God; for some of them are recorded as the words of angels, some as the words of men, some as those of demons, and some as those of Satan. We mean that it is God's word in the sense that God, by the inspiration of its writers, caused to be written this record of things that were said and done by himself and certain of his creatures.

In saying that we receive this book as the only rule of faith, we mean, first, that we receive all of its utterances as true in the sense which properly belongs to them, and therefore as objects of belief; and second, that nothing else, as a matter of religious belief, is to be required of us. Of course this does not bind us to any book now printed in the Bible which may prove to have been improperly inserted, or to any passage in any book which may prove to be an uninspired interpolation. In receiving it as the only rule of practice, we bind ourselves in conscience to observe all that it appoints for us to do, distinguishing what it appoints for us from what it appointed for others in former dispensations; and we refuse to be bound by anything which it does not thus appoint.

By the "we" in our proposition, is meant, not the writer of this essay, nor the writers of the essays in this volume, nor the particular body of disciples with which these writers are identified; but all, everywhere, who do thus receive the Bible. Many, it is true, receive the Bible as the word of God who do not receive it as the only rule of faith and practice; and we shall accordingly divide the question, discussing first the grounds on which the book is received in the former sense, and afterward the grounds on which it is received in the latter sense.

There is still another distinction which must be noted before we enter upon our principal theme. While the "we" whose grounds of belief are to be stated, includes all believers, all do not receive it on the same grounds. There is a great diversity in this respect. In order that all may be properly represented in the statements which are to be made, it is necessary to present these various grounds, and to consider them separately. Believers may be divided, in reference to their grounds of belief, into three classes; first, the uneducated, who have never made a study of the evidences of Christianity; second, the more intelligent class, who have paid more or less attention to the subject, but have never studied it systematically; and third, those who have investigated the subject exhaustively. This classification of believers shall guide us in marking divisions in this part of our essay.

I. THE NARROWEST GROUND OF BELIEF

A large majority of the believers of this age, and of every age except the earliest, have received the Bible as the word of God on the one and only ground that they have been so educated. They have been trained from their earliest childhood to look upon the Bible as a sacred book; to reverence it as a most precious gift from God; to abhor unbelief in reference to it as a deadly sin, and to tremble when the least shadow of doubt concerning it passes across their minds. They have learned to estimate the truth of all other writings by their agreement or disagreement with this; and they fully expect to be judged by it in the day of final accounts. If they are called upon to give a reason for this implicit faith, they seldom go farther than to answer, "We have been brought up to believe the Bible; our fathers and mothers before us have believed it; and we have, never thought of doubting it."

This ground of faith has not received the respectful consideration to which it is entitled. It is often stigmatized as purely traditional and unreasoning; and so it appears to be. But is it any the less valuable on this account? On what depends the value of faith in anything that is of a practical nature? On the reasons which the believer can give for his faith? or on the firmness with which he maintains his faith, and the exactness with which he puts it into practice? Faith in the genuineness of medicines in the skill of physicians, in the honesty of men of business, in the accuracy of interest tables and of logarithms, in the constancy of friendship and of marital vows, in everything on which life and well-being depend, derives its value from the latter consideration, and not at all from the former. If the religion taught in the Bible is true, the blessings which it offers to men are bestowed on those who believe, and who live in accordance with their faith, without the slightest regard to the reasons or the causes which induced them to believe. This is true not only of the blessings which it offers as the special gifts of God, but also of those noble traits of character which this faith brings forth as its natural fruits. Not one of these is dependent on the reasons which induce men to believe. This fact cannot be emphasized too strongly.

This ground of faith has been pronounced not only traditional and unreasoning, but insufficient for the trials to which faith must be subjected. For some persons it has proved insufficient; and these have either abandoned the faith, or found better ground for believing; but it has proved sufficient for the majority of believers in ages past, and it will for ages to come. If the good results of faith are dependent, not on the causes of it, but on its steadfastness and its fruits, it follows that a faith which does not waver, and which brings forth these fruits to the end of life, has a sufficient basis in which to rest. The faith of the class now under consideration does remain steadfast to the end, and it does bring forth the required fruits. Myriads of them are now living, and myriads more have gone to rest, the shield of whose faith was never pierced by a single dart of unbelief. These believers met the arguments of infidelity, so far as they encountered them, with a smile or a frown, according to the temperament of each; they pitied the infidel as an unfortunate and wayward man; they turned to their Bibles with greater confidence and affection in proportion as it was assailed; they walked humbly with their God, and truly with their neighbors; and in the hour of death they were not afraid. It is offered as an objection, that the same may be truly said of faith in other books, supposed to be sacred, and in other religions which are conceded to be of human origin. As respects the ground of faith, this must be admitted; but what follows? It does not follow that all books and religions thus received are equally true and equally beneficial to their adherents. The claims of each to be true depend on the evidences which can be adduced in its favor; and this is supposed to be beyond the ken of the humble believers of whom we now speak. If any one of these religions is true and divine, the believer in it reaps all the good fruits of it; and if any is false, the believer in it reaps all the good that is in it, if any, and he also just as certainly tastes all the bitter fruits which a false system must necessarily bear. The objection, then, is without weight; and the ground on which a countless host of God's children have rested their faith is vindicated. It has proved sufficient for them, though many of them have passed through much tribulation to the region in which they had laid up their treasures.

