The Bross Lectures, 1904. By the Reverend Marcus Dods, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1905.1
By the munificence of the late William Bross, a considerable sum of money has been placed in the hands of the “Trustees of Lake Forest University,” the proceeds of which they are charged to use to create a literature of exposition and defense of the Christian religion. It is specified, among other particular objects that should be sought under this general commission, that an effort is to be made “to demonstrate the divine origin and authority of the Christian Scriptures.” It was quite natural, therefore, that among the earlier works called out under the stimulation of this bequest, there should be one on the origin and nature of the Bible. It may be doubted, however, whether Dr. Dods’s lectures are calculated to meet perfectly the expectation aroused by language which speaks of a demonstration of the divine origin and authority of the Christian Scriptures. Dr. Dods, of course, believes that the Scriptures are a product of a movement of life and thought which originated in a divine impulse, and that there is much that is divine, and therefore authoritative, in them—that their main burden and central message, in fact, is divine. But around this central core, he believes that much that is human in origin and far from authoritative in effect has been woven like a widely extended web, or shall we say like the coma of a comet that surrounds, partly transmitting, partly obscuring, the light of the nucleus.
In this Dr. Dods is but a respresentative of a general tendency which is at the moment very active in Christendom. Men everywhere, deeply affected by the assault which has been made in our day, perhaps with unexampled vigor and subtlety, upon the Christian system as a divine revelation, and especially upon the Christian Scriptures as the vehicle of that revelation, have sought to ease the situation by casting away what they have deemed the husk in the hope of saving what appeared to them the kernel. They have commended to us, therefore, a new and reduced Christianity, documented in a new and reduced body of Scriptures. Dr. Dods is by no means an extreme representative of this tendency. But gradus non mutant speciem. In this book also he appears before us as the “concessive” apologist, the “mediating” theologian, and begs to put in our hands a Bible, which, in his view, is much more rationally conceived in its origin and nature than the old Bible was, and therefore, in his opinion, may be much more successfully defended. We certainly shall not deny that a certain measure of ease may be purchased for the defender by simply declining to defend; although it is not always certain that, so long as what we consider the citadel is to be defended, its defense is made really easier by the surrender of what we may deem outposts but which may prove to be approaches. We gladly recognize that Dr. Dods would fain defend what both he and we look upon as the citadel. But we find it impossible to admit that what he would yield as indefensible outposts are either indefensible or can be yielded safely or loyally. We rejoice that we have a fuller and richer Christianity than Dr. Dods feels bound to proclaim, and Scriptures far more divine in their origin and nature than he is inclined to admit. We believe that the defense of this richer Christianity and these more completely divine Scriptures is not only possible but imperative, if we would preserve Christianity in the world. And we believe their defense to be logically easier than that of the lowered views which Dr. Dods would commend to us. We do not believe that half-truths are more easily defended than whole ones; and we look upon the “concessive apologetics” which Dr. Dods represents as inimical to Christianity, and all the more to be firmly resisted because its assault is more insidious and therefore more dangerous than open attack.
Ask Dr. Dods what the Scriptures are and he will tell you, A body of books which we set apart from all others and assign a place of supremacy because they “are all in direct connection with God’s historical revelation which culminated in Christ” (p. 23). Like all Dr. Dods’s definitions (it is inherent in the position he occupies) this is—inadequate. If we should say the Bible is the documentation of God’s self-revelation for the purpose of human salvation, that would be a more adequate description of the internal characteristic of the Scriptures—expressing, indeed, their unifying principle. But the plain fact is, to put it in briefest terms, that the Scriptures are the corpus juris of Christians imposed on them as such by competent authority. This competent authority is proximately the apostles, acting as Christ’s authoritative agents in founding His Church. Thus apostolicity (in the sense of apostolic imposition, not authorship) is and always has been the principle of canonicity. There is no gain in blinking this plain fact, and seeking to transmute it into some more immanent principle. The Christian Church is a manufactured article; it was founded; and its character was impressed on it and its law imposed on it by its founders. Of course we may ask why the apostles imposed just this particular body of books on the churches which they established as Christ’s authorized agents in founding His Church. And doubtless, in pursuing this inquiry, we shall ultimately reach the principle that these books stand together as constituting the “canon” which the apostles gave the Church, because they constitute as a whole the documentation of God’s revelation of Himself for salvation. But nothing could be more confusing than to confound this internal principle of unity with the external principle of canonicity, though good men, as, for example, Luther, have in every age been guilty of the confusion—with the most unfortunate results. Throughout its whole history authentication as God’s law for His Church has been the proximate ground of the reception of the canon, although, of course, throughout the whole history of its formation organic participation in the revelatory process has been the principle of the constitution of the canon. And it is on the same ground that the canon must continue to be received if received at all. It is a grave error to represent this rational procedure as a desertion of the principle which governed the fathers of the Reformed Churches. They, as little as we, sought to determine the “canon”—which is a matter of history—on the basis of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti—which is a matter of experience: on that basis is determined not the “canon” but “the Word of God.” From his standpoint Dr. Dods very naturally finds the method of the Reformed doctors a little confusing: but the confusion is his, not theirs. They treated the Scriptures as a unit because the Scriptures are a unitary apostolic book; and they then asked if this book “found them.” Discovering that it did, they recognized it as “the Word of God.” Of course, Dr. Dods may say that apostolicity cannot justly be claimed for all these books. That is a matter of opinion, concerning which we differ with him and concerning which the fathers of the Reformed Churches differed with him. That the body of the apostles imposed a Bible on the Church is not disputable; that this Bible contained all the books, and no others, which our present Bible contains we consider historically substantiated: that this collection as a whole is “the Word of God” is experimentally verifiable. This strikes us as a much more reasonable method of dealing with the matter than Dr. Dods’s fluctuating way, which involves a confusion between the historical question of what constitutes the canon and the vital one of what is the Word of God to me—analogous to the common confusion of the Scriptures as the principium cognoscendi and the Scriptures as the means of grace.