Chapter II. Material of Theology.

Chapter II. Material of Theology.I. Sources of Theology.God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

Chapter II. Material of Theology.I. Sources of Theology.God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

Chapter II. Material of Theology.I. Sources of Theology.God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

Chapter II. Material of Theology.I. Sources of Theology.God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

I. Sources of Theology.God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.

Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.

Ambrose:“To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader:“To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.”C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelationhelpsreason and conscience, but is not asubstitutefor them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.”A. J. F. Behrends:“The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.”Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”

We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word‘authority’is derived fromauctor,augeo,‘to add.’Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element ofwitness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.”Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it.... Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason,—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”

Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.”Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to thewillof the man, and it claimsobediencefrom him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation[pg 026]on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is“the light which lighteth every man”(John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203sq.

1. Scripture and Nature.By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.

By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.

We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.

We here use the word“nature”in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word“nature,”which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said:“Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.”We shall in subsequent chapters use the term“nature”in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase“Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word“nature”in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183sq.

E. G. Robinson:“Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.”If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the questionHowis answered, the questionsWhenceandWhyarise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.”The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been:“Spiritual Law in the Natural World,”for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.

(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.

Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.

Outward witness:Ps.19:1-6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”;Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”Inward witness:Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ =“that which is known of God is manifest in them.”Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd, Homiletics, 11.Rom. 1:32—“knowing the ordinance of God”;2:15—“they show the[pg 027]work of the law written in their hearts.”Therefore even the heathen are“without excuse”(Rom. 1:20). There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.

Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows:“The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking.Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much abook, as avoice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.”Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.

(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.

Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”

Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God,“acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections”(Hackett,in loco).Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase“word of God”does not primarily denote arecord,—it is thespokenword, thedoctrine, the vitalizingtruth, disclosed by Christ; seeMat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”;Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”;Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”;13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”;19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the Lord”;1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word;cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”;Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”

(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.

There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”

There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents[pg 028]this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is“the truth”(John 14:6);“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”(Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says,“shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”(John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided“into all the truth”(John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.

Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word“experience”is derived fromexperior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not“norma normans,”but“norma normata.”Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say:“God made me,”though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.”“Man's nature,”said Spurgeon,“is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.”Dr. George A. Gordon says that“Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say“illustrative,”instead of“additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.

H. H. Bawden:“God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christis, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”

(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology[pg 029]is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology. Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the Scriptures came, it could not furnish.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.”Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.”CompareRev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”= the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God.

Note Plato's illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave's mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.”Alexander McLaren:“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God's love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.”The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.”See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227.

2. Scripture and Rationalism.Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.

Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man's unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind's power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.

A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (a) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (b) To judge with regard to man's need of a special and supernatural revelation. (c) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (d) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (e) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given.

Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”

Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.”Leibnitz:“Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.”Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood's illustration[pg 030]of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.”Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”

Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers, scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl ignores Christ's world-relations and therefore secularizes and disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”

B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at least one of the following errors: (a) That of confounding reason with mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (b) That of ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right reason in religious things. (c) That of denying our dependence in our present state of sin upon God's past revelations of himself. (d) That of regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious truth.

Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.

Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge, in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us from the senses, says:“At any rate we must bring to all facts the light in which we see them.”This the Christian does. The light of love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind's repose On evidence is not to be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic structure, built by rule.”

Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza's Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as“an overuse of reason.”It is rather the use of an abnormal, perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology. The phrase“sanctified intellect”means simply intellect accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work under their influence. Bishop Butler:“Let reason be kept to, but let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call that reasoning.”Newman Smyth, Death's Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the darkness of the earth.[pg 031]Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would come out into the sunlight on the earth's other side.”The most unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon reason, in the narrow sense.“The better to exalt reason, they make the world irrational.”“The hen that has hatched ducklings walks with them to the water's edge, but there she stops, and she is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on, finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.”Compare γνῶσις (1 Tim. 6:20—“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with ἐπίγνωσις (2 Pet. 1:2—“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”= full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.