II. BROADER GROUNDS OF BELIEF

The preceding ground, satisfying as it is to the mass of uneducated believers, has proved insufficient for those who, either from the natural questionings of awakened thought, or from the attacks of unbelievers, have been constrained to ask whether education has guided them aright. All these inquire for the grounds on which their teachers have taught them, and they pass into the second or into the third class mentioned above, according to the extent of their subsequent investigations.

1. Most commonly, the first new ground to which these awakened minds advance, is this: they look to see who the teachers of their faith are; and they find that they constitute the overwhelming majority of the good, the wise and the learned, of this and of all past ages up to the age in which the Bible became a completed book. They see that these men constitute the class best informed on the subject, and most likely, both on this account and on account of their goodness of heart, to decide the question correctly. They ascertain, too, that many of these men were converted from unbelief to belief, as the result of their investigations; and although they find that some have reversed this process, the number of the latter is so small in comparison as not to seriously affect the evidence.

That this is solid ground on which to stand is made more obvious when we reflect that it is the very ground on which the deductions of science are received by the mass of mankind. We accept what we are taught concerning the geography of distant lands, concerning geology, astronomy, chemistry, and the facts of all history, because we have confidence in our teachers; and if their deductions are called in question by a man here and there, it is sufficient for us that his objections amount to nothing in the estimation of the great majority of those who are competent judges. It is only the very few who are competent to investigate these sciences for themselves; and the rest of us are never reproached because we accept our faith from their hands. Scientific men who are thus credited by their less-informed neighbors, should be the last men on earth to censure Christians for receiving the Bible on similar ground.

It is said, however, that this ground of faith depends entirely on the circumstance that in the past the majority has been on the side of belief, and that should the majority at some future time turn the other way, the argument would be reversed, and would become equally strong in favor of unbelief. This is unquestionably true. The argument would be reversed, and the state of opinion among the common people would be reversed with it. This would be true on any ground of faith, for the common people always have been and always will be governed in their opinions on all subjects by the conclusions of the great majority of those who are known to be more competent judges than themselves. Should infidelity ever secure this majority, the Bible, having lost the officers of its army, would of course be deserted by the rank and file. But we need not anticipate such a day. If the Bible is from God, it can never come.

2. Others of the class now under consideration, while holding firmly to the ground of faith last mentioned, look still farther, and, considering the effects which faith in the Bible has had on all true and consistent believers, they find that these effects are good and only good continually. They find that only those believers who have not conformed their lives to the requirements of the book have failed to realize these good effects; and that those who have conformed to it most nearly have been the purest and best of men. They cannot believe that such traits are wrought into human character by the belief of a book whose writers are impostors, and whose distinctive claim for itself is a falsehood. They cannot believe this, because they have learned by their own experience, and by that of those who have gone before them, that the belief of falsehood is injurious to men, while the belief of truth alone is truly and permanently beneficial. Many eminent unbelievers have themselves admitted that the highest ideal of human life would be attained if men would live according to the requirements of this book, and thus out of their own mouths we confirm the solidity of this ground of belief.

A feeble attempt has been made to offset this argument by pointing to a very few men in heathen lands who have lived very noble lives and taught a very pure morality, though they never saw or heard of the Bible; but to this it is truly answered that the life of the noblest man who ever lived in heathen lands cannot compare to those of thousands who have believed the Bible; and that only so far as the lives and precepts of these noble heathens are in harmony with the teachings of the Bible, is there anything in them to be admired. The fact, then, instead of being an objection to our argument, only confirms it by furnishing additional proof of the ennobling effects of that which our Bible teaches.

