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The Bible and Man

The natural outline of a human life which has suggested the method of these lectures represents a man as awaking each morning to the consciousness of himself. Every man lives perforce in his own company. He walks with himself on every road of life. He sits with himself in its resting places. He lies down with himself in its slumbers. He is his own friend, and his own enemy. Omar Khayyám declares that he is his own heaven and his own hell. There is a story of a farmer who said that when he climbed to the roof of his barn and looked about, he always found that he himself was the center of the world. The roof of the sky at all points was equally distant from him; the walls of the world made by the dipping horizon showed the same length of radius from himself! The story has its serious, as well as its amusing side. Every man is the personal center of a world which gets its meaning from his own heart. It is no wonder that the old Greek motto was “Know thyself.”

Yet the knowledge of self is not easy knowledge. The fact that no man has ever seen his own face, save by reflection in some mirror, is a parable. The very eyes that see cannot see themselves. They are so near that they are hidden. The moral literature of the race always emphasizes the difficulty of self-revelation. Its cry is, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” It has a yet deeper desire: that it may know more of its own essential nature. Each man longs for a revelation of God; and each man longs for a revelation of himself. The present emphasis is that the Bible is the medium of this human revelation.

We do not go far in the reading of its pages without discovering that the word “thou” looms large in its spiritual grammar. Those curious persons who often bring their arithmetic to the Bible could doubtless tell how many times “thou” and “thee” and “thy” and “thine” are found in its chapters. In the Ten Commandments and in the New Commandment “thou” is the recurring word. Personal address is prominent everywhere. Indeed, the whole Book is a kind of prophet coming into the court of each soul and saying, “Thou art the man.” Sometimes the approach is an accusation, sometimes an approbation; in any case the note is intensely individual. In the New Commandment the “self” is made the standard by which the relation to the neighbor is to be tested. The implication would seem to be that the man who does not love himself lacks the law by which his love for other men may be made efficient. Polonius was not far from the biblical idea when he said:

To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In daily parlance it is often said. “Put yourself in his place”: but the value of that transfer of self is small if you do not know what the self is after you give it the new place! The revelation of self is likewise the revelation of other men. We know our neighbors only as we know ourselves.

Presuming, therefore, that we send a man to the Scriptures to find the doctrine of his own nature, what will be his discovery? The question is not a new one, and its answer has sometimes been touched by prejudice. Many have contended that in its effort to magnify God, the Bible is guilty of belittling man. Fragments of Scripture might be presented to support this criticism. We must, however, insist that the biblical teaching is to be determined by its main current rather than by its eddies. The Book does present God as high and lifted up, while man lies with his lips in the dust. It does make God a King, while it proclaims man a subject. It does stress divine sovereignty, while insisting on human obedience and reverence. It does call for humility on the part of man. We may well admit that it is possible to overdo the call to humility. That good mood may easily pass over into a false mood. Occasionally men, in an effort to be humble, speak untruth concerning their own souls. It is just here that the “worm-of-the-dust” theory gets its chance. That phrase was a biblical one, used by a character in his moment of self-abasement. Yet the Concordance will prove that this lowly estimate of man is by no means the staple of teaching, as well as that much of the cheap preaching of human nature is a radical departure from the doctrine of the Book. It is always good to keep clear the distinction between vanity and self-respect, so that if a man may not have the right to look down on his neighbors he may still have the right to look up to himself. Humility must ever be based on truth, and self-respect can have no other foundation. The two moods are not contradictory. The one comes from the recognition of the nature of God, in the utter and unspeakable perfection of his attributes; the other comes from the recognition of the nature of man as being himself a partaker of that divine nature. In reality the two moods grow out of the same truth.

A still deeper objection is sometimes offered against the scriptural theory of human nature. It is charged that the doctrine of the Fall, together with the constant emphasis of man’s “exceeding sinfulness,” deprives man of special dignity. Without doubt the theory of the Fall has sometimes been presented in such a manner as to cancel all human claims to greatness. Whenever a religious teacher carries his doctrine of the Fall to unjust lengths, we must all be tempted to declare that we can readily prove an alibi! And if he shall employ that doctrine as a vast slur on humanity, we shall insist that the length of the fall must be the length of the possible rise! In harmony with this idea a great preacher has given the world a sermon on “The Dignity of Humanity as Evidenced by its Ruins.” Much of the glory of the Coliseum at Rome has departed, but even its ruins are a testimony to its greatness. Seeing its gaunt grandeur in the sunlight, or viewing its impressive shadows in the moonlight, the tourist gets the shock of its glory. The simple truth is that a doctrine of the Fall is possible only when you start with human greatness. God made one creature strong enough to resist Himself—one creature with sufficient self-determination to make mutiny in the world. We would not torture the doctrine of the Fall into a mere compliment for humanity; but we would insist that the possibility of a Fall implies a height to fall from, and that responsibility for a Fall implies a nature great enough and free enough to make far-reaching choices. The evidence of the dignity is still found among the ruins.

We must always supplement any doctrine of the Fall with a doctrine of human responsibility. The Bible is most explicit in this insistence. Its pages are crowded with the moral imperative for man. The thorn and the brier are on the earth; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the era of the good people. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain; but the creation is not blamed, because it waits for the revealing of the sons of God. The lion and the lamb do not lie down together; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the age of peace that can issue only from the hearts of men. The coin rolls into dust and shadow and is lost; we do not blame the coin. The sheep wanders into desert and darkness and is lost; we do not blame the sheep. The son goes off into the swine field and is lost; and we do blame the son. The coin and the sheep have no communings with self, no sense of guilt, no road of repentant return; but the son has all these. The Bible does utter its vigorous charge against man’s sin; it is the ever-open court room into which the human conscience is summoned for judgment. The Book does not treat man as a machine whose cogs and wheels are moved only by outside force; nor does it treat him as a manikin, jerked hither and yon by irresponsible sensations; it rather dignifies him with personal responsibility. The Fall does not prevent climbing, if only man will take advantage of those gracious powers that are offered for his help. Emerson saw the meaning of this when he wrote his tribute to mankind based on its ability to respond to the moral order:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, “Thou must,”

The youth replies, “I can!”

Words like “ought” and “should” and “must” have gone forth from the Bible and have fairly penetrated the moral consciousness of the race. No other book so honors human nature with a sublime call to responsibility.

We now leave these general considerations and take up the several portions of the Scriptures with a view to ascertaining their contributions to a doctrine of man. The foundation of that doctrine is seen in the account of the creation. Whether that account be poem, parable, allegory, or history, its meaning for this special point is the same. The climax of the creation is man. God is represented as changing chaos into cosmos, separating waters and land, fixing sun and moon in their places, bringing verdure to the surface of the earth, assigning birds and beasts and fishes to their spheres, and then as giving to man a wide rulership. “God made man to have dominion”—that is the biblical word; and the ages have been telling how true that word is. The Bible theory and the facts of life join in a coronation of man.

The account of the creation goes deeper than this in its estimate of mankind. Its conferring of power on man is explained by its conferring a nature on man. Man is made in the divine image. The Word was not content with one statement of that fact; it must needs give it double emphasis. “So God created man in his own image”—that would seem simple and strong enough. But the statement is strengthened by repetition, “In the image of God created he him.” These twice-repeated words are the real charter of man’s greatness. The atheist must admit that man has the dominion, but the believer holds that man has the dominion because he has the birthright. Man is not only God’s submonarch, he is God’s image.

It is interesting and convincing to note how soon that primary truth about man’s nