VI Reason
CHAPTER VI
REASON1
How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
MATTHEW vii. 4
WE saw earlier that some regard the evangelical position as inherently obscurantist. We can imagine what such will say if they have followed our argument thus far. 'This is all very well,' they will tell us, 'but the fact remains that modern scholarship assures us that the Bible does err. That is the conclusion of. free scientific enquiry; nothing can alter it, and honest men must face it. You must not wonder if those who will not face it are accused of having wilfully shuttered minds, and sinning against reason and truth. Nor must you wonder that Christians of greater intellectual integrity and realism are at pains to show them the error of their ways. For dishonest thinking, however well-intentioned, can only discredit the cause it serves, and must in the long run boomerang disastrously on those who indulge in it. To plead for the authority of the Bible is a good and necessary work; we do something similar ourselves. But the case cannot be put in your way.' They might add that they do not take seriously the theological scholarship with which evangelical views are defended, for they see it as, of necessity, a pseudo-scholarship, trying to rationalize a position which is both unreasoning and unreasonable. Evangelical scholarship, they say, is blatantly unscientific. The canons of scientific history require one to approach one's sources with an open mind, free from preconceptions about them, and to decide simply on grounds of date and character how much or how little confidence one may put in them. But the Evangelical approaches the study of Scripture with his mind made up; he is determined to defend the historicity of all biblical narratives and the truth of all biblical teaching, no matter what mental contortions and special pleading this may involve. Such an unscientific attitude, they tell us, is not merely unscholarly; it is un-Christian. True Christianity is a rational faith; but Evangelicalism counsels blind submission to a book which it is demonstrably irrational to treat as an infallible authority. This is more like murdering reason than redeeming it; it turns the faith of Christ into a bibliolatrous superstition.
We have now reached the point in our argument at which we can address ourselves directly to this criticism. Were it well founded, it would be damning, for the principles to which it appeals are true and right. (They are, indeed, the very principles on which our own case against Liberalism is based, as will appear.) The gospel does in truth proclaim the redemption of reason. Obscurantism is always evil, and wilful error is always sin. All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them. If Liberals think that this is what Evangelicals do, we cannot expect any sympathy from them for our position, any more than they could expect any sympathy from us for theirs if we thought that they were doing this themselves. This, however, is just what we do think; and we reply to them accordingly. They accuse us of not facing all the facts. We reply that they think this is so only because they themselves do not face all the facts. The boot is on the other foot. They say we fail to meet the claims of reason. We say that they fail to meet the claims of Christian reason; and that it is they, rather than we, who weaken the Church's intellectual life, in that they discourage Christians from using their minds in a manner consistent with their faith. We shall now try to make good these contentions, in principle at any rate.
'Reason' means reasoning, as 'faith' means believing and trusting. The first is the mark of men, as distinct from beasts; the second, of Christians, as distinct from unbelievers. As there can be no faith without thinking (for truth must be known before there can be trust), so for the Christian there should be no thinking without faith (for thoughts that do not express faith are sin1). The Christian's intellectual vocation is to think about all things in such a way that his life of thought is part of his life of faith and homage to God. Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith. Broadly speaking, the proper function of reason in relation to faith is threefold :
1. Its first task is to receive the teaching of God. Scripture pictures the believer as one who knows himself called to take the attitude of a child, and who is looking to his divine Teacher for instruction.2 God teaches the Church through the Word, interpreted by the Spirit; accordingly, the Christian seeks the help of the Spirit to enable him to learn what Scripture teaches. His mind is necessarily active in this; biblical interpretation is an exacting mental discipline, and so is systematic theology, the thinking through of the various strands of biblical teaching in the mutual relations in which Scripture sets them. But the Christian does not by his mental labour construct knowledge of God out of his own head, or contribute anything of his own to what God is teaching him; his labour is simply that of receiving and assimilating. He ascribes all the knowledge he gains not to his own keenness of wit, but to the effective instruction of the Holy Spirit. The attitude of mind which he seeks to maintain is that of a pupil who wants to learn as much as his text-book and teacher will tell him, and who therefore attends diligently to them and listens to all that they say. With Charles Simeon, he reminds himself when he approaches Scripture : 'I know only one thing—that I know nothing.' To say this and mean it is no doubt the hardest task in the world; but this is what he tries to do. He confesses himself blind, stupid and ignorant through sin, and cries to God for enlightenment and instruction.
We have seen already that the biblical revelation terminates in mystery. The lamp of Scripture lights only a limited area of our darkness; beyond that area lie the secrets of God, into which men may not pry. Our knowledge of God, therefore, though true as far as it goes, is nowhere complete or exhaustive. The humble pupil of Scripture will recognize these limits and keep within them. He will not be so self-willed as, on the one hand, to build a speculative theological system which will say more about God than God has said about Himself, or, on the other, to ignore or tone down what Scripture does say because he finds it hard to fit in with the rest of what he knows. His aim is to learn all that God teaches, and give it all its due place in his own thought. And he will never let himself suppose that now he has finished learning and knows everything; instead, he will keep listening to Scripture for further correction and instruction.
The humble pupil of Scripture will trust his text-book and not doubt its claims for itself. Does this mean that he is using his reason uncritically or unscientifically in his study of it? Not at all. Scientific criticism, if it is to be more than an irrelevant testimony to one's own prejudices, must aim to appreciate objects for what they are; its function is to discern their essential nature and to judge them in terms of criteria appropriate to their nature. To find fault with blank verse for not rhyming, for instance, or with a historical novel for adding to the recorded facts, would be very stupid and invalid criticism; it would show failure to grasp the nature of what one was criticizing. Now, we have seen what view of the nature of Scripture Christians should hold—that it is truth from God, profitable for doctrine and instruction. We have seen that this is not a matter of inductive proof, but of divine testimony, received through the witness of the Spirit. Scientific criticism for the Christian, therefore, must mean the effort to understand and appreciate Scripture as what it is—God's truth in writing. Such criticism is an exercise of reasoning faith. But to subject Scripture to a scientific critical technique designed to help us tell true from false among fallible human records would be an act of unbelief that was both unscientific and uncritical; for it would be treating Scripture as something other than it is. 'Scientific criticism' would be a complete misnomer for such a procedure. To assume a priori that Scripture, like any merely human historical document, is doubtless partly true but also partly false would be a quite unscientific thing to do; for the method of science is to proceed a posteriori from the known to the unknown, and Christians know from the teaching of Christ that all Scripture is truth from God. And to form conclusions as to which parts of Scripture are the erroneous ones would be invalid and worthless as criticism, since it would be the result of evaluating Scripture by wholly inappropriate criteria. For Christians to consent to study Scripture on the assumption that it is a fallible human book would not argue intellectual honesty so much as uncritical muddle-headedness; and if they are consistent they will decline to do it. The only biblical criticism which they can consistently regard as valid is that which takes as its starting-point the Bible's account of itself. Much modern criticism within the Christian Church stands self-condemned as unscientific by its arbitrary refusal to take account of what God has told the Church about the nature of Scripture.