3. A third ground for the faith of the second class of believers is one not so easily defined, but fully as substantial as either of the preceding. It is the stamp of truthfulness which is felt rather than seen as they read the Bible and reflect on its contents. They have observed that false narratives, even when most plausible, have an indefinable air or tone about them which awakens suspicion and causes us to pause and hesitate about receiving them; and that, on the other hand, there is an air or tone about truth which asserts itself and dissipates doubt. It is comparable to the ring of a sound bell, or of a piece of sound porcelain, as distinguished from that of one slightly cracked. More profound thinkers may be able to analyze and define the characteristics of truth and error alluded to, but our second class of believers make no such attempt. The human mind is made for the reception of truth, and when it is uncorrupted it has a natural susceptibility to truth, analogous to that of the eye to light, and of the ear to sound, which enables it within certain limits to recognize both truth and falsehood. This instinct is no guide in matters of a purely scientific character; but in matters of history and morals it will assert itself, and its promptings are often irresistible. A juryman is often led by it to decide cases of property and life, when the explicit testimony would have led him in the opposite direction. Now those of whom I speak feel, as they read their Bibles from day to day and year to year, that they are in mental and spiritual contact with narratives and precepts which have the ring of truth about them. They feel this so distinctly, and it impresses them so deeply, that they cannot shake it off if they would, and they cannot attempt to do so without doing violence to their moral nature.

It will be admitted that if God were in any proper sense the author of the Bible, it would bear these marks of its own truthfulness. Indeed, if he inspired its authors, he must have desired that his creatures should believe its statements and observe its precepts; and he would certainly impart this very quality to it. The fact, then, that the Bible has the identical effect on a vast multitude of its readers which its author must have designed if that author is God, is no mean proof that God is its author. This evidence can have but little effect on those who are as yet unbelievers, and who consequently do not receive the impression we refer to; but it is solid and satisfactory evidence to all those who have for this and other reasons combined received the book as true, and studied it for the good that is in it.

4. The next ground on which we plant our feet is found in the incomparable character of Him who is the central figure in the panorama which the Bible spreads out before us. Friends and foes alike admit that Jesus who is called the Christ occupies this position. He is the centre and soul of the New Testament, and, whether unbelievers will have it or not, the law and the prophets all pointed to him as their end. Now when we consider who the writers of the Bible were, what they were in their education, in their prejudices, in their hopes, and in their conceptions of humanity, we are driven to the conclusion that it was impossible for them to either conceive or depict such a character as Jesus. This argument has been set forth by eloquent writers in whole volumes; and it has often been said that the conception and portrayal of such a character by these writers without divine inspiration would have been a greater miracle than any which Jesus is said to have wrought. Of course the word miracle is here used in its etymological sense of a mere wonder, and not in its scriptural sense of an immediate act of God. Though so often and so confidently published to the world, this argument has never met with a serious answer, so far as the present writer is informed. Until it shall be proved to be without force, we must be allowed to still believe that the Bible is the book of God, for this reason, even if we should be compelled to lay aside all others.

5. As a result of mature reflection on the last two grounds of faith, there spreads out before the believer another field of evidence, in which he beholds a wondrous adaptation of this book to the spiritual wants of our fallen race. That we are sinners before God, is the profound conviction of every thoughtful soul who realizes the existence of a divine being to whom we are responsible for our conduct. Every such person feels the need of something to impress upon him a keener sense of his unworthiness, to deliver him from the guilt which he has already incurred, and to give him ability to resist the enticements of sin. He looks in vain for deliverance and strength to all the systems of human philosophy, and to all the religions of earth except that of the Bible. In the revelations of this book he finds what he desires; or rather, he finds that which, whether consciously sought or not, meets and satisfies the longings of his soul. He finds in this book, as he thoughtfully and believingly reads it, power to subdue his stubborn will, and to bring him in humble penitence to the foot-stool of the God whom it reveals. He finds in the tender mercy there offered to him through the atoning blood of a wondrous Redeemer, whose work is the characteristic and the glory of this religious system, the only conceivable release from the burden of his guilt; for only in forgiveness, free and final, can the guilty soul find peace. Receiving this heavenly gift, he enjoys a peace of mind which passes all understanding. Starting forward afresh in the journey of life, he finds the same good book furnishing him with hopes, and gratitude, and courage, which enable him to control himself as no other man can, by maxims of wisdom and holiness which gradually transform him into the spiritual image of his God, and fit him to dwell with God forever. With this experience, he cannot doubt that the book which has enabled him to attain it, and which claims to be the word of God, is all that it claims to be.