3. Scripture and Mysticism.As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”[pg 032]B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.

As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism recognizes too much.

A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men's minds to understand Christ's previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal means.

“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”

“Mystic”= one initiated, from μύω,“to close the eyes”—probably in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine truth is a“mystery,”not only as something into which one must be initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (Eph. 3:19)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer onRom. 11:25—“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery.”The Germans haveMystikwith a favorable sense,Mysticismuswith an unfavorable sense,—corresponding respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is intimated inJohn 16:13—“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you into all the truth”;Eph. 3:9—“dispensation of the mystery”;1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion revives, there is an outcry against mysticism,i. e., higher knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the heart.”Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, inActs 26:24, 25, with his self-vindication in2 Cor. 5:13—“whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”

Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the larger unity of God's being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates the race, the universe, Christ himself.”Ibid., 5—Mysticism is“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth; (2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord; (4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The‘scala perfectionis’is (a) the purgative life; (b) the illuminative life; (c) the unitive life.”Stevens, Johannine Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery, but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is: Abiding in Christ.”As the power press cannot dispense with the type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ's external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”;cf.Rom. 6:17—“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”

B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (a) the outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (b) the activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge; (c) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.

In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.

In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and in Scripture (Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness”;Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen”;Acts 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”;Eph. 6:17—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already given we are to test all new communications which would contradict or supersede it (1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God”;Eph. 5:10—“proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a“swallowing up of man in God.”But Christ does not deprive us of reason and will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their normal clearness and strength. ComparePs. 16:7—“Jehovah, who hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own faculties.

False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture“ad aperturam libri”is like guiding one's actions by a throw of the dice. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of God's will in the matter”;cf.Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193; Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and the answer came:‘Go home!’”He did this only once in his life, in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human counsel.“To whomsoever this faith is given,”he says,“let him obey it.”

F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot; or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely, appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be“rational service”(Rom. 12:1); blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity, waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to make an intelligent decision, while“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”(Rom. 14:23).

“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss of ability to say:‘This is I,’and‘This is mine.’Such was Hypatia's attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said:‘The happiest woman has no history.’Self-denial is not self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ we become our complete selves.”Col 2:9, 10—“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man; abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all evil; the spiritual self belongs to a[pg 033]higher realm. But this spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like Aristotle's νοῦς.”A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of our individual experience, even while our experience throws new light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol., 48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215, 556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming, Vocab. Philos.,in voce; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 379-429.

4. Scripture and Romanism.While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as under Christ the primary and final authority.

Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (a) Of making the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of religious knowledge; and (b) Of making the relation of the individual to Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to Christ.

In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils, new communications of truth. Cyprian:“He who has not the church for his mother, has not God for his Father.”Augustine:“I would not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also influenced me.”Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own, but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman, Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their substance what they are now.”But this is demonstrably untrue of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true doctrine,“Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,”Romanism substitutes her maxim,“Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.”Luther saw in this the principle of mysticism, when he said:“Papatus est merus enthusiasmus.”See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.

In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was before the church and made the church possible. The word of God existed before it was written down, and by that word the first disciples as well as the latest were begotten (1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in1 Tim. 3:15—“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”= the church is God's appointed proclaimer of truth;cf.Phil. 2:16—“holding forth the word of life.”But the church can proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the Romanist asks:“Where was your church before Luther?”the Protestant may reply:“Where yours is not now—in the word of God. Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour before the wheat went to the mill?”Lady Jane Grey, three days before her execution, February 12, 1554, said:“I ground my faith on God's word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church, nor yet my faith.”

The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth[pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible;“like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.”Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”George Herbert:“What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!”It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says:“Man for the machine!”Protestantism:“The machine for man!”Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following:“It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.”But this contradictsJohn 10:7—where Christ says“I am the door”; and1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”= Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

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