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Bible Teaching in Our Schools

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Jul 23, 1908

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 85, No. 30.

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Bible Teaching in Our Schools

By Editor

Our subject is both broad and important. It will be impossible within the proper limits to discuss it exhaustively. We can only endeavor to cover the ground in a partial way, and to make some suggestions which we hope may be helpful.
The last quarter of a century has witnessed a marked change in the attitude of many professed Christians toward the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures. The difference between the old and the new view is clearly stated in one of the latest books on liberalism ("The Programme of Modernism") in these words:—
The common and traditional notion is that in the Bible we possess an orderly and complete history of the revelation of the Old and New Testaments, guaranteed true in every part by the authority of God, who, as he has inspired the Bible, may be called the principal historian; and also by the secondary historians, who were more or less immediate witnesses of the facts they record,—such as Moses and Joshua for the Old Testament; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for the New. But this conception has been shaken to its foundations by literary criticism applied to the historical books of either Testament.
As a result of this destructive criticism, the Bible is now, even to many teachers of religion, a fallible book, inspired only in the sense in which all the great classics are inspired, and with no more authority than is conceded to it after it has been tried at the bar of reason. In such a time as this, there is, therefore, great need of a powerful testimony to the fact that the whole Bible is indeed “the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.” This testimony can best be borne by a prayerful and earnest study of the book itself—such a study as will lead to the revelation of its power and authority in lives molded by it.
The teachers of the Bible in our educational institutions ought to be such painstaking students of the Word of God as will enable them to bring forth constantly from this divine storehouse things new and old, and especially ought they to have such a clear comprehension of the truths of the gospel, and particularly of those phases of truth which need to be emphasized in the message to this generation, that they may be most effective defenders of “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” In this time of apostasy from the truth, when some who have long professed the faith are becoming unsettled concerning some of its essential features, and when men of ability in other denominations are attacking with greater show of learning than ever before, both the theological and the historical features of this second advent movement, there should go forth from our educational institutions an influence that should tend to “stablish, strengthen, settle” any who may be wavering in this message; and the heads of the Bible departments in our institutions should, by such study and research as can not be expected from the average minister, be prepared to defend, with expositions both sound and convincing, those doctrines which constitute the warp and woof of the third angel’s message. Furthermore, the students who are for any considerable length of time under the instruction of these teachers, should go to the field sound in doctrine and experience, and equipped with such a knowledge of the Scriptures as will make them most efficient both in winning souls and in building up the church in the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus.
Let us then consider some suggestions which may tend to the realization of this ideal:—
1. The Bible is one book, the product of one mind, and not a library by different authors. While the individuality of the different instruments used in producing this book may appear plainly, yet the thoughts are always the thoughts of God; and as he can not lie, there will be found neither inconsistency nor contradiction between the different portions of this one volume, even though written at times and places far separated from each other. When the tragic story of Job’s experience was written; when Moses traced the record of the beginnings of things; when “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied” of the glorious consummation of the gospel in the second advent of our Lord, all things which holy men of old were afterward moved to write by the Holy Spirit were then present to the divine mind, and the Spirit of truth has placed his own stamp both of harmony and reliability upon every succeeding portion. This conception of the Bible is fundamental in the profitable study and the successful teaching of this heaven-sent message.
2. There is but one theme in the Bible,—the gospel of Christ. Nature speaks of the power and the wisdom of him who created and who upholds all things, but only through a supernatural revelation can come a knowledge of the entrance of sin, with the consequent sentence of death, and the divine provision whereby the image of God may be restored in the human soul, the curse removed, and the kingdom of God again established upon earth. Christ the eternal Son; his pre-existence with the Father in times eternal; his relation to all created things and all created beings as the only Mediator; his devotion to the salvation of the human family; his wondrous humiliation in becoming the Son of man; his sacrificial death; his resurrection “by the glory of the Father;” his ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high; his ministry in “the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man;” and his return to this earth “with power and great glory,” to gather his saints unto himself,—Christ the revelation of his Father’s character, and himself the meeting-place between divinity and humanity,—Christ “the Way, the Truth, and theLife,”—Christ the “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last,”—Christ in whom the gospel becomes personality, is the one subject in Holy Writ. Of this there is abundant confirmation in the Book itself. When Jesus was walking with the two disciples to Emmaus, “he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” To the Jews he declared of the Scriptures, “They are they which testify of me;” of Moses he declared, “He wrote of me;” and to the eleven, after his resurrection, he said, “All things must be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.” Such is the intimate connection between the Word of God in language and the Word of God in the flesh.