F.—9
Must Bible study conducted on these principles be hidebound and unenterprising? No. It is true that the student will not spend his time in speculative reconstructions of 'real' facts and truths supposed to lie behind, but to vary from, the biblical record; for he will see such enquiries as attempts to answer questions that are based on wrong principles and that should never have been asked. Nor will he develop theories about the origins and authorship of biblical books which go against the Bible's own testimony.1 Instead, he will set himself to tackle the right questions: namely, what does the Bible actually teach? What does God's written Word mean? What does it say to us? History shows that this, the authentic evangelical approach to Scripture, creates a strong passion for biblical exposition; one has only to think of the expository labours of Luther, Calvin and their successors, whose biblical study could hardly be described as unenterprising! Like them, the modern evangelical student should demand of himself the highest level of scholarly attainment in the fulfilment of his exegetical vocation. In the words of a contemporary spokesman for classical Reformed theology, Professor Auguste Lecerf : 'Every hypothesis which does not deny a priori the inspiration of the original text, which does not systematically exclude miracle and prophecy, and presuppose the humanistic ideology of the eighteenth or nineteenth century . . . has a right to the impartial and attentive examination of the Reformed exegete . . . . We must be prepared to accept loyally the facts as they present themselves and to practise scrupulously the methods of a conscientious critic in the spirit of the faith which has been bestowed upon us and in the liberty indispensable to any science which wishes to be taken seriously.'1
2. The second task of Christian reason is to apply the teaching of God to life: to bring it into constructive relationship with our other knowledge and interests, and to work out its bearing on the practical problems of daily life and action—moral, social, personal, political, aesthetic, or whatever they may be. This is really an extension of the first task, for the Bible is a book about life and itself instructs us, at any rate in principle, as to the practical bearings of its teaching. Theology must function as the queen of the sciences, showing us how to approach, interpret and use all our knowledge in such a way that the secular order is sanctified to the glory of God. Part of the business of theology is to teach us to see all facts and truths as God's property, of which we are stewards; and so to behave reverently and responsibly in the world which we acknowledge as His. The need for theology to provide basic principles for interpreting facts becomes greater according to the extent to which the practice of particular intellectual disciplines is affected by the outlook and presuppositions which each student brings to it. There may not be much room for subjectivity in (say) mathematics, but such studies as history, philosophy and the social and psychological sciences are decisively affected by the general assumptions and viewpoint of those who pursue them, and here it is of the first importance that Christians should occupy themselves in thinking out what lines of approach to these studies are consonant with biblical truth.
It is probably true that during the past century Evangelicals have culpably neglected this task of reflecting on the biblical world-view and relating current knowledge to it. This seems to have been due partly to an over-individualistic preoccupation with personal salvation, in which was reflected the typical weakness of the nineteenth-century outlook; partly to the aggressive anti-Christian attitude of much modern science and philosophy, which led many to think that they would be wiser not to take such studies seriously; and partly to the anti-intellectual habit of mind which always threatens warm piety, exalting strong emotion at the expense of clear-headedness and urging that it is more important to feel rightly than to think rightly. (This attitude, of course, was encouraged in the nineteenth century by the work of Schleiermacher.) But in truth this lapse is a tragedy; for it marks a decline from biblical Christianity into a modern form of one of the oldest thorns in the Church's flesh—Manicheism. This is an unfamiliar word today, though it was common enough in the Middle Ages (when bishops and theologians used to use it as a kind of oath for roughhousing obscure opponents, just as some use 'Fundamentalism' today); but the point of view which it denoted is still quite familiar. The Manichean idea was that the material world is evil and worthless. One's dealings with it should therefore be cut down to a bare minimum. True spirituality means living as much out of this world as possible; holiness is to be defined in terms of abstinence from needless traffic with created things. Nothing is gained from the study of anything here below, and the less interest one has in the world around one the better for one's soul.
