CHAPTER IX

BIBLICAL TEACHING AND THE CHRISTIAN

HOPE

FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS

In determining our doctrine of the Christian hope we take up first the question of the Bible teaching and how it is to be used. There is a conception of the Bible that would give a very simple answer to this question. It is the idea that the Bible is a textbook of doctrine which was dictated word by word by God. Such a theory misrepresents the character of the Bible, and mistakes the nature of religion and of God's dealings with men. By insisting on the inspired and therefore infallible letter, it places all the Bible essentially on the same level, and we have seen how this resulted in premillennialism in the loss of the distinctive Christian elements in the future hope while the Judaism of an earlier and lower age came to the fore. It is necessary then, before we go further, that we grasp clearly certain fundamental principles as to the Christian revelation and its bearing upon the Christian hope. Here are four truths that are basic for our later study:

1. The kingdom of God in Christian thought is the great purpose of God and the goal of human history. Because God is good this rule of his will be the highest good of men. Because God is personal spirit this government of his in its fulfillment will be not the compulsion of an outward force, but the sway of an indwelling and controlling Spirit in the hearts and lives of men.

2. In order that there may be such a spiritual rule men must know God. God's revelation of himself is always the condition of the coming of his rule. That would not be necessary if God's rule were by sheer power, and if man had only blindly to submit. But if God is to rule within, then man must know and trust.

3. This revelation, which is simply God showing himself to man, answers man's two great questions. The first is, What must I do, what kind of a man must I be? He who really sees God has found the answer to that: the Spirit of God is to be the rule of our life; we are to be sons of our Father. The second question is, What may I hope for? And the answer to that too depends wholly upon what God is. If we know what kind of a God we have, then we know what help we may hope for now, and what kind of a world the future will bring.

4. And knowing this kind of a God, we know too what religion is. Religion is a personal fellowship with God in the unity of Spirit and life. Such a religion will bring forth its creeds, and form its organization, and find its forms of worship. But creed and church and ritual are expressions of this religion, not the religion itself. Religion is a personal relation. On God's side it is the gracious giving of himself to be known and possessed. On man's side it involves a self-surrendering faith, in which man gives himself to God, receives God, and lives his life in the Spirit given to him of God.

Here, then, is the great need: if the rule of God is to come upon earth, God must show himself to men, men must know God. It is the Christian conviction that he has thus revealed himself. We need to ask, then, In what manner has God made himself known?

THE REVELATION OF GOD

It might seem a very simple and obvious answer to say that God has revealed himself through the Bible, but the answer does not go far enough. True, he who will go to the Bible with open mind and earnest heart will find God speaking to him; but the Bible itself is at the end, not at the beginning, so far as God's revelation of himself is concerned. There is a long history that lies back of this. These writings come from many ages: how did they come to be? Why, among many Christian writings, were just these gathered together which we find in our New Testament? Why did we take over those which the Jewish Church had thus selected? We cannot consider all these questions here, but they must be kept in mind as against the tendency to think of the Bible as the point at which we start, as a completed whole with no questions lying back of it. We have not answered the question, how did God reveal himself? by pointing to the Bible. How did this Bible come to be, and in what way is God revealed in it?

There are two ways conceivably that God could have taken in revealing himself. He might, himself remaining hidden, have given men information about himself, or at intervals wrought some outstanding deed in which men might see his purpose and his power. And this information and the story of these deeds he might have caused men to write down for those who came later. And to all this he might have added instruction as to conduct and worship and perhaps some veiled account of the future so written that its meaning would become clear only as it was fulfilled by the event. It is in this way that some men have conceived God's revelation.

They have made it first of all a book revelation. As such it is clearly a revelation about God rather than a revelation of God himself. It is not so much the living God whom men come personally to see and know, but a sum of ideas about God and of rules for men laid down by him. Such a revelation clearly is not adequate to the kind of religion which we have been considering. It makes of religion a matter of belief on the one hand and obedience to command on the other. But the religion of which we have been speaking demands more. Man must know God in personal fellowship and God himself as thus known by his Spirit must enter into man's life. This alone is the religion of the spirit and this is the Christian faith.

There is, however, a second way which God might take. Instead of giving men teaching about himself or prescriptions laid down by himself, he might make himself known to men directly in the experience of life. Revelation becomes thus not intellectual but vital. Redemption itself becomes the means of revelation; men know God by the very deeds by which God comes into saving relation with them. Such is the Christian conception, and such is the picture of the method of God which the Bible itself gives us, the Bible which is the monument of this redeeming selfrevealing of God.

It is important that we grasp this idea clearly. We begin not with a set of writings, but with the thought of a living God. Christianity has a book, but it is not a book religion. Mohammedanism is a book religion; so are Mormonism and Christian Science. Each of these began with a book, and the book is not only supreme