THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH

WHENEVER an intellectual question of moment and difficulty comes into vogue, there are apparently two possible ways of deciding it. It may be decided by reason or by authority. The world hardly realises how many of its beliefs it accepts, and must accept, on trust from authority. Not one man in a thousand affects to understand the principles of philosophy or logic or therapeutics or poetry or art. A man believes that there are such principles, and that they demand and deserve his assent; but what they are, or how it is that they are such as they are, or why it is his duty to accept them, he could not satisfactorily explain even to himself. Upon the whole he believes what others who are wiser than he believe; he admires or rejects what others who are wiser than he admire or reject; he follows the experts, and he is justified in following them; or at least his knowledge of their judgments tends unconsciously to colour his own. And where the authority is ancient and venerable and enjoys a traditional repute of many centuries, and appeals to deeply rooted instincts of human nature, it is apt to be respected when it asserts itself, not only within, but actually outside its legitimate province; it is easily obeyed, and it is not resisted without a sense of painful effort. But in the long run it is always authority which rests upon reason, and not reason upon authority. Authority, even when it is most imperious, is obeyed in intellectual questions because it is believed, rightly or wrongly, to have reason behind it.

Thus a parent issues orders to his child, but he does not and cannot always give his reasons for them; he expects them to be obeyed because they are his. But the ultimate justification of the child's obedience is that the orders are reasonable, as issuing from the larger and longer experience of the parent. Similarly a Church may assert her supremacy over faith and morals; she may demand and exact from her members an unquestioning loyalty to her dictates; but she must first show reasonable evidence for a belief in her title to discipline and direct the human conscience. Here, as everywhere, reason is the ultimate base of authority. Indeed it is evident that no exercise of private judgment is so serious as the renunciation of private

judgment for all a lifetime. But authority which is its own final warrant neither possesses nor merits respect.

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that authority, although it may be clearly founded upon reason, can claim to cover the whole field of human knowledge. There are questions which no authority can decide; for the decision of them, in their nature, rests elsewhere. No power on earth can convince me that I have seen what I have not seen, or have not seen what I have seen; or that I like what is disagreeable to my taste, or dislike what is agreeable to it. The evidence of my senses, so far as it reaches, unless indeed they are plainly subject to delusion, is final. If this law does not apply to such a doctrine as Transubstantiation, the reason is that the doctrine as held in the Roman Catholic Church, however mysterious in itself, is not properly concerned with phenomena falling under the domain of the senses, but with the substance or essence which lies beyond them. But whether the earth moves round the sun or the sun round the earth, whether Julius Cæsar died by the hands of assassins in the Senate House at Rome on the Ides of March in the year 44 B.C., whether and when Columbus sailed to the West and discovered America, who wrote the Letters of Junius or the Ikon Basilike-these are typical questions of a kind upon which authority can pronounce no final judgment: they belong to physical, or historical, or literary science. So, too, whether St. Peter visited Rome or not, and, if so, how long he remained there, and what his relation was to the Christian Church at Rome, are questions of history and not of faith; they cannot be decided by authority. All that authority can do-and that only because of the importance of the issue is to make men hesitate before they accept certain possible or probable results of historical science. But if literary criticism is competent to determine the genuineness and authenticity of the Letters of Junius and of the Ikon Basilike, there can be no valid a priori reason why it should not equally determine the genuineness and authenticity of the Pentateuch, or the Psalms, or the Book of Isaiah, or the Gospels, or the Epistles of St. Paul. No question would seem to lie more properly within the sphere of literary criticism than the origin, date, and history of certain books. If authority apart from reason can settle these questions, it can settle any question. But here, too, in proportion as the issue at stake is serious, men will rightly hesitate before assenting to conclusions which are or may be novel and painful in themselves and possibly dangerous to the interests of Christian society. They will hesitate, but they will not refuse in the end to accept whatever conclusions are justified by evidence.