3. In order to have a grasp upon the main theme of the Scriptures, it is necessary to acquire a knowledge of the book as a whole. A narrow runway of texts, arbitrarily joined together and expounded on traditional authority, does not furnish a satisfactory statement of gospel truth. The Bible is not a mere collection of texts any more than it is a collection of separate books, but rather a living organism, all of whose parts sustain an intimate and necessary relation to each other. As the study of one of the joints of the finger, or the lobe of the ear, or even of the proverbial fifth rib, will not give a comprehensive and satisfactory view of the structure and functions of the human body, no more will the study of disjointed texts or haphazard selections of the Scriptures furnish a well-balanced view of the revelation of the gospel.
From the creation of the heavens and the earth in the beginning to the creation of the new heavens and the new earth; from paradise lost to paradise restored; from the entrance of sin to the destruction of death and hell in the lake of fire; from the promise of the Seed of the woman who should bruise the serpent’s head, to the, “Surely I come quickly,” which closes the Revelation,—there is a constant development of the main theme, in history, in biography, in prophecy, in the songs of the sweet singer of Israel, and in the epistolary correspondence of the great apostle to the Gentiles, until in the full tide of the symbolism of the book of Revelation the complete triumph of the gospel is foretold, and the singing of the hallelujah chorus, and the announcement that “the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,” are anticipated. This view of the progress of the gospel is necessary to an adequate comprehension of the fulness of its meaning; and no teacher of the Scriptures should rest satisfied until his mental vision can extend from the horizon of Genesis to the horizon of Revelation.
4. Every Bible teacher ought to be familiar with the material found in each separate book of the Bible, and with those special characteristics which distinguish one book from another. The need of such knowledge is so manifest that it hardly seems necessary to take the time to emphasize it, and instead of doing this we will illustrate our meaning by taking up a few of the individual books of the Bible. It often happens that a single text of the New Testament will indicate the key-note for a whole book of the Old Testament, as the following examples will show: Genesis is the book of beginnings, but overtopping all other subjects in importance is the beginning of the gospel. While the first chapter of Genesis is the only authentic record of the original creation, it was not written merely to record the facts, but in order to disclose the secure foundation upon which rests the gospel of salvation. Man was originally created in the image of God, and at the close of creation week all things were pronounced “Very good;” but through sin the image of the Creator in man was marred, and the curse came upon the earth. The same power which wrought in the original creation through the mediation of the eternal Son, has been vouchsafed in the gospel of the new creation, “The power of God unto salvation.”
To our first parents, before they were excluded from Eden, the first proclamation of the gospel was made in the announcement that the Seed of the woman would bruise the serpent’s head. To Abraham the gospel was preached in the promise that in him should all the nations of the earth be blessed (Gal. 3:8), and to Jacob in the dream of the mystic ladder was made known the fact that earth and heaven had been connected by the promised Seed. Joseph, the dreamer, in his experience in Egypt is a marked type of the great Deliverer, and the prophecy of Jacob just before his death announces that “the Shepherd the Stone of Israel” will appear in the line of Joseph. The book of Genesis may therefore be regarded as an extended exposition of Mark 1:1: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The limits of this paper will not permit us to deal thus particularly with other books, but merely to suggest as follows:—
(a) The brief statement in Matt. 5:15, “Out of Egypt have I called my Son,” is the index-finger pointing to the book of Exodus, a knowledge of which is necessary to a full understanding of the experience of Jesus, who in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, led forth his people anciently.
(b) In the book of Leviticus, which contains the gospel in precept, are given explicit instructions concerning those services of the tabernacle through which sinful men were permitted to draw near to a holy God. The epistle to the Hebrews is the divine commentary in which the antitypes of these services are fully revealed, and the key-note is found in Heb. 10:19-22: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, . . . let us draw near.”
(c) The story of wilderness wandering and of the bringing again of the children of Israel to the borders of the promised land is told in the book of Numbers. The spiritual meaning of this whole experience is interpreted in James 5:20: “He who converteth a sinner from the error [wandering] of his way shall save a soul from death.”
(d) In the book of Deuteronomy past experiences are rehearsed, and what has been once told is written again to guide in the proper interpretation and application of the lessons contained therein. Thus the contents of the book of Deuteronomy may be indicated by the words found in Matt. 4:7: “It is written again.”
(e) The conquest of the land, in which success and defeat some times alternated, is recorded in the book of Joshua. This whole campaign might have been a succession of the victories of faith the same as at Jericho, but self-confidence and a failure to maintain a record of implicit obedience to God’s instructions led to disaster. In all this is set forth the experience of the individual Christian in the great controversy, while Eph. 6:12 will show the spiritual application of what is written in the book of Joshua: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
(f) In the oft-repeated apostasy of the children of Israel, as recorded in the book of Judges, and the long-suffering of God in pardoning their transgressions, and renewing to them the divine favor, we have an object-lesson on a national scale of the application of the principle enunciated by Jesus in reply to the question of Peter (Matt. 18:21, 22): “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”
(g) The great lesson in the book of Ruth is the right of redemption by one near of kin, and the place which this story occupies in unfolding the gospel is clearly indicated in the light of Heb. 2:14: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same.”
These illustrations are amply sufficient to indicate how in a single text ofthe New Testament may be gathered up the spiritual meaning of a whole book of the Old Testament, and again remind us that the gospel is enfolded in the Old Testament and unfolded in the New Testament.
(To be concluded)