Errant Man and the Inerrant Book
Dr. Gordon's theology—The Bible and inspiration— Estimate of human
nature
THE text was for Dr. Gordon not the winding horn of the chase to signal the start across the moors of rhetoric and through the tangled woods of theology; rather was it the inscription above an entrance opening into the Word of God. Scripture he compared to the dissected map. To find the complete statement of truth it is needful to hunt through chapter after chapter, book after book, and to combine the scattered parts. The concordance, he said, is, after all, the best commentary. " In Scripture single words, like blazed trees in a forest, are sure guides through the labyrinth of revelation. ' Lamb,' ' blood,' ' faith,' ' forgiveness,' ' peace '—these are God's words and whoever will take one of them and trace it through the Bible, threading together on this single word, as on a cord, the various texts where it occurs, will find both a wondrous continuity and a wondrous unity thereby established."
It is hardly necessary to say that to the Bible he accorded a place of solitary and unapproachable preeminence. With those who stand ready to degrade it to the ranks, stripping from it the sword of the Spirit, and sending it down to march with Shakespeare, Plato, and the raw conscripts of heart and brain, he never argued. The sensitized film photographs more than the eye can detect. The prepared heart sees more than the aciitest critic. " There is a finer sense than the scien-
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tific, a more delicate touch than the exegetical. It is written, and cannot be altered, 'The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' The Bible repeatedly suffers violence, and the violent seek to take it by force. But the Holy Spirit alone holds the key to it. He only knows the combination of faith and study by which it can be unlocked, and all its hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge appropriated."
As to modern Old Testament criticism, he doubtless felt, as do many others, that, though it may be as scientific as paleontology, it is also as lifeless and as dry. He thought it a new scholasticism as wearisome as that of Aquinas or of Duns Scotus, as far removed, too, from the method of Jesus. On the other hand, he was not ready to make a casus belli of theories concerning " priestly writers " and " redactors." The time is short. Speculation soon dies out if not fed with the oil of controversy. Fruitfulness is more important than an abstract accuracy. The way of light is not paved with lexicons, but with self-denials and faithful testimonies. He shut the door behind him, therefore, leaving the sanhedrim of critics and conservatives to wrangle and bicker, and passed out into the world of the needy and the sorrowing. " ' Take and eat in simplicity the bread as you have it before you,' he said, quoting Bengel, " ' and be not disturbed if you find in it now and then a grit of the millstone.' In reading some of the lucubrations of the higher criticism, it seems as though it had deliberately selected the grit and ignored the grain. Let such as like this way grind their teeth on biblical criticism; but such as prefer food to fault-finding will eat the grain of the Word."
And again: "Upon the much-mooted question of ' inerrancy ' we do not presume to enter. But we do express the wish that our higher critics were as ready to test their own iner-
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rancy by Scripture as to test the Scripture's inerrancy by their own.
"We can conceive of nothing better than Bengel's rule for searching the Word of God with profit: ' Te totiun applica ad textum; rem totam applica ad te.' (' Apply thyself wholly to the text; apply the subject wholly to thyself.') Subjective criticism was never so urgently needed as now; and we might even copy with profit the example of some of our Puritan fathers, who used to spend hours on their knees before the open Bible, praying, ' Search me, O God, and know my heart try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.'
"On the contrary, has not the te totuin application to the text of Scripture been vastly overdone in our day? 'Truly light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,' and unquestionably very useful scientific ends are promoted by the spectroscope, which unbraids the sunbeams, assorts their rays, and assigns them to their various sources. But this is not the process which makes the flowers grow, and the grain ripen, and the orchards bring forth their fruit. Many who are engaged in practical Christian work believe that the principal use of Scripture is for regeneration and spiritual nutrition; that its words are ' spirit and life,' and as such are as certain, if received and cherished in the heart, to produce transformed and holy characters as the wheat grain to beget the wheat harvest. Why not occupy ourselves, therefore, principally with sowing the seed of the Word broadcast among men? And as to our personal use of Scripture, is it not better that we use the Bible as a searchlight for illuminating cur understanding than to use our understanding as a search-warrant for discovering whether some error or contradiction may not be hiding in the nooks and crannies of its history or chronology?
