BY JOSEPH PARKER (1867)

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Chapter 2: The Written Word

There is a document which claims to be authentic, and which certainly comes before the world as no other book does. The Book claims to have had an origin as mysterious as the birth of Christ—combining the human and divine. The hand is man’s, the voice is God’s. While this Christian document is before us, we are not called upon to write a life of Christ, but to interpret a life that is written, or to show cause for rejecting the document. Our relation to the document should be first ascertained. Are we to reserve the right of discrimination in reading the documentary evidence? If so, by what law, or under what conditions, is the discriminative faculty to be regulated? To receive the book just as it stands would be simply an exercise of faith; to adopt an eclectic course would involve the rendering of reasons for abandoning the immemorial orthodoxy of the Church.

No doubt the Book is often thought of in a narrow and even unreasoning way by its admirers. Certainly, it is so sparing in details as to apparently leave much of life unprovided for. It does not occupy a tenth part of the ground traversed by Plato, who, in connection with many lofty speculations, discoursed concerning lands and dwellings, hunting and fishing, cemeteries, monuments, and epitaphs, family quarrels and injury to property, rhetoric and geometry, with a thousand other subjects. Compared with this elaborate treatment of nearly all questions, the statements of the Christian writings are exceedingly bald and poor; yet there may be more in those writings than all the tomes of philosophy. God’s first book, the book of nature, apparently leaves much of life unprovided for; yet as men acquire skill to turn over the ponderous pages, they find that every want has been anticipated. Adam would hardly know the world of which he was the first occupant; yet the primal forces and characteristics of nature are just the same as when he kept the garden of Eden. Modern civilization can hardly understand how men could subsist in ancient times; yet the earth abides forever without appendix or supplement. What was wanting was the faculty of interpretation. Men saw the water but could not interpret it into steam; they saw the lightning, but mistook it for an enemy; they saw the sun, but could not fully interpret all he signified by the eloquence of light. The human power of interpretation grows; yet after it has grown it often forgets both the process and the fact. The volume of nature is precisely today as God published it; but the latter readers are more sharp-sighted and inquisitive than the former. Civilization becomes wiser, keener, more ambitious and inclusive, year by year. Men were partly afraid; partly unable, to decipher the writing of nature; they read the illuminated title, and settled down into contentment or indifference; as if, when “God finished the heavens and the earth,” he also finished all the uses and applications to which future ages would be disposed to put them.

The Christian writings abound in seminal ideas; they are full of beginnings. The outlines are many, but there are no finished pictures. The value of those writings may be best represented by the term Life. We know they are inspired, because they are inspiring. The living man is the best confirmation of the living book. The book is not a plumb-line by which to test the perpendicularity of a wall; it is a living spirit, quickening and regulating spirits capable of illimitable development. With infinite appropriateness, therefore, it closes with an apocalypse—not with a final line, but with prophecies of a future which shall eclipse the splendor of all earlier light. The Old Testament closed with a prophecy; The New Testament culminated in a revelation. The New Testament is only the beginning of books; not a finished and sealed document, according to popular notions of finality, but the beginning of a literature punctuated and paragraphed by tears and laughter, by battle and pestilence, and all the changes of a tumultuous yet progressive civilization. The Apocalypse looks towards the future with ten thousand eager and glowing eyes. What if that Apocalypse be fulfilling under our own observation, and Christ be saying to us, “Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the signs of the sky, how is it ye cannot discern the signs of the times?”

God is, so to speak, issuing ever-enlarging editions of the New Testament—so rapidly, indeed, that the world itself can hardly contain the books. Though we no longer know Christ after the flesh, yet we walk with him in the holy sanctuary of the spirit; and from among the golden candlesticks he throws out all the rays by which we read today’s story and tomorrow’s apocalypse. He is still “the light of the world,” and still there is about him all the mystery of light. The light which reveals the landscape needs itself to be revealed; so paradoxical is nature, like nature’s God, that we are dependent for revelation upon what is itself a mystery! If we have ceased to know any of the facts of the Book—its temples, sacrifices, washings, oblations, and miracles—it is because we have come to a deeper sympathy with its spirit. We have now transcended the use of the grammar and the lexicon, except for the most rudimentary and initial purposes. We are not now entirely dependent upon the scribe, but by a divinely regulated instinct we know as the hand and the voice of God. Our faith cannot be broken down by a misspelt word or a mistaken date; the heart is enthroned as arbiter, and it knows the “going” of the divine step.

