“WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THE OLD TESTAMENT.”

Otago Witness, Issue 3743, 8 December 1925, Page 73

“WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THE OLD TESTAMENT.”

By the Very Rev. Dean Fitchett. We have been asked to publish the following address which .was delivered at the Churcli Congress in Christchurch in 1923: I intend an informal address from the point of view of the parish priest—the parish priest of to-day, not of the day before yesterday. Advanced scholarship? no; you do not expect advanced scholarship from the parish priest. But the results of scholarship are within his reach: he will be a foolish parish priest if he neglects them. My subject is: ‘‘What to Say About the Old Testament. ” What the parish priest is to say to himself about it; what—as may seem expedient—he is to say to his people. Let me first note some points that are of common knowledge. The Old Testament is the ancient liteiature of the Jewish people. In matter and form it is mainly what we should expect in a national literature —histories, codes of law, ethics, philosophy, songs, dramatic pieces, romance folk-lore. In addition it nag books of religious appeal—the writings of the prophets. It is for the most part anonymous, in this unlike the other ancient literatures best known to us, those of Greece and Rome. Its production was spread over centuries, the later writings distinguishable from the earlier mainly bv changes in the language. All languages change; the English of today could not have been written in Shakespeare’s time, still less in Chaucer’s. Its literary quality (which is not the parish priest’s chief concern) is of the highest. James Anthony Froude, a distinguished man of letters, but in religion no friend to our way of thinking, writes of the Book of Job that it will ‘‘one day be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world.” Distinctive above all else is its religious purpose. Men and events are viewed in their relation to a divine will—sub specie aeternitatis. These points noted, I go on to speak in particular of three things —Hebrew folklore, the ancient Hebrew Idea of God. and Inspiration. And here I must bethink me of the company in which I stand. Bishops and clergy are around me, and they will judge; with what severity, who can tell? We must speak by the card or equiveation will undo us. There will be no equivocating; I shall havo courage to say what I think. FOLK-LORE. Every national literature runs back into folk-lore. Earlier than written history are unwritten beliefs, traditions of men and things in the past, stories that have been handed down, songs, proverbial savings. Our British folk-lore, or part of it, was done into nineteenth century poetry by Tennyson—the “Idylls of the King.” Arthur. Guinevere, Lancelot. Galahad, Merlin. Vivian, and the rest, did they ever exist? We cannot tell. They are shadowy figures that people the times before history was written. Inevitably there was a Hebrew folk-lore; we find it in the early chapters of Genesis. With the twelfth chapter consecutive history seems to begin, the record of a single family in successive generations, Abraham Isaac, Jacob, and the sons of Jaoob. In the earlier chapters we have a creation story, a Paradise story, a flood story, and the story of a tower that was to reach to heaven. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” w« read; thoro were men who lived to a prodigious age. In. studying this folk-lore we must recall what wo know about Abraham. To Abraham, a native of Mesopotamia, the land of Nineveh and Babylon, had come a call such as came to the , founders of this province of Cantertwry,