6. Some of the class of believers now under consideration have extended their readings into general history and the history of the church. All such have learned that the claim of the Bible to be the word of God has passed through fiery trials in the course of its history, such as would long since have brought it into contempt had it not been too well grounded to be overthrown. If the book had come down through the ages unchallenged, the continued hold which it had on the confidence of men would argue little in its favor; but instead of this, its claim has been hotly contested by men of genius and learning from the second century after Christ until the present time. All manner of literary weapons have been wielded against it, including the sneers of scoffers, the ridicule of the giddy and profligate, the criticisms of men of letters, the deductions of philosophers, and the researches of historians. Decipherers of manuscripts and hieroglyphics, students of archæology, delvers in the bowels of the earth, explorers of the solar system and of the stellar universe, analyzers of historical documents, and experts in comparative philology, have unitedly and separately assailed the Bible, many times proclaiming that they had put all of its friends to flight, and that soon it would have no intelligent man to uphold its claims; but through all these conflicts it has passed without loss in the number of its friends, and not only without loss, but with an ever-increasing number who insist that it is the word of God. The enemies of the book are boldly challenged to tell how this can be, if the high claim set up for it is false, or even doubtful.

This challenge is answered by the statement that the tenacious hold which the Bible has on the minds of men is the result of superstition, and of an obstinate conservatism which is natural to our race. The answer is refuted by the fact that it is not the superstitious part of our race, nor the part most given to blind conservatism, that has thus clung to the Bible. That portion of the race most given to these two weaknesses is found where the Bible is unknown, or is made subordinate to other rules of faith, as among Mohammedans and Buddhists. On the other hand, those nations which have shown themselves freest of all from superstition, and quickest of all to cast aside old errors and to seize upon now truths, are the very nations which have clung most tenaciously to the Bible. Not only so, but the class of men in these nations most noted for faith in the Bible, includes in it leaders in human thought in every department of learning. To such an extent is this true, that when unbelievers of real learning and talent have for a time become leaders of great bodies of men, they have, as a rule, soon lost their leadership as a result of defeat in the conflicts which their attacks on the Bible have provoked. More than two or three might be named, who, in the memory of persons now living, have attained to such leadership and then lost it.

Now this whole series of battles has been fought over the single question, whether the Bible is the word of God, in the sense of our proposition. The proposition has thus far been so triumphantly maintained as to inspire us with the strongest conviction that it is true, and that it will continue to be maintained in the estimation of an ever increasing number of persons, until at last there shall be none to call it in question. The Bible has to-day an immensely wider recognition among men than at any previous period in its history. More copies of it are now annually published and sold than ever before; more, perhaps, than of any one thousand other books combined. It is printed and read as no other book ever has been or ever will be, in all the languages of the earth which have an alphabet, while many of these languages have been provided with alphabets for the very purpose that the Bible might be printed in them. It is one of the most wonderful events of this present century of wonders, that on May 1st, 1881, when the Revised Version of the English New Testament was published, more than one million copies were sold in a single day, and this among the people of all the earth who already had in hand the largest number of New Testaments. There is nothing comparable to this in the history of books. These facts guarantee that its power over the next generation will be far greater and more world-wide than it is now. Indeed, if we judge the future by the rules of ordinary foresight, the facilities which now exist for the free circulation of this book throughout the world, and the multitude of rich and powerful friends who esteem it a high privilege to expend fabulous sums of money to put it into the hands of every human being, argue a future for it which is far more glorious than its most enthusiastic friends have dreamed, or Christian poets have sung.

A book with such a history and such prospects, all due to the fact that it is believed to be the word of God, cannot be standing on a false claim, if there is any such thing as distinguishing between documents that are false and those that are true. On this ground we rest our faith; and we feel that in doing so we would be standing on a rock, if there was nothing else beneath our feet. But we stand not on this alone. We step backward and forward on the six different grounds which we have enumerated, with no uncertainty in our tread; and when we think of them all, we realize that the believer has within his reach, if he will reflect soberly, and read but a little outside of his Bible, abundant evidence to satisfy an honest soul, and to defend his faith against the assaults of unbelief.

[To be continued]

A SIMPLE QUESTION CONCERNING KNOWLEDGE OF THE CONCEPT OF GOD

By Bob Myhan

If it is the case, as this writer believes, that all knowledge is acquired through one or more of the five senses—sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch—through which sense did man first acquire knowledge of the concept of God? &