No doubt the Book does contain contradictions more or less real. So does the book of nature. The desert contradicts the garden; the storm contradicts the calm; summer and winter are utterly discordant; one plant grows poison, another is impregnated with healing juices; the savage beast and the creature of gentle blood face each other in the contradictory book of nature. The world is full of contradictions, and an intolerably insipid world it would be but for its anomalies. Every man is his own contradiction. In 10 years a growing man will throw off many tastes, companionships and habits, which today are pleasant to him. There is nothing without an element of contradiction but death, and death itself is the great contradiction of God. Human maxims and policies are continually at strife. Out of contradiction comes education. But what is contradiction? Not lying, necessarily—not even opposition, absolutely; contradiction may simply mean incompleteness, or may arise from ellipsis. Two gases may mutually antagonize, yet may be held altogether by a third. Two statements may be discrepant, until a missing link is supplied. A man may pursue two divergent courses of conduct, yet may hold his integrity without a breach; when smitten on one cheek, he may turn the other, and yet he may rebuke an offending brother; he may judge no man, yet he may refuse to cast his pearls before swine, or give that which is holy unto the dogs: this supposed contradictoriness he has learned of Jesus Christ, who, though he had nowhere to lay his head, promised to those who followed him, “a hundredfold more in the present world;” who reproached men for not coming to him, and then told them that no man came unto him except if the Father drew him, and afterwards gave them to understand that they would be damned if they did not come unto him; who preached trust concerning tomorrow, and then told men to make unto themselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness.

All this appears to be contradictory and perplexing, yet the same kind of contradiction marks the whole life and speech of men. One book may be many books, as the New Testament literally is. Its chapters may be addressed to different men, or to the same men under different circumstances; or cautionary words my be interposed in anticipation of possible abuse. One of the New Testament writers states plainly that there are in the revelation two distinct kinds of spiritual ailment, known respectively as “milk” and “strong meat;” one for babes, the other for men. When babes eat men’s food, what wonder if they suffer from doctrinal dyspepsia, and be excluded from the Church as heretics? And when men appropriate the babe’s milk, what wonder that the Church should suffer in robustness and power? There is one remarkable saying of Christ’s, which prepares us for ever-widening revelations of his purpose in relation to man: he said, “I have many things to tell you, but ye cannot hear them now: howbeit, when he the Spirit of Truth is come, he will lead you into all truth.”

Among the “many things” would be explanations of hard sayings and complements of unfinished circles. The plan of revelation, too, hinted that man should become more reliant upon the Spirit. Writing is a human contrivance, but thinking is a divine operation. The scribe for the child, the Spirit for man. The instructions of a parent or schoolmaster amply illustrate the whole case alike as to method, instrument, and result. At one period the child is addressed as if he were irresponsible, and at another as if every deed would be brought under judgement. The schoolmaster first sets before the pupil the most detailed methods of calculation, and insists upon every step being taken; afterwards he shows the pupil how to abbreviate the processes of doing the very same work, and actually ridicules him if the calculation is carried on in the detailed and minute method which at first was affirmed to be right. So a man is educated in proportion as he becomes able to group and summarize details, and by scientific eclipses to pass rapidly towards results. All this is part of a great movement from the letter to the Spirit, from the symbol to the life. This is man’s upward course towards God; a deliverance from manual toil, and an entrance upon the joys of a work which never satiates the appetite, and never serves the faculty. When we are “perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect,” we shall escape the medium of manual processes, and the work from the spiritual center.

According to the processes, so may be the verdicts which men may pass upon one another. The pupil who is only able to do a sum in simple multiplication would not be “able to bear” a revelation respecting the differential calculus; but in proportion as he was able to acquit himself well in multiplication, the teacher would be justified in saying that he was a good scholar, and yet that he knew nothing—good as far as he had gone, yet ignorant in view of the vast region which remained to be explored.