and to many of our countrymen beforo and since: ‘‘Get thee out of thv country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.” Obeying the call, he journeyed westward, and still westward, until brought up bv the Mediterranean Sea; there, in the south of Palestine, he settled—Abraham and Sarah his wife. Lot their kinsman, with his wife and daughters—dwellers in tents. The black tents of the nomadic Bedouin are in the same region to-day. We think of this as the whole migration, until there is sprung upon us the fact that on an emergency Abraham could put into the field 318 armed men, “born in hia own house.” Three hundred and eighteen men capable of arms would mean a total community of over a thousand. Evidently Abraham was at the head of a clan or tribe. It must have been & long caravan that trailed across the desert spaces betweeen Mesopotamia and Palestine. These ancestors of the Hebrew people would bring with them their beliefs, whatever they were; books they had none, but they had a folk-lore—ideas about men and events in the past, ideas about God and the origin of things, ideas about the invisible forces behind the processes of nature. We have means of knowing what these ideas were. Whole libraries nave been unearthed in the land from which Abraham came, cuneiform script on clay tablets. That there should be correspondence between the Babylonian and the Hebrew folk-lores—in the creation story, in the Paradise story, in the flood otory—is nothing surprising; it is what w© should expect. But there is an immense transformation. The people of the land from which Abraham came believed in gods many, patterns of every immorality, gods and goddesses of violence, intrigue, lust. Turn to the Book of Genesis; what is it? Monotheism, not polytheism. “In the beginning God”—is the majestic opening,—One God, the Maker of heaven and earth; One God, the sovereign ruler of tne universe; and this note—One God—runs through the Old Testament from end to end. That divine influence which we call inspiration, where so plain as on this first page? The Paradis© story—read by some of the early Christian fathers as parable or allegory—the oldest story In the world, and everlastingly true, is our own life story. The path by which our first parents entered upon moral capacity, by that path enter we. Like the infant child, they were without the knowledge of good and evil. The image of God in which they were being created, what was it but the holiness of God? and holiness comes of choice between good and evil, the choosing of good a choosing free, continuous, persistent. The first human pair attained to the knowledge of good and evil as the infant child attains —by collision with limitations set, by authority, collision wilful and intelligent. A tree of temptation was set in the midst of the garden, its fruit appealing to appetite, unfenced except bv command. No palisades or barbed wire. Even thus stands it with us; no other than this will be the moral position of every human being to the end of time. Always the tree of temptation, always the appeal to appetite, always the command that may be broken. The Paradise story in the first pages of Genesis is the profoundest thing in literature. The creation story would give the ancient Hebrew his highest conception of the Creator’s power, wisdom, and oeneficence. To us, milleniums later, God has given a fuller revelation. Some of us are old enough to remember the agonised controversies that ensued when the modern sciency of geology first found a voice—the painful and laboured attempts to harmonise Genesis and science. All that i.s over end done. It is no concern o ours to reconcile ancient folk-lore with modern knowledge. Do I believe in a six-days creation? I believe that the ancient Hebrews believed in it. Do I believe that a certain Methuselah lived through nine centuries? The same answer: I believe that the ancient Hebrews believed it. We are at ease on the subject of Hebrew foik-lore. THE IDEA OF GOD. We all know what play has been made bv secularist lecturers m England and America of the so-called “moral difficulties” of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament they say is a Moloch; its etftical standard they say is below the level of our modern civilisation. Even were it so, why should the faults and errors of the ancient Hebrew's be reproached against Christianity? There was a time when the Hebrew people wero at so low a level intellectually and morally as to tiiink that a golden calf made by their own hands was the God that brought them out of Egypt. A people that could think that ir-Jght think anything; the grossest misconceptions were possible. Their idea of God is seen in what they thought God permitted, and in what they thought God commanded. In their domestic life, polygamy, concubinage, divorce at the husband’s mere caprice. The comment of our Lord was that Moses tolerated this “because of the hardness of their hearts,” which is to say that they were capable of nothing better. In social relations, the right of revenge, evil for evil, the lex talionis, ap eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. All this was thought to have divine approval. Not seldom a man entering upon actions that gratified his animal impulses and evil passions imagined himself to be fulfilling the will of God—the word of the Lord had come to him. The massacre of whole populations in the invasion and conquest of Palestine had “Thus saith the Lord” for its warrant. It was a “Thus saith the Lord” from Samuel that sent Saul to the slaughter of the Amalekites: “Go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Do I believe that God authorised these worse than German barbarities? 1 believe that the people of the time believed it, and I find it hard to believe that they did. In correction of their misconceptions, why were they not enlightened from above? It was not light from above that was wanting, but eyes to see. If a doctor of divinity teaches an infant class the result is measured not by the capacity of the teacher, but by the incapacity of tne children. The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. It took denturies of discipline, not unmingled with chastisement, to educate tho Hebrew people into worthy ideas of God. For our part, we are Christians, and own no responsibility for tho failures of early Judaism. Humbly we worship the Creator of the universe as “Our Father”; gratefully we accept the asaurnnee of our Lord: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father”; and with St. Paul we find “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Oirist.”

INSPIRATION. The Bishop of Goulbum has just reminded us that we have no authoritative definition of inspiration; our Church does not give it.. This we have often said to ourselves, perhaps with a feeling of relief, as though rid of a difficulty. Yet we ought to be able to give some account of the New Testament teaching that in old time “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” A hsat is afforded us by the third Gospel. The third Gospel alone has ihe parables of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican in the Temple, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and some other teachings of our Lord. We bless God that St. Luke was inspired to preserve to us these, treasures. If we turn to the preface, we get light on the nature and manner of his inspiration: “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative” —many were writing gospels, and not a few aprocryphal gospels have come down to U 9; —“it seemed good to me also,” continues St. Luke—and here is the divine impulse—a duty was laid upon him, it was on his soul and conscience to write a gospel; he had to do it. His fitness for this high task —“having traced the course of all things accurately from the first”; here again is the inspiration. He was not a typist writing to tne dictation of another; he had been divinely impelled to trace the course of all things accurately from the first. And thus came into existence the Gospel according to St. Luke. We may transfer this to the writers of the Old Testament. To some ready setibe came a divine impulse to write a history; it would be an impulse to make the best or his opportunities and his materials, tracing the vourse of all things accurately from the first. If to a man of poetic genius there came a divine impulse to say the thing that was in him, he would write a psalm;— part of it with the note of universality, to echo in human hearts for ever; part of it born of the time, to perish with the time. If we sang last Sunday, "That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and that the tongue of thy dogs may be red through the same,” it was with the reservation that these sentiments were not ours. The style is the man, the belief is the man; this was a man of his time with the limitations of his time. When a divine impulse to say the thing that was in him came to a man of cultivated spirituality—an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, an Amos—we get utterances that are for all time. The great prophets were great preachers; their sound i.s gone out into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world. And nov, glancing back over the whole literature from Genesis to Malachi, w r e can without nr barrassment look in the face any critic, any man of science. Next to the New Testament, the Old Testament is for us the most wonderful book in the world, and the most precious. We see in it the divine training of a people who in turn should train others. We see an agelong avenue of preparation for the Gospel and Kingdcm of our Lord Jesus Christ. With heart and conscience we assent to every clause of the prayer of the Church with which we began this morning’s session: l “Blessed Lord. Who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of Thv holy Word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed- hope of everlasting life which Thou hast given us,” not in the institutes of Moses, nor in the Psalms of David, but “in our Saviour Jesus Christ.”