MR. GLADSTONE AND DR LIDDON ON THE BIBLE.
TN Good Words for April, Mr. Gladstone has begun a series of papers in which he proposes to give popular reasons for the belief that the inspiration of Scripture will hold its ground, even if the specialists who are now attacking the different books of the Bible, and especially some of the most important books of the Old Testament, from the critical side, should establish their case. "It appears to me," he says, that we may grant, for argument's sake, to the negative or destructive specialist in the field of the ancient Scriptures all which as a specialist he can by possibility be entitled to ask respecting the age, text, and authorship of the books, and yet may hold firmly, as firmly as of old, to the ideas justly con- veyed by the title I have adopted for this paper, and may invite our fellow-men to stand along with us on 'the impreg- nable rock of Holy Scripture." Dr. Liddon, who has pub- lished a very eloquent sermon,* probably directed against the view taken of the Old Testament by one of the writers in the volume called " Lux Mundi," a sermon which has just reached a second edition, to one brilliant passage in which Mr. Gladstone refers, does not apparently at all agree with Mr. Gladstone; for he manifestly thinks that almost all the objec- tions directed by the modern critics against portions of the Old Testament would, if accepted, be fatal to Christian faith, partly on the ground that the Apostles gave a general sanction to the teaching of the Old Testament as they then knew it, and still more on the ground that our Lord himself referred to the Jewish Scriptures as a final authority for their own time and place, and especially that he drew certain inferences of his own from statements made in the Old Testament Scriptures as if their evidence was unanswerable. Of course we are unable to judge from Mr. Gladstone's preliminary paper what he regards as the limits of that which a specialist can, "as a specialist, by possibility be entitled to ask respecting the
• The Worth of the Old Testament. A. Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on the Second Sunday in Advent, December 5th, 1889, by H. P. Liddon, D.O.L. Second Edition, revised, with a new Preface. London: Rivingtons;
age, text, and authorship of the books " of the Bible ; and it may turn out that he assigns to this limit so narrow a significance, that destructive criticism would hardly be entitled to its name at all, since he might deny it all substantially destructive power, But of course this is not a very probable view. No one knows better than Mr. Gladstone that if the Fourth Gospel could have been rele- gated to the middle of the second century, as many of the destructive critics have maintained, it would have had no authority at all as expounding the theology of the Incarna- tion; nor even that if the Book of Daniel could be shown to have been written in the time of Antiochns Epiphanes, after many of the events predicted had really taken place, the prophecy, as a prophecy, would, as Dr. Liddon intimates, have been utterly untrustworthy, and, in fact, a deception. We feel sure that Mr. Gladstone cannot refer to such destructive criticism as is here involved, when he says that Christians could afford to "grant, for argument's sake, to the negative or destructive specialist all which as a specialist he can by possibility be entitled to ask respecting the age, text, and authorship of the Bible, and yet may hold firmly, as firmly as of old, to the ideas justly conveyed " by " the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture." Destructive criticism of the kind we have mentioned may, and in the case of the Fourth Gospel we believe that it does, utterly break down; but if it did not utterly break down, if it could establish anything like what it professes to establish, we believe that it would, as Dr. Liddon maintains, go to the root of the Christian revelation,—at all events, as the Christian revelation has been understood by nine-tenths of all existing Christians.