" An errant Bible is exactly what is demanded by errant youth. To a ' man beholding his natural face in the glass
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of Scripture it is a vast relief to be assured, on scientific authority, that the glass is perchance considerably convexed, so that the sinful self seen therein, which has often been so troublesome, after all, may have been greatly exaggerated. Our plea is not, however, for war on the critics, but for watch over ourselves— that we let no day pass in the new year in which we do not turn the light of Scripture upon our lives, subject our hearts to its searching inquisition, and rejoice to be found out by it concerning those sins of which we have been willingly ignorant."
This reverential regard for the Bible pervaded his whole teaching and gave to his theological opinions an anchorage in days of drift and uncertainty. We remember reading in a Boston newspaper a report of one of his sermons made by a young woman from the Harvard Annex, who prefaced her column with a brief description of the church and of its pastor. Her remarks on the well-filled house and hearty congregational worship were appreciative and commendatory. Of the sermon she observed that one could scarce have believed that any progress had been made in theology since the days of Jonathan Edwards if the words of the speaker could be used as a test. Ah well! what she heard there was truly older than Edwards, older than Calvin, older than Augustine, older even than Paul. It came from the heart of Jesus himself. " Back to Christ," was the cry and aim of the preacher. The soul of man was to him not a common inn for nondescript and vagrant theories, but a home for the perpetual residence of God's Spirit. In " progressive theology," therefore, he took little interest. " ' Advanced thought,' " he used to say, " is very aptly characterized by the Revised Version: ' He that goeth on and abideth not in the truth is not of God.' We can go on and outstrip the Word of God, but such advances are at our peril. Almost better lag behind the truth than outrun it. Best of all is it to walk in the truth."
The common term of opprobrium with which opinions of
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this sort are stigmatized in Boston is " narrowness." " Broad " and " narrow " are at best vaguely relative terms, and ordinarily mere ungracious epithets bandied by partizans. For it should be marked that the test of " liberalism " is as purely personal as that of heresy in the middle ages. If you agree with me you are " broad "; if not, " narrow." Properly used, however, these adjectives concern not belief, but temper, animus, and manner of presentation. Thus most of us would agree that the man who wrote the thirteenth of First Corinthians, " that paean to charity," was more of a liberal, spite of his Calvinism, than many who bear the name. The honest, just, and pertinent characterizations of doctrine are not "broad" and "narrow," but "true" and "false." So we have " broad " men advocating false doctrine and " narrow " men maintaining the truth. Now, while exception might be freely taken to the interpretation of Christianity set forth weekly from the pulpit of the Clarendon Street Church, of the courtesy of the preacher, the generosity, the liberalism (in its uncorrupted sense), there could be no question. " It is," confessed one of his opponents, " more of a delight to me to hear Dr. Gordon speak what is not according to my mind than to listen to any other man discourse on that which I like and agree with."
Gordon himself would have said that the test by which the truth or falsity of his opinions was to be determined was that of scripturalness or unscripturalness. The test of experience and of history, however, in all important particulars reinforces the teaching of the New Testament. The axiom with which he started was the corruption of man and the hopelessness of all attempts at self-recovery. The human heart is, in his opinion, an incorrigible recidivist. Its fallings are incessant. It is at ever-recurring intervals remanded by the judge, conscience, to the punishment of remorse, to the lonely cell of despair. Men without Christ are, as the contagion-smitten crews on
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those Baltic vessels in the days of the Black Death, dead, dying, drifting. In themselves there is no hope, no salvation, no escape.
" The simple fact is," he writes, " that we are in a fallen condition by nature; yes, worse than fallen, we are in a burdened condition. We bear the weight of inherited transgression in our bodies and souls. Every man carries his father and his grandfather on his back. People sneer at the doctrine of original sin, but let them look at the facts of human life and be silent. Hawthorne in his ' Note-book,' published after his death, says, ' I have been reading Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress." What a strange figure Christian cuts, going through the country with the burden on his back! I wonder what he has in his pack?' Had the great novelist no dealings with his own conscience that he should ask such a question? Had he had no observation of human life not to mark how men come into the world weighted down with hereditary tendencies toward wrong-doing, under which they stagger to the grave?"