Such 'spirituality' is in no way Christian; yet it constantly appears in the Christian Church. It would be idle to deny that it is in the air today within evangelical circles, though in fairness it should be said that it is not only they who suffer from this malady. It is evident from their behaviour that some cherish the idea that to take any interest or pleasure in material things is inevitably sinful; that a negative, indifferent attitude to the world around one is a mark of 'keenness', and anything else is 'worldliness'; and, in particular, that constructive thought about the world's contents and problems is no part of a Christian's business. It is to be feared that there are some students—not all of them Evangelicals—who regard their 'academic' and their 'Christian' work as mutually exclusive, and who think it their duty to skimp the former so as to have more time for the latter; there are others who keep their Christian faith and their secular studies locked up in separate compartments in their minds, seeing no need or obligation to bring the two together for their mutual enrichment. Hebert quotes Sir John Wolfenden's much-publicized remark about 'the number of young people who today come from Sixth Forms to Universities with their minds firmly closed, locked, bolted and barred, not just about the Bible and religion in general, but about all sorts of other things as well, philosophy, politics and history among them'.1 If this was intended as a vignette of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, it would seem both unfair and untrue; but there is not usually smoke without at least a little fire. All these attitudes that have been mentioned betray the same lack of concern about the world and its problems, and the same unawareness that this lack of concern is in any way un-Christian. The zeal of Christians who have such a negative, Manichean outlook on the world is undoubted (it is, indeed, their very zeal—misguided—that has led them to it); but it is no wonder if they strike others as queer fish, only half alive and oddly under-developed. They give the impression of being not quite human—which is, in fact, the truth about them. That is what Manicheism in the system does for one.
But the Manichean attitude is altogether wrong. God forbids Christians to lose interest in His world. He made man to rule the created order; man is set in it to have dominion over it and to use it for God's glory,1 and therefore he may, and must, study its contents and its problems. This belongs to his vocation both as a man and as a Christian. The biblical revelation is given us, not merely to show us how to gain heaven, but also to provide us with the principles for glorifying God by creative and imaginative living here and now. We are to use the minds He gave us to apply revealed truth to the whole of life. We are certainly to be detached from the world in the sense that we do not regard it as our true home, nor look to it for our true reward, nor lose our heart to it. That is the point of the biblical warnings against 'worldliness'.2 Instead of this, we must cultivate the genuine, Christian 'other-worldliness', that of the man who can always say, 'To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.'3 But equally certainly we are not to be detached from the world in the sense that we turn our back on it and lose interest in it. God cares about it, and so must we. When Christ enjoins us, as part of the first great commandment, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind',4 He is telling us to use our minds not merely to learn biblical doctrine on its own, but to apply that doctrine to the facts of God's world as we know them, so that we may interpret them correctly and make a right and reverent use of our knowledge.
We need, therefore, to be constantly searching Scripture to find what lines of approach it indicates to the problems raised by secular studies—history, natural science, philosophy, psychology and the rest—and how we should view what those studies teach us in the light of God's written truth. Sometimes this will be hard to see; the one may seem to conflict with the other, and there will be tension in our minds. In such cases, our attitude must be determined by the principle that, since the same God is the Author both of nature and of Scripture, true science and a right interpretation of Scripture cannot conflict. We shall, therefore, continue loyal to the evidence both of Scripture and of empirical enquiry, resolved to do justice to all the facts from both sources while we wait for further light as to the right method of relating them together. Meanwhile, we shall look to see whether the appearance of contradiction is not due to mistakes and arbitrary assumptions, both scientific and theological, which a closer scrutiny of the evidence will enable us to correct. It is tempting in such cases to cut the knot and deny the problem, either by discounting one or other set of facts, or by locking them into two separate compartments in our minds and refusing to bring them together; but this, the easy but unrealistic way out, is actually sin (it is always sin to dodge facts), and may well bring its revenge in intellectual upheaval and disillusionment later on. The truth is that the facts of nature yield positive help in many ways for interpreting Scripture statements correctly, and the discipline of wrestling with the problem of relating the two sets of facts, natural and biblical, leads to a greatly enriched understanding of both. Not only does the book of Scripture throw light on the meaning of the book of nature; the book of nature reflects some of that light back on to Scripture, so that we may read its message more clearly. It is through the ferment of thought created by such interaction that theological insight is deepened and the relevance of the gospel more fully grasped.
3. The third task of Christian reason is to communicate God's truth to others. The duty of Christian witness involves reasoning, as the descriptions of Paul's missionary activity show.1 Faith is not created by reasoning, but neither is it created without it. There is more involved in witness to Christ than throwing pre-arranged clumps of texts at unbelieving heads; the meaning and application of the gospel must be explained to men and women in terms of their actual situation. This requires hard thinking. The biblical revelation was given in terms of Eastern culture, environment and thought-forms, all very different from our modern, industrial, Western world, and it has to be translated into modern terms before modern men can fully grasp its relevance. Biblical terms and images (sin, justification, sacrifice, covenant, holiness, priest, blood, spirit, for instance) are not self-explanatory; it is therefore our task as witnesses for Christ to seek out ways and means of making their meaning clear.
Not that we may alter or revise the gospel in order to make it more palatable to the modern mind. That would be treachery to Christ. Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms. Our business is to interpret and criticize modern thought by the gospel, not vice versa. Confusion here is fatal. The formula 'of course, nowadays we don't believe . . .' should find no place in modern re-statements of the gospel; its appearance (a common thing, unfortunately) is usually a sign that what is being stated is, to that extent, not the gospel, but a denial of the gospel; and such statements come under Paul's curse, to which we referred before.1 Nor, again, may we present the faith as a philosophy, to be accepted (if at all) on grounds of rational demonstration ; we must always declare it as revealed truth, divinely mysterious and transcending reason's power to verify, to be received humbly on the authority of God. Faith involves the renunciation of intellectual self-sufficiency; we must always proclaim the gospel in a way that makes this clear. That was the point of Paul's protest against the Corinthian desire to arrange a marriage between the gospel of Christ crucified and the 'wisdom of words' of the Greek tradition. The gospel, he insisted, makes foolish the wisdom of this world—that is, it shows the bankruptcy of proud, self-sufficient reason and condemns it; and his own method of preaching the gospel was deliberately designed to wean aspiring philosophers from reliance on their reason and shut them up to humble, self-distrustful dependence on God's Word and Spirit for light and understanding. 'My speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.'1
J. R. W. Stott well sums up the position : 'In evangelism, then, we shall need to recognize that the men to whom we preach have minds. We shall not ask them to stifle their minds, but to open them, and in particular to open them to receive a divine illumination in order to understand the divine revelation. We shall not seek to murder their intellect (since it was given to them by God), but neither shall we flatter it (since it is finite and fallen). We shall endeavour to reason with them, but only from revelation, the while admitting our need and theirs for the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.'2
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH
Such, in outline, are the biblical principles governing the Christian use of reason. Why are those who try, however inadequately, to be loyal to these principles told that they are incorrigible obscurantists, and that their minds are not free?
Let us put the matter in its broader setting. What confronts us in this complaint of obscurantism is one more outbreak of a conflict that has been in progress within the Christian Church since it was founded. It is sometimes called (not very happily) the conflict between faith and reason. It always takes essentially the same form. Whereas the logic of faith requires us, as we saw, to challenge and correct secular opinion by the light of revealed truth, the self-styled champions of reason always desire to bring the biblical faith into line with secular ideas. A few examples may be given. In the second century, Gnosticism aspired to remodel the doctrine of salvation in the light of an Oriental dualism which taught that matter, as such, was evil; salvation, therefore, it was held, should be conceived as deliverance from the body and the material world. In the fourth century, Arianism aspired to remodel the Church's Christology by the light of Greek philosophical ideas about God, which made it impossible to think of Jesus Christ as divine. In the eighteenth century, the Deists wished to remodel the doctrine of providence in the light of the then-popular view of the universe as a self-contained machine, and to make men think of God as an absentee landlord, who had left His world to run itself. The nineteenth-century Liberals tried to remodel the doctrines of human nature and grace in the light of the theory of evolution, maintaining that sin was just a transitional stage in the steady march of mankind, under Christ's leadership, towards inevitable perfection. And their twentieth-century children (the present-day critics of Evangelicalism), though they have generally returned to a more biblical view of man and his redemption, are anxious today to remodel the doctrine of revelation in the light of the rationalistic biblical criticism which they have inherited. All attempts of this sort to refurbish faith by reason rest on the same assumption, implicit if not explicit—namely, that the human mind, working by its own light, is the final arbiter of truth, even in the things of God; or, putting it another way, that some form of the subjectivist doctrine of authority is true. And when the champions of reason complain (as they regularly do) that Christians who reject their views keep reason from its rights and deny it freedom, all they are really doing is calling attention to the fact that the latter do not accept their unscriptural views about authority.
It is not, perhaps, surprising to find Christians constantly, often unconsciously, lapsing into subjectivist assumptions. For when men become Christians they do not cease to be sinners; and the attitude of mind which the subjectivist position expresses—that epitomized by Protagoras, five centuries before Christ, in the famous phrase 'man is the measure of all things'—is one which, Scripture tells us, is natural to sinful men. It was precisely because man welcomed the prospect of becoming the measure and judge of all things that sin first entered the world. 'When you eat . . . your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,' affirmed the serpent.1 It was as though he said : 'You will not need to depend any more on what God chooses to tell you; you will be able to work out for yourselves what is good and bad, and be master of your own judgment, on the basis of your own experience; you will have a mind of your own for the first time.' 'So when the woman saw that. . . the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate,' and Adam with her. Man accepted the invitation to pursue wisdom by constructing a private interpretation of life out of the resources of his own independent judgment. He sought intellectual self-sufficiency, ability to solve all life's problems without reference to the word of God. He turned his back on the way of acquiring wisdom by making God's statements the criterion for his judgment; indeed, he accepted the serpent's assurance that wisdom could not be had that way at all. He had the audacity to query God's word. Pride, and more particularly intellectual pride, was thus the root of his sin.
And this same outlook has been natural to man ever since. Sinners are no more ready to acknowledge God in their thinking, by allowing His utterances authority over their judgment, than they are to acknowledge God in their actions, by allowing His utterances authority over their behaviour. Sin has its root in the mind, and this attitude of mind is its very essence. And when men become Christians, they are still prone in their pride to lapse into the assumption that there is no rationality or wisdom in merely taking their Creator's word; they are still apt to demand instead that their reason be permitted to make its own independent assessment of what He says and to have the last word in deciding whether it is credible or not. This is as real and gross a moral lapse as any, though it is not always seen as such; and the temptation to it is strong and insidious. And once one succumbs, and relapses to any degree into this sinful habit of mind, one is instantly drawn to the conclusion that Christians who continue to base their thinking on an unquestioning belief of what God has said are fettering reason and stifling free thought. No doubt the serpent would have told Eve as much, had she asked him.
But it is not so. The true antithesis here, as we have seen, is not between faith and reason (as if believing and thinking were mutually exclusive), but between a faithful and a faithless use of reason. The question is not whether we should think, but how we should think; whether or not our thinking should be controlled by our faith. The real difference between Evangelicals and those who call them obscurantists lies in the realm of method. We disagree as to the principles that should guide the Christian judgment. Our critics say that the way in which we deal with the Bible is fundamentally dishonest. We reply that they think so only because the way in which they deal with the Bible is fundamentally un-Christian. They hold that what needs revision is our doctrine of biblical authority; but it seems that what really needs revision is their method of biblical scholarship. Instead of subjecting their own judgment wholly to Scripture, they subject Scripture in part to their own judgment. They treat the question of the truth and authority of Scripture, which God has closed, as if it were still open; they assume the right and competence of the Christian student to decide for himself how much of the Bible's teaching should be received as authoritative. They accept what they do accept, not simply because it is Scripture, but because it satisfies some further criteria of credibility which they have set up; so that even when they believe the right thing, in so far as they are consistent subjectivists they do so for the wrong reason. Their whole approach to the Bible is fundamentally unbiblical.