When Christ tells men to come unto him, he is addressing them in their alienated condition; when he tells them that they will not come unless the Father draw them, he is but cheering and confirming their Christ-ward desires. The statement is equivalent to this: “I am so unlike what all men have expected, and I have commenced my work in so unlikely a manner, that no man could possibly come unto such a poor, friendless, homeless man, except my Father draw him; I present no external charms, I can appeal to no sordid motives; if any man, therefore, feels the slightest drawing towards me, he may regard the inclination as divinely inspired, for no man cometh unto such a person as I am, except the Father which hath sent me to draw him.’ In this view we have the meaning of the expression, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Men are moved by opposites. While there is a falsehood in extremes, there is a moral leverage in them also. The servant is on the road to mastery; the humble man is traveling to the throne; decomposition is a step towards reproduction: so this lowly outcast Christ, by the very depth of his humiliation, lifts society towards the latitude of heaven. He could not have done his work at any of the intermediate points of the social scale; he must go down until there was no man below him—until he was despised and rejected of men; so that by any action on his part from the depth, and a concurrent action on his Father’s part from heaven, he could say, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work; no man cometh unto me except the Father draw him.”

But is it not declared, in other parts of the Christian writings, that certain men are foreordained and predestinated to eternal life; that God is likened unto a potter who may fit one vessel unto honor, and another; that he subdues and hardens whom he will? Is not this contradictory of much that Christ said, and confirmatory of other of his sayings? In the interpretation of all such sayings, the heart is to be trusted before the dictionary. Christ often puts the understanding of divine mysteries upon the base of an analogy between fatherly and divine government: “If he  . . . how much more your Father?” This is a method of interpretation which refers decision to the natural and universal instincts of man, and such a method is absolutely essential where grammar and lexicon cannot disclose the inner meaning of language. Christ goes back to the interpretation of consciousness, where literal interpretation fails. Tried by this higher tribunal of criticism, such meanings as have been attached to the idea of predestination simply cannot be correct. The heart repels them; nature shudders with horror when they are suggested. The fatherly instinct of the human race, to which Christ himself appealed, instantly, without flutter or misgiving, says, “If God calls all men, and yet determines that only a few shall come; if he mocks men by offering gifts which he has rendered them powerless to accept; if he makes some men vessels of dishonor, and then breaks them to pieces because they are not vessels of honor; if he can sit on his judgement seat, and see men going down to hell because he determined from all eternity that they should not go to heaven; if when he says ‘whosoever’ he means but a few—then let all honest and noble men leave him alone in his hateful heaven, and go down to hell in company with poor injured creatures who have deserved better at his hands.” This is the conclusion of that very instinct of parenthood which Christ himself challenged in the interest of the divine government. Nowhere in the sacred writings is God represented as falling below the promptings of that holy instinct, but everywhere as transcending them in love and beneficence; but the interpretation which reprobates any portion of the human race shamefully and cruelly dishonors all that is compassionate and generous, not to say all that is equitable and just, in the common nature of men. Christ’s new canon of interpretation renders men independent of technical criticism, and when the instinct upon which it is founded is entirely purified, it will render men independent of all ambiguous codes. So far, the parental instinct enables men confidently to affirm that, whatever may be the meaning of predestination, it cannot narrow the affections, or pervert the justice of God.

It has been suggested by the narrowest and hardest school of theologians, that God may, as a sovereign, condemn anybody without being held accountable, or without giving any shadow of reason to his creatures. This, however, is a notion which proceeds upon a mistaken apprehension alike of divine and human nature. There is not only a fallacy, but a falsehood, in the very heart of such a representation. God himself cannot so act with moral beings. In proportion as any creature is endowed with the moral element, in that proportion is the sovereignty of God limited in relation to that being, when debated questions arise between the creature and the Creator. It is by virtue of the moral element that man stands upon a common plane with God. Sovereignty is a matter of power over forces and events which do not come within the sphere of responsibility. The whole tenor of the Christian writings goes to show that, as a sovereign, God could not even save man; his sovereignty was limited to the method by which salvation should be offered; on all questions of plan, time, and circumstances, God’s sovereignty was absolute; but no man could be saved apart from the exercise of his own will; the moment that force entered would be the moment of his degradation as a man. If man could have been saved simply by a volition of the sovereign, then the humiliation and agony of Christ constituted a circumlocution in the divine government which could be accounted for only on the ground of the most wanton cruelty on the part of God. Salvation and reprobation alike lie beyond the limits of sovereignty, except in such points as have just been named. It is not our business to enter upon an interpretation of such passages as are mistakenly supposed to justify the theory of reprobation, but it is our business in thus canvassing the Christian writings to point out the canon of construction which Christ himself appealed to in illustrating the immeasurable bounty of God towards man. Christ set up the human parent as the best representative of the divine Father, and thereby elevated the parental spirit into an interpreter of divine things.