This doctrine of the exceeding sinfulness of man is the pons asinorum of both theology and experience. It is the one certainty of which it is allowable to speak with dogmatic positiveness. To say that " men are by nature and from the beginning sons of God," that " there is nothing in Christianity which has not its roots in human nature," and that "reverence for our own human nature is the only salvation from brutal vice and every false belief," is to declare one's self unsophisticated, unaccountably blind, a prophet, if not of the deceit of one's heart, at least of the sightlessness of one's eyes.* In the " era * How can men preach thus? Probably because their minds dwell upon the convergence of worldly Christians and respectable worldlings into one group, where classification is as difficult as of those diatoms and desmids which scientists at one time declare vegetation and at another animal life. There is no mistaking a milch cow for a beech-tree, however. Neither should there be any difficulty in discriminating between unspeakable Turks and ineffable saints. They cannot both be " sons of God." of good feeling " in which Gordon lived the distinctions between good and bad, the regenerate and the sullenly and obstinately evil, were commonly slighted. The world was declared to be growing hourly better, the flesh proclaimed to be in no need of renovation, and the devil ridiculed as a figment of the imagination vanishing at the cock-crowing of science. " Ruin and redemption," he was wont to say, " are the two poles of evangelical theology; but it cannot be denied that to-day and in Boston orthodoxy is at both poles considerably flattened." The sentimental theory of " universal sonship " was mingled with the teaching of Jesus, as santonin powder is mixed with food, resulting in a strange color-blindness which made the whole earth appear beautifully but falsely rose-hued. In this Pelagian teaching, as Amiel says, " the specifically Christian accent is lost. Christianity becomes a religion of dignity, not of humility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, find no place in it. Holiness and mysticism evaporate, the law is effaced, and faith is made a poor, dull thing." *
" Life is deeper than faith, and death is deeper than denial. Heterodoxy, generally speaking, is simply spiritual death translated into a creed. If the men who are now promoting the new theology— a counter-reformation destined to bury every church it touches in helpless spiritual death— had been engaged for years in the hand-to-hand labor of bringing the unconverted to Christ, we believe that such a movement would have been impossible." So Gordon wrote of those martyrs " of the chair," the Andover professors, in the days of the Andover controversy. It was doubtless his work among outcasts and drunkards which saved him from the incorrigible optimism in regard to man's nature current, and which enabled him to preach Christ crucified with such steadfastness and tenderness. The following extracts illustrate his evangelicism and exemplify the fervor and power of its presentation
* "Journal Intime," p. 115.
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" Liberalism is the religion of human nature. It does not make stern and rigid claims on men. It does not hold them up to strong convictions on such subjects as sin and retribution and the need of regeneration. Hence when men get careless and easy-going in their opinions they drift into what is called liberalism as inevitably as water runs downhill. You never find men backsliding into orthodoxy; you never find men drifting into high Calvinism; and you never will till you find water running uphill and iron floating upward in the air. On the contrary, one has to climb to get into this kind of faith, trampling on pride and self-esteem, and holding himself rigidly up to that conviction which is hardest to receive, that human nature is naturally depraved and needs regeneration, and that God is righteously holy and must punish sin. If one gets tired of believing this he has only to shut his eyes and slide, and by the simple gravitation of human nature he lands among the liberals as certainly as a stone loosed from the mountain-side lands in the valley."
" We have sometimes turned up a flat stone in a field just to see the nameless brood of hideous insects that would be found there, and to see them rushing in every direction to hide themselves from the sun that was poured in upon them. So if the shield of respectability were suddenly removed, if the sanction of false custom were lifted, if human palliations and excuses were for a moment taken away, and our hearts were left naked and open before him with whom we have to do, what a hurrying and hiding there would be from the face of him that sitteth on the throne! what a shrinking away of secret sins of enmity and jealousy and falsehood and impurity! So in these days of shallow theology there is nothing so needful as that we should have times of thorough self-examination in which we should try to see the worst there is in us. We ought now and then to take out a search-warrant for our own hearts,
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and, when we find what evil there is in us, to say, ' Strike, Lord, for I deserve the worst. I will not evade, I will not palliate, I will not contend; I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him.' "
" One can no more compel his heart to love that to which he is disinclined than he can change the law of gravitation so that it shall lift him up instead of holding him down. But if you have a new heart the law of your spiritual gravitation will be changed so that you will be attracted heavenward instead of earthward. * Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world,' says Jesus. But why should I be of good cheer on that account? If the world has overcome me so that I lie bruised and bleeding beneath its feet, it is no comfort for another to say to me, * Be of good courage; for though you have fallen, I stand upright; and though you have been defeated by sin, I have conquered sin.' It would only deepen my chagrin and discouragement instead of giving new courage. But in the Epistle of John we have a text which supplements this: ' This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.' Does this mean that having faith in yourself enables you to overcome the world? No. And yet this is all the gospel that many have for the helpless sinner. They would go to the poor victim of lust and intemperance, who lies utterly defeated and despairing, and who cries, ' Oh that I could get away from myself, for I am my own worst enemy,' and they would say to him, ' Have faith in yourself.' As well tell a drowning man to lay hold oi. his right hand in order to rescue himself when both the right hand and the left belong to the same sinking body. No! 'this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith'— the faith that fastens to Christ, the great overcomer for us, and appropriates his victory and makes it our own."
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" I go into my garden after a terrific storm and find that my grape-vine, which for years had climbed into the sunlight and basked in its beams, has fallen down, its leaves all torn and its boughs bespattered with mud. And I begin to talk to my vine: ' O vine, thou needest to be pruned and enriched. I must pour ashes about thy roots and pour water above thee to cause thee to revive, and then thou wilt lift thyself into the light and warmth.' Then I do my best at pruning and enriching, but each day as I walk into my garden I see the vine lying there. It stretches up its tendrils, indeed, like supplicating fingers to the sky; but because it can find nothing upon which to lay hold it still creeps on the ground.
" Suppose, instead of talking any more to my vine, I build a trellis upon which it can lift itself up to the sunlight? Ah, that is Christ's method. He casts a glance of pity upon us and says, not simply, ' I am from above; ye are from beneath. No man can come to me except the Father draw him;' but listen: ' I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee,' says Jehovah. But how, O Father? ' I have drawn thee with the cords of love, and with the bands of a man.' But what love and what man? I will tell you. ' This is my beloved Son; hear ye him,' and the Son says, ' I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.' The cross is the divine trellis for lifting men's affections to God. The heart that was striving in vain to love the Father, and was only falling back to earth beaten and baffled after each effort, finds at last its firm support. ' The preaching of the cross is to them that perish, foolishness; but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God.'
" ' If any man preach any other gospel unto yon than that ye have received, let him be accursed.'' This makes very serious business of the ministry— serious in view of the fact that we
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have no more choice as to what kind of gospel we will preach than as to what kind of money we will use to pay our debts. There never was a time when ' another gospel ' had such free course and was so glorified among us as now. It is not so much open infidelity as fictitious Christianity that we have to fear— a gospel which uses all the phrases and exercises all the seeming fervors of the true faith, but is as unlike it as lead is to gold. Indeed, I may say that to-day liberalism has, for the most part, left off contending and taken up counterfeiting. One of the most artful methods of issuing spurious currency is to take a gold coin, bore into it and dig out the great bulk of the gold, and then fill up the cavity with lead. The face of the coin remains intact, but the heart has been hollowed out.
" So the most dangerous theology in circulation among us to-day is an evangelicalism which keeps most of the phrases of orthodoxy, and yet is utterly void of the vital substance thereof. 'Atonement! Yes, indeed,' says this other gospel. ' Jesus Christ is the martyr-man of the race, one in whom the enthusiasm of humanity kindled to such intensity that it consumed the heart from which it proceeded, giving the most splendid example of self-sacrifice which the world has ever seen. Not that in his death he bore the curse of a violated law! Such an idea spoils the poetry and pathos of his martyrdom, needlessly embarrassing it with the theology of substitution and vicarious satisfaction for human guilt, thereby keeping alive the old "offense of the cross." Divinity of Christ! Yes; with all the heart let it be believed; and since by his incarnation Christ became our kinsman according to the flesh, let us rejoice in "the essential divinity of human nature" also.' Thus, whereas in a former generation the contention was for bringing Christ down to the level of our common humanity, now it is for lifting up our common humanity to the level of Christ. And so is brought in that most deadly doctrine of
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broad Christianity, that 'all men by nature are sons of God,' a doctrine proclaimed among us with such alluring eloquence that thousands of uninstructed souls imagine they hear the ring of the true gospel coin in what is really only the prolonged resonance of an old Pelagian heresy.
" We fully affirm that this doctrine is not only contradicted by all Scripture, but disproved by all human experience. ' As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.' Here is sonship to God, but it is predicated solely on the ground of the new birth, the solemn necessity of which, as announced by our Lord, bears witness to the depravity, not to the divinity, of human nature. Can we brave it out with God, still maintaining in the face of explicit Scripture that without repentance and without regeneration... men are the children of God? Such a doctrine Milton rightly traces not to Christ, but to the prince of fallen angels, whom he makes to say
" ' The son of God I am, or was,
And if I was I am ; relation holds
All men are sons of God.' "