Understanding the Scriptures | Page 9

are the results primarily of will-activities, how can they finally be mastered except by minds quickened by doing the will revealed in the Scriptures? The book of Christianity must be interpreted by the disciples of Christianity. Judged merely by bookish standards, there is no satisfactory explanation of the power of the Bible. But lift the whole problem out of the realm of books as such! The glimpses into any high truth that are worth while--how do they come? They come out of experience. Even when they are repeated from one mind to another they become the property of that second mind only as they reproduce themselves in experience. Otherwise the whole transaction is of words, words, words. The Scriptures have to do with deeds, not words.
All this is offensive to the dogmatic reasoner. For him the intellect as such is the organ of religious truth. He insists on speaking of the Scriptures in formally theological terms. That the Scripture writers employed theological terms there can be no doubt, but they did not speak as systematic theologians. And always they brought their theology to the test of actual life. The writer of these lines once knew a student who had read enough of psychology to enable him to reason himself into a belief that he was the only person in existence; that is to say, he declared that he himself was the only one of whose existence he was infallibly certain. Does not all knowledge of an external world come as a report through a sensation aroused by stimulus? If the appropriate stimulus could be kept up an external world might fall away and I would still think it was there. The bell might ring at the door and might be nobody there. And so on and on, through steps familiar enough to the student of philosophy. When a friend made a quick appeal to life with the question: "If you are the only one alive, why do you bring your troubles to me?" the amateur philosopher came to earth with a sense of jar. But the jar is no greater than that when we pass from the plane of dogmatic theology to that of reading the Scriptures for their own sake. The old scholastics said that in God there are three substances, one essence, and two processions. How does this sound as compared with the statement of Jesus that he and his Father are one, and that he would send the Comforter? This is not to decry theology; but is nevertheless to discriminate between theology and scripture.
Some one will object, however, that the scriptural truths take their start in large part from the visions of mystics--of men who brood long and patiently until they behold realities not otherwise discernible. Some students will urge upon us that such mystic revelations are granted peculiarly to the mystic temperament as such, and they often come regardless of the quality of life that the seers themselves may be living.
There have, indeed, been in all ages of the world temperaments of supernormal or abnormal responsiveness to influences which seem to make little or no impression upon the ordinary mind. In all periods natures of this type have been looked upon as organs of religious revelation. So valuable have abnormal experiences seemed that all manner of expedients have been utilized to beget unusual mental states. A certain tribe of Indians, for example, in the southwest of our country are accustomed at set times to send their religious leaders into the desert to find and partake of a peculiar plant which has an opiate or narcotic effect. In the belief of the Indians this plant opens the door to visions. The visions, as reported by those who have recovered from the influence of the narcotic, are not of any considerable value. Similar attempts have been made by hypnotic experimenters among other peoples, the hypnosis sometimes being self-induced. From some Old Testament passages especially we may well believe that this sort of extraordinary mental condition was sought for in the so-called schools of the prophets in the olden days of Israel. The astonishing peculiarity about the Scriptures, however, is not that there is so much reliance on this trance experience as that there is so little. The Hebrew Scriptures were the expression of a people living in the midst of heathen surroundings; and heathenism always has laid stress upon the virtue of these abnormal experiences. Granting all allowances for mental states induced by eating an opiate, or by whirling like the dervish, or by fasting like the Hindu, the fact remains that in the main, the visions of the writers of our Scriptures came out of attempts to realize in conduct the moral will of God. When we think of the surroundings even of the early church; when