With such real or apparent contradictions before us, it becomes of the first importance to determine what is to be done with the Christian writings? Are sophisticated and foolhardy men to be turned into them indiscriminately, and left without guidance as to their divisions and applications? Is the Church an authorized and necessary interpreter of the written Word? The determining distinction between a book that is true and a book that is false is, that the true book, with all its ellipses, brokenness, and literal discrepancies, may be trusted anywhere; for the spirit that pervades it will be its strong defense and it will grow upon the consciousness of men in proportion as they learn more of the brokenness and ellipsis of life itself. The bad book, on the other hand, with all its artistic consistency, will cheat every promise it offers, and fail most where it is needed most. The position which the Christian writings have attained is the best vindication of their claim to be the declarations which God has authorized; not apposition of finality, or apprehension as to encroachment, but one of inspiring and self-spreading life, which encompasses all the wants of man.

Words already cited from Christ’s own lips show that we are not living under a dispensation of the book, but under the dispensation of the Spirit; and this fact harmonizes with the while of God’s educational method being one of continuous advance from the seen to the unseen, from “beggarly elements” to all-subduing life. Christ gave a very partial revelation of himself in the days of his flesh. A few strong, startling and revolutionary words, with a chastened and persuasive tone of consolation, sustained by many mighty works, was all that he gave men, with one exception; but that exception was itself the chief hope of the Church, being nothing less than a promise of the Spirit of Truth. That Spirit was to be an indwelling presence in the Church, inspiring and guiding the education of the soul, interpreting the facts which the visible Christ had created, and leading into the truths which those facts dimly outlined. Truth is always deeper than fact. Christ had built up, by teaching and suffering, the world’s greatest, holiest fact: but the Spirit was promised, to reveal the infinite truth which that fact pointed out. The Christian writings without the Christian Spirit would be a dead letter; but the Spirit, by daily interpretation and application of the written word, enlarges it so as to extend it over the whole ground of life. Though this is the age of the Spirit, it is appropriately termed the Christian era; for the Spirit “takes of the things Christ” alone—never changes the theme but continues to unfold “the unsearchable riches.” Christ’s personal work was rudimentary in a large sense; he struck across the courses of life in a manner which compelled attention; his words often flashed like lightning, and his step startled like thunder at midnight; but his work has all the appearance of a fragment about it. He has many things to say, but forbears; what men knew not in his lifetime, they were to know afterwards; his own words were to be succeeded by greater, because he was going to the Father. There was much abruptness about this. He had roused the Jewish mind without tranquilizing it again. He had started new conceptions, dismissed old prejudices, removed traditional boundaries, troubled the fountain of individual and national life, yet things were left in a chaotic state:

“Obstabatque allis aliud: quia corpore in uno
Frigida pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis,
Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus.”

All this was to be settled, orbed, illuminated; and much time would be necessary before we could continue the poet’s description of the metamorphosis, and say, “Hanc Deus, et melior litem Natura diremit.” Christ’s work, looked at entirely by itself, simply as a three years’ ministry, was certainly fragmentary, though perfect so far as it went; yet looked at in relation to the whole width of human history, it was suggestive, not exhaustive; preliminary, not final; vernal, not autumnal. Throughout the whole of his work the Spirit expounded simply the doctrines of Christ, not any doctrines of his own: “He shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak; and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.” Here then we have the solution of the difficulty as to the interpretation of the written Word; there is a Spirit whose particular function it is to reveal the historic Christ more plainly, and so to keep pace with the enlarging capacity and power of the world. This Spirit operates upon a homogenous spirit in man himself, and thus a mutual “witness” is established—a witness which in many cases transcends the difficulties suggested by merely verbal criticism.