Humbled by Bible Students from Long Ago
As I continued work on my commentary on Revelation during the summer months, I often wonder what people will be saying about our preaching, teaching, writing, etc. when they review manuscripts a hundred years from now. This morning I took a book off of my shelf and re-read a section from it, a section written that summed up the author’s evaluation of exegesis in medieval times. F.W. Farrar’s History of Interpretation
“It is always an evil to create any discontinuity between ourselves and the past. It has not been my object to hunt out the details of ancient error; still less to glory in the superiority of modern insight. If we are compelled to study and to point out errors of the past, it should be in a spirit of humility, and not of malice; it should be that we may faithfully learn, not vainly triumph.â€
After referring to a number of medieval scholars, Farrar continues: “If they had left nothing else to the Church, they have left the best of all legacies–the legacy of holy lives and an immortal example; the legacy of men who during years of unselfish sincerity spurned delights and lived laborious days. The writings of some of them will be always valuable for the spirit of deep devotion which they breathe, for high moral teaching, for profound philosophical and theological investigation. But their lives were better than their learning. They had found Christ, even though they read His name by wrong methods. . . . {Their} exegesis demonstrates the amazing vitality of error; the fatally stupefying effects which result from the attempt to crush free inquiry under the leaden weight of authority and tradition; the hopeless insecurity of super-structures, even when they have been elaborated with the utmost care and skill, which have been based on shallow, imaginary, or untested foundations. But the sadness of these facts is irradiated by one truth of which they furnish the strongest evidence. It is that the Bible may be obscured for centuries by bad translations, and buried under mountainloads of valueless and erroneous exposition; that it may be withheld from the ignorant, and grossly mis-interpreted by the learned; that it may even be abused as a bulwark of immense follies, and a pretext for enormous crimes; and yet there is in the truths which constitute its essence so divine a preciousness, so innate a force, that never in any age has it ceased to teach men the way of salvation, never has it lost the power to brighten happiness and to console affliction, to inspire men with courage for the amelioration of social wrongs, for the overthrow of popular idols, for the assault on ancient errors, for the restatement of forgotten and neglected truths. Men may still continue to misunderstand and misrepresent it; to turn it into a grim idol or a mechanical fetish; to betray it with the kiss of false devotion, and to thrust it between the soul and the God Whom it was designed to reveal; but to the end of all time–and herein consists is divine authority–it shall guide the souls of the humble to the strait gate and the narrow way which leadeth to eternal life . . .”
I almost stopped typing out such a long quotation for this post, thinking that it was taking too much time, but the more words I typed, the faster I typed. Why? Because I needed to revisit them. My spirit was touched by such kind and bold words. Indeed, I wished I had written these words. What I can do is remember them and hide them away in my head and my heart and bring them out into the daylight when I think I have arrived in total understanding of anything.