The rival principles of authority and criticism in sacred literature correspond with the two great divisions of Western Christendom. The Church of Rome appeals to authority. The Protestant Churches rely upon criticism. The Church of Rome bases her appeal upon her intrinsic right to determine all questions of faith and morals, and

therefore all questions, such as the inspiration of Holy Scripture, which pertain directly or indirectly to faith and morals. The Protestant Churches rely upon criticism, as believing that an unfettered, unbiassed inquiry into the origin of historical records is the only course which is perfectly loyal to the rights of the human intellect and conscience.

It has sometimes been held, in view of Chillingworth's famous dictum, that the Protestant Churches take, and are bound to take, a stricter view of the Bible than the Roman Catholic Church, as the Scriptures themselves are the title-deeds of Protestantism, and a Protestant cannot afford to let their authority be called in question. But the fact is that Protestantism is, for good or for evil, the home of Biblical scholarship. The strongest guarantee for the free study of the Bible is the value set upon the Bible itself. Where the results of criticism are subject to an official censorship, few results will be attained, and still fewer will be published to the world. Truth demands complete liberty of thought and teaching.

The attitude of the Church of Rome on the one hand and of the Reformed Churches on the other towards Biblical criticism deserves to be historically considered. In view of certain recent Papal utterances, and especially of the Encyclical Letter Pascendi Gregis, it is sometimes argued that Pope Pius X. has authoritatively laid a burden, as novel as it is grievous, upon the members of his Church. That he has tightened the fetters in which Biblical criticism or Biblical opinion moves, so far as it moves at all, within the Church of Rome is undoubtedly true. But the fetters were forged before his time, and his predecessor riveted them on the Church in an Encyclical Letter of his own, Upon the Study of Holy Scripture '-the letter commonly cited from its initial words as Providentissimus Deus. It will be worth while to summarise the conclusions of this remarkable document.

According to the Pope, it would be impious either to regard inspiration as limited to certain portions of the Bible or to admit the possibility of error in the sacred writers. It would be intolerable to concede that Divine inspiration relates to matters of faith and morals and to these alone. For when the truth is at stake, no one is entitled to argue that it is not so important to consider what God said as what was His purpose in saying it. All the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical have been entirely, and in all their parts, composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. But Divine inspiration, so far from leaving room for any possibility of error, not only excludes it, but excludes it without any qualification, inasmuch as God, who is the Supreme Truth, cannot in His nature be the Author of any sort of error. The complete immunity of all the Scriptures from error has, the Pope declares, been the most positive belief of all the Fathers and doctors of the Church. It follows that the idea 2 Ibid. p. 24.

De Studiis Scripturæ Sacræ, p. 22.

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of any contradiction between the sacred writers, or of any opposition in any one of them to the doctrine of the Church, must be repudiated as foolish and false. It follows too that as God, the Creator and Ruler of all things, is also the Author of the Scriptures, there cannot be, either in the natural universe or in the records of history, anything at variance with the Scriptures."

Upon the character of inspiration the Pope speaks as plainly as upon the fact:

It is idle (he says) to pretend that the Holy Spirit made use of men like instruments for writing, as though a falsehood might have fallen from the lips, not indeed of the original Author, but of the inspired writers. For the Holy Spirit moved and incited them to writing in such a way by His own supernatural virtue, and stood by them, as they wrote, in such a way that they at once and the same time rightly conceived and sought faithfully to record, and did in suitable language and with infallible truthfulness express, all such things and only such things as He commanded. If it were not so, He would not Himself be the Author of Holy Scripture as a whole."

