Corollaries of Biblical Scholarship

The close, analytical study of the Scriptures is an absorbing pursuit. But it must never be isolated from a disciplined devotional life in which the Bible is used for the nourishment of the soul. Careful scholarship, patient attention to detail in searching the Scriptures—these are essential. Yet the Bible must always be seen for what it is, the actual Word of God, “living and powerful,” as the writer of Hebrews puts it in that remarkable passage (4:12, 13), in which the written and the incarnate Word so wonderfully merge. As Luther picturesquely said of the Pauline epistles, “The words of St. Paul are not dead words; they are living creatures and have hands and feet.” Therefore, the objective, scholarly study of Scripture must be guarded and supplemented, lest even the best of methodology should lapse into unfeeling dissection of the living Book.

Consider, then, three corollaries of biblical scholarship.

1. The cultivation of the devotional life must go hand in hand with the scholarly study of Scripture.

2. All Bible study, however analytical and objective it may be, must always stand in subjection to our Lord Jesus Christ.

3. In all Bible study the truth must be paramount.

Devotional Use

Now what is the devotional use of the Bible? It is a use of Scripture in which immediate outcomes such as analysis, research, or homiletical study, do not have priority. Thus it is in essence a disinterested use of Scripture, which means that we come to it first of all as spiritual food—feeding upon it in our souls, letting it speak to us, claiming its promises, meditating upon its teaching, resting in its truth, letting it judge us, seeking from it God’s will, living in its light, resolving to walk in its precepts.

For such use of the Bible there is a chief requisite. And that is the discipline of time and place. One speaks personally of his own use of Scripture with humility and diffidence.

Nevertheless, were I to evaluate the influences that have formed my mind and instructed my heart, I should place first, above all my education, the simple habit of daily, devotional Bible reading begun in boyhood and continued uninterruptedly until the present, which means over half a century of daily reading. To be sure, there is nothing unusual about this experience. Many thousands have done likewise. But for myself I should say that, along with prayer, this one thing has meant, next to my knowledge of Christ, more than anything else.

In a recent issue of The Christian Century, there is a moving account of life in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s seminary in Germany in the days before the war. Says the author of the article, who was a student under Bonhoeffer:

We members of the community rose in silence each morning, then assembled in silence in the dining room for prayers. None of us was allowed to speak before God himself had spoken to us and we had sung our morning praise to him. After a hymn, one or more psalms were read antiphonally. The Old Testament lesson was followed by a verse or two of a hymn, a hymn that was used for a week or more. After the reading from the New Testament, one of us offered prayers. Then, again in silence, we went to our dormitories to make our beds and to put things in order. Next came breakfast, during which we continued to practice taciturnitas; after breakfast we retired to our studies, which each of us shared with one or two of his fellows. For half an hour our task was one of meditation on a short passage from the German Bible, a passage about which we were asked to center our thoughts for a week, not to gather ideas for our next sermon or to examine it exegetically but to discover what it had to say to us. We were to pray over it, to think of our life in its light, and to use it as a basis for intercession on behalf of our brethren, our families, and all whom we knew to be in special need or difficulty. Such meditation did not come easily to us, for few of us had learned to read the Bible devotionally.

Evening prayers were at 9:30 P.M., taking much the same form as those of the morning; thereafter we were expected to maintain silence until bedtime, for God’s word was to be the last word of the day just as it had been the first.

Surely this is the devotional discipline of the Word at its best. Few of us are under such strenuous discipline as that in Bonhoeffer’s seminary, but we should at the very least hear God speaking through his Word the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.

Relation To Christ

The second corollary of biblical scholarship is that all Bible study, however analytical or objective, must stand in relation to our Lord Jesus Christ. We see this principle at its highest in the wonderful narrative of Luke 24, where the risen Christ, the incarnate Word, teaches the written Word to two obscure disciples on the way to Emmaus. This is without doubt one of the greatest of all passages about Bible teaching. Notice the emphasis of our risen Lord as Luke reports it: “Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” Later, after he had said the blessing and broken bread at the evening meal, and after the eyes of the two disciples had been opened so that they recognized their Teacher, they hastened back to Jerusalem with burning hearts, eager to tell how they had seen the Lord. There, in a room with the door locked, the living Saviour appeared and said, “All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me.” To which Luke adds, “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.”

Let us set it down as a fact that, unless we are alert to see Christ in the Scriptures, we shall never understand them as we ought. A question every Bible scholar must be asking himself by way of correction and direction is this: “Is my study of the Bible, my handling of it in research, in teaching, and in preaching, as well as in my devotional life, really bringing me closer to Christ?”

For the Christian scholar the study of the Bible is of a different order from the study of any other book, or of any other subject. By reason of its inspiration, the Bible is uniquely related to God through the Holy Spirit. And we Christians are indwelt by this same Spirit. Thus in a way that passes understanding, the scholar who knows the Lord and comes prayerfully to the Scriptures, seeking in them the Lord, will not fail to find him there. For it is the function of the Spirit not to speak of himself but to glorify Christ (John 16:13, 14).

Submission To Truth

Related to this is a third corollary, which reminds us that in every kind of Bible study the truth must be paramount. Our Lord is himself the truth. As our study of Scripture must always be in submission to him, so it must be in submission to the truth.

If I may venture to coin a word, those who live and work in the Bible must shun at all costs any kind of “aletheiaphobia”—fear of the truth. Sometimes evangelicals are tempted to be afraid of newly apprehended truth. If this is the case, it may be because they have made the mistake of equating some particular, cherished, doctrinal formulation or historical position with final truth. Therefore, when they are faced with some hitherto unrealized truth, some breakthrough into wider knowledge, it may appear as a threat to a dearly held system and the reaction may be one of fear or even of anger. But, as Plato said in the Republic, “No man should be angry at what is true.” Why? Because for the Christian to be angry at what is true is to be angry at God. Trusting, therefore, in the infinite greatness of the Lord of truth, the evangelical scholar must resolutely put aside the fear of any valid disclosure of truth.

But there is another side to “aletheiaphobia,” and it relates to those of a liberal persuasion theologically. Priding themselves upon their openness to everything new, and prone, perhaps, to accept the new too readily and uncritically as true, they may see in old yet unwelcome truth a threat to their breadth of view. Theirs is not so much the fear of the expanding aspect of truth, as it is the fear of the particularity of truth. But what if some of the older positions that have been discarded as outmoded, mythological, or unhistorical, are proved by modern knowledge to be, after all, true? Then they too must be accepted, because truth is sovereign.

Under The Word

In his book, Paul’s Attitude to Scripture, E. Earle Ellis tells how an admirer once said to Adolph Schlatter, the renowned New Testament scholar, that he had always wanted to meet a theologian like him who stood upon the Word of God. Schlatter replied, “Thank you, sir. But I don’t stand on the Word of God; I stand under it.” The distinction is significant. Moreover, it rebukes the tendency to erect our own structure of thought upon Scripture instead of submitting our thought to Scripture come what may.

Great indeed is the privilege and opportunity of the Bible scholar and minister of the Word in days like these. God has given us the Book that has the answers for this apocalyptic age, when men’s hearts are failing them for fear. This is a time when, as never before, the Bible is speaking to our common human need, when the Book is coming alive under the stress of portentous events. And its whole message is summed up in the terse yet infinitely spacious declaration at the close of Hebrews: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.”

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