On the other hand, if we take Mr. Gladstone's qualification of the limits of havoc which the destructive critical specialist may possibly work, as signifying the limits within which there is at the present time any weighty reason to suppose that the destructive critical specialist may succeed, -we should be much more disposed to agree with Mr. Gladstone that he cannot really strike any serious blow at Christian faith, than with Dr. Liddon's more alarmist view. We hold, indeed, that the historical school might very possibly succeed in upsetting the view that the book of Daniel dates from a period long before Antiochus Epiphanes,—a point on which Hebraists tell us that the philological evidence of the language itself is virtually-de- cisive,—and yet that no serious blow would be struck at the truth and power of the chief part of the historical revelation contained in the Bible. Again, if the view of such critics as Robertson Smith as to the date of Deuteronomy in its present form were regarded as established, we do not think that any serious blow would have been struck at the truth and power of the chief part of the historical revelation contained in the Bible. So far as we can judge, the whole weight of Dr. Liddon's argument depends on one assumption, that our Lord in taking a human nature, and in speaking from the centre of that human nature, was yet virtually so dominated by the divine omniscience, that except on one subject, his human knowledge,—the knowledge derived from his human nature,—was unlimited. " Our Lord has told us," says Dr. Liddon, "that on one subject His knowledge was limited. We have no reason for supposing that it was limited on any other. But if our Lord, as Man, did not know the day and the hour of the Judgment (St. Mark xiii., 32), He did not as Man claim to know it. Had He told us that the real value of the Books of the Old Testament was hidden from Him, or had He never referred to them, there could have been no conflict between modern so-called `critical' speculations and His divine authority." Surely this is going a great deal beyond the true significance of the evangelists' teaching as to Christ's human life. It seems to us that that life implies the limitation of his human knowledge on various different occa- sions. What is the meaning of " How is it that ye sought me P wilt ye not that I must be about my father's business," if our Lord was perfectly aware all the time that Joseph and Mary were searching for him for parts of three whole days, while he was attending in the Temple to ask questions of the doctors of the Jewish law P What, again, was the meaning of his "asking them questions" at all, if all the time he not only knew the answers far better than those who answered him, but knew also what the answers he was to receive would be, before those whom he interrogated had opened their mouths P Surely our Lord did not "as man" claim to know the answer to any question which he appeared to ask for the sake of instruction. We cannot even conceive the scene of our Lord's boyhood as described by St. Luke, except on the hypothesis that our Lord's human nature was genuinely human, that he really desired to know the interpretation put by the Jewish doctors on the Jewish Scriptures, and that he had not anticipated the anxiety felt concerning him by his mother and her husband. Again, take the prayer in Gethsemane. What is the meaning of the prayer, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me, and yet not as I will, but as thou wilt," if he in his human nature knew perfectly well that it was God's will that he should drink the cup P The whole meaning of that hour of anguish, the whole depth of that spiritual cry, depended on the human limitations of the nature the agony of which escaped in that cry. And the same impression is derived from the Gospel which may be called the Gospel of the Incarnation, in its account of what we may fairly speak of as the foretaste of the agony. When our Lord says : " Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say Father, save me from this hour.' But for this cause came I to this hour. Father, glorify thy name,"—can any one doubt for a moment that such a deliberation as that with himself, was a deliberation simply impossible to divine omni- science conscious of its omniscience, and that its profoundly touching and impressive character is derived only from its frank expression of human determination to accept as God's will what he would fain have deprecated? We admit and assert, of course, that our Lord's human nature was fre- quently pierced by flashes of divine insight and divine power ; that, as St. John says, he knew " what was in man," as none other could have known it; that he stilled the tempest and multiplied the loaves as none other would even have attempted to do in his place. But even his power as man was limited, as his rebuke to the disciples who would have used force to resist his capture shows, where he speaks of his power to "pray to his Father" for angelic aid, had he thought it right to offer such a prayer, not of any power inherent in his human nature to summon such aid. The mystery of the two natures in one person is seen, indeed, at many points in his career ; but Dr. Liddon's view of our Lord's human intellect as absolutely unlimited in all but a single direction, appears to us to solve this mystery in a sense which almost destroys the humanity, instead of taking it up into God. And why, if it be-admitted, as every one admits, that our Lord suffered all the grief which lacerated human affections suffer, all the sense of desolation which human weakness involves, all the consciousness of an almost intolerable burden under which unassisted human effort so often succumbs, should it be thought necessary to deny that he also suffered in his human experience from the limitation of his human knowledge? It is surely not reasonable to suppose that even that constant communion with God which theologians express under the name of the beatific vision, could have removed from the genuinely human nature which he had assumed on our behalf, the human limitations which are of its very essence.
But if Dr. Liddon is mistaken in thus disposing of almost all the limitations of our Lord's human intellect, if this would falsify the very deepest pathos of the Gospel narrative, then surely it would be right and natural to assume that our Lord's human knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures was just the knowledge which the best teaching of his time, linked to true spiritual perfection, would confer, and was not the sort of knowledge which modern philology and modern studies would secure,—was, in short, consistent with such a view (say) of the Book of Daniel as the best Jewish doctors of his time could have imparted, even if that view were erroneous. So far as we can see, Dr. Liddon's conception of our Lord's nature tends as much in the direction of denying his humanity, as the Unitarian view of our Lord's nature tends in the direction of denying his deity. But if we are right the force of Dr. Liddon's argument disappears, and then we should certainly hold with Mr. Gladstone that whatever (within reason) the negative school of criticism may establish, it will not really injure the essence or diminish the impressive historical effect of the revelation so wonderfully and so gradually commu- nicated to the Jewish race. Even if some of our canonical books turn out to have been rashly accepted, and some that are deutero-canonical prove to be more authentic and more weighty than those supposed to be of the highest authority, the Anglican Church at least is committed to no view of inspiration that will make it difficult to confess the errors of the past and to rectify the teaching of the future.
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