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That, although Holy Scripture was composed under immediate Divine inspiration, its true and genuine meaning cannot be ascertained outside the Church is a doctrine essential to the position of the Church of Rome. But it would seem that the Pope goes so far as to claim for his Church the exclusive power of determining literary questions which affect the nature and history of particular books of the Bible; for he condemns the pretence which passes under the respectable name of the Higher Criticism,' that it is possible or right to pronounce judgment upon the origin, integrity, and authority of any book 'from what are called internal evidences alone.' But, in fact, if authority of itself can decide any critical question, it can decide the genuineness of such a passage as the famous text relating to the Three Heavenly Witnesses (1 John v. 7); and the Pope has not scrupled to decide it. For after much controversy the question was formally submitted to the Congregation of the Inquisition: Is it safe to deny or at least to throw doubt upon the authenticity of the text of the Three Heavenly Witnesses?' The reply of the Congregation, given on the 13th of January 1897, was 'No.' Two days later, on the 15th, it was approved and confirmed by the Pope.

3 De Studiis Scripturæ Sacræ, p. 15. • Ibid. p. 17.

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* See La Question Biblique chez les Catholiques de France au rix Siècle, par Albert Houtin, ch. 14, especially pp. 237-8 (2a édition, 1902). The following is the official record:

Feria iv die 13 Ianuarii 1897 In Congregatione Generali S. Rom. et U. Inquisitionis habita coram Emis et Reymis Cardinalibus contra haereticam pravitatem Generalibus Inquisitoribus, proposito dubio :

"Utrum tuto negari aut saltem in dubium revocari possit, esse authenticum textum S. Ioannis, in epistula prima cap. v. vers. 7, quod sic se habet: Quoniam tres sunt qui testimonium dant in coelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus; et hi tres unum sunt? Omnibus diligentissime examine perpensis, praehabitoque DD. consultorum voto, iidem Eminentissimi Cardinales respondendum mandaverunt :

Pope Leo XIII., indeed, goes far beyond the warrant of the Vatican Council and a fortiori of the Council of Trent.

The Vatican Council declared only that the books of the Old and the New Testaments, as wholes and in all their parts, were to be received as sacred and canonical, and were to be so received because they had been composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and because God Himself was the Author of them; also that it was the function of the Church to decide upon the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and that whatever the Church had held and holds to be the true meaning was the meaning. By the books of the Old and the New Testaments the Council understood such as were enumerated by the Council of Trent and contained in the Vulgate Translation."

The Council of Trent limited itself in the following way: it defined the Holy Scriptures and the unwritten tradition of the Church as the channels of Divine 'truth and discipline'; it drew up a catalogue (index in the Latin) of the Holy Scriptures which included, as is well known, the Apocryphal Books; it declared that the Vulgate translation was to be treated as authentic in public readings, discussions, sermons, and expositions'; and it prohibited any such interpretation of the Holy Scriptures as should be 'contrary to the sense which is held, as it has ever been held, by Holy Mother Church, whose office it is to judge the true meaning and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.' 10

This language of the Council of Trent Perrone applies, in a spirit which has been generally accepted among Roman Catholics, to the difficult question of inspiration. He speaks of 'Divine Inspiration ' as extending at least to the facts and the doctrines involved in them' (saltem ad res atque sententias in eis contentas), and as implying

not only that the sacred writers are exempt from any taint of error, however slight, as is the traditional theory of inspiration, but also that it was the one God who moved them to take to writing, and that in all their writing they had a positive assistance (adsistentia positiva) at their side; hence it is God alone who ought in strictness to be regarded and treated as the Author of the sacred books.

He adds:

The reason of the limitation in the words 'at least as regards facts and doctrines' (saltem quoad res et sententias) is that, as the Church has refused to define or to decide the question agitated among the schoolmen whether God dictated also the actual words, sentences, and paragraphs, we had no wish to mix up in a lighthearted manner a personal controversy with the doctrine of the

"Feria vero vi die 15 eiusdem mensis et anni, in solita audientia R. P. D. assessori S. Officii impertita, facta de suprascriptis accusata relatione SS D. N. Leoni Papae XIII., Sanctitas Sua resolutionem Eminentissimorum Patrum approbavit et confirmavit." There is an interesting correspondence upon this decree in the Guardian of the 19th and 26th of May and of the 9th and 16th of June. 10 Ibid. iv.

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Sessio, iii. cap. 2.