We see now how fallacious it is for them to think that the question as to whether the Bible is inerrant or not can be settled by appeal to the work of modern scholars and 'the assured results of biblical criticism'. Whether or not one is prepared to postulate that the Bible may contain falsehoods purporting to be truths is a matter of presupposition and method. Liberals will tell us that they hold their views about Scripture 'on critical grounds', as if that phrase explains everything. In fact, it explains nothing. What are these 'critical grounds'? On examination, they are found to derive from un-biblical principles of judgment for interpreting biblical evidence. These 'assured results of modern criticism' are simply popular hypotheses built on the inadmissible assumption that there may be untrue statements in Scripture.
The general question which Christian students must face before ever they tackle specific critical issues is this : should the principles governing our study of Scripture be drawn from Scripture itself, or not? It is not a hard question to answer. Christian believers, who acknowledge the authority of Christ as a Teacher in other matters, ought equally to acknowledge it in their approach to the Bible; they should receive Scripture as He did, accepting its claim to be divinely inspired and true and studying it as such. Those who pooh-pooh such an approach as obscurantist, unscientific and intellectually dishonest, should remember that they hereby stigmatize Jesus Christ, who taught His disciples this approach and thereby excluded any other.
We would not be misunderstood. We have nothing to say in defence of the real obscurantism which would ignore altogether the questions raised by modern critical enquiry. We deplore the idea that Evangelicals ought to have, or look for, ready-made 'party-line' answers to all these problems. On many questions of biblical history and exposition there is room for real and legitimate difference of opinion, and no doubt always will be. All that we insist on is that no critical discussion is sound or legitimate that is not based on the Bible's own view of itself. We entirely agree with Hebert that in Bible study 'we are required to be at once humble and docile, and alert and critical. We must be critical; an entirely uncritical person would be entirely gullible, foolish and superstitious. . . . The ideal biblical student would have to be as sharply and even daringly critical as is humanly possible, and at the same time deeply sensitive to the things of the spirit, and so far as his will goes entirely obedient to God's will.'1 Our whole complaint against the modern critical movement is that its exponents have not been alert and critical enough; they have failed to criticize the assumptions which their critical method enshrines. It is for sharp and even daring criticism at this point that we now plead. Evangelicals dissent from 'critical orthodoxy' not because they are wilfully ignorant of its conclusions, but because they are acutely conscious of the illegitimacy of its method. They seek to be obedient to God's will by reforming biblical criticism according to His Word; they advocate a Christian critique of critical method; for they are sure that criticism should be of a piece with faith, not wedded to axioms which represent a lapse into unbelief.
Hebert tells us that the older Liberalism is now dead, and has been replaced by the 'Biblical Theology' movement. 'The characteristic of this Biblical Theology is that it is at once deeply orthodox in faith, and thoroughly critical—more critical than the Liberal critics, since it is also critical of the critics themselves.' Those associated with this movement, he tells us, 'endeavour to see the Bible "from within"; not to impose on it standards of judgment derived from any modern belief in "progress", but to sit at their feet (its authors') and learn from them what they are seeking to express.'2 We welcome this statement of aims, to which we would ourselves wholeheartedly subscribe; we can only hope that its adherents will soon act upon it in regard to the doctrine of Scripture. It is hard to believe that they take their professed aims seriously when they charge Evangelicals with obscurantism for believing the 'Jewish' doctrine of Scripture, the only one that the Bible knows, and when Dr. Hebert himself writes a complete book on 'Fundamentalism' without discussing at all the avowed biblicism of our Lord and His apostles, nor the biblical concepts of Scripture and of its authority. The exponents of 'Biblical Theology' have yet to convince Evangelicals that they are completely sincere in saying that they desire to see the Bible 'from within', and to break with the arbitrary subjectivism of the older Liberals. If they wish to gain the confidence of Evangelicals, they must show an attitude to the Bible more earnestly biblical than that which they adopt at present.
THE FREEDOM OF REASON SECURED BY FAITH
We end by replying directly to the criticism with which this chapter began. Do evangelical principles inhibit the freedom of reason? On the contrary, they establish it. Freedom is no merely negative conception; anarchy is not freedom, either on the moral or on the intellectual level. True freedom is something positive: to possess it is to fulfil one's human destiny. Such freedom is found only in subjection to God and His truth; and the more subject, the more free—this is the biblical paradox of Christian liberty. Man becomes free only in bondservice to Jesus Christ; otherwise, he is captive to sin. Man's mind becomes free only when its thoughts are brought into captivity to Christ and His Word; till then, it is at the mercy of sinful prejudice and dishonest mental habits within, and of popular opinion, organized propaganda and unquestioned commonplaces without. Tossed about by every wind of intellectual fashion and carried to and fro by cross-currents of reaction, man without God is not free for truth; he is for ever mastered by the things he takes for granted, the victim of a hopeless and everlasting relativism. Only as his thoughts are searched, challenged and corrected by God through His Word may man hope to rise to a way of looking at things which, instead of reflecting merely passing phases of human thought, reflects God's eternal truth. This is the only road to intellectual freedom, and its sole safeguard is the principle of absolute subjection to Scripture. If, as our critics say, Evangelicals at present are not entering into this heritage, that does not mean that it is not theirs to enter into. The truth is that, in principle, it is theirs and no one else's; for they alone treat the idea of biblical authority seriously enough to secure and preserve this freedom. If anyone in the present debate lacks intellectual freedom, it is rather those whose minds are governed by the tyrannical modern axiom that what is newest must be truest, what is old must be out-of-date, and change is always progress; those who feel they must deny what Christ affirmed about Scripture rather than break with nineteenth-century ideas of what assumptions are 'scientific' and what are not; those in the grip of a theological neurosis that makes them regard rationalistic principles of biblical criticism as an inviolable sacred cow. Because they submit to Scripture only in part, their minds are not wholly free for truth; by maintaining a fancied freedom (non-subjection to God's Word), they forfeit the possibility of real freedom; nor can they gain the second till they renounce the first. They may be right in saying that modern Evangelicals are intellectually hidebound; but it is the pot that is calling the kettle black. And the kettle can be cleaned—please God, it will be, as Evangelicalism recovers its native intellectual vigour in our own day—but the pot will have to be discarded and replaced.
Are evangelical principles obscurantist ? No. The truth is that Evangelicals face facts which the exponents of 'critical orthodoxy' overlook: namely, that the Bible teaches a positive doctrine of its origin and nature, which Christ incorporated in His own teaching. The position that is really obscurantist is that of those who refuse to face these facts, and will not consider that to reject Christ's teaching about the Bible is as sinful and faithless as to reject His teaching on anything else. If the adjective 'heretical' has any place in this debate, it is surely here that it ought to be applied.
'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken,' wrote Oliver Cromwell on a famous occasion to the General Assembly of the Scottish Church. We address a similar plea to some in high places in British churches today. We ask them to think it possible they may be mistaken in attributing intellectual dishonesty to those who cannot stomach the idea that God's witness to His Word is untrue, and who think it likelier that man has erred than that God has lied. We would ask them to think it possible they may be mistaken in supposing that only minds which lapse into unbiblical ways of thought are open and free, whereas minds which do not are fettered and closed. We would ask them to think it possible they may be mistaken when they detect in evangelical evangelism a summons to stifle the mind. We do indeed summon sinners to bow before the authority of the written Word of God; but this is a call, not to stop thinking, but to stop thinking sinfully, and to start bringing one's thoughts into captivity to Christ. Repentance means 'change of mind'; and the call to submit to biblical authority is part of the preaching of repentance—a summons to intellectual prodigals to return to the Father's house and start thinking normally again, using their minds not as tools of pride, but in humility and obedience, as children of a heavenly Father should do.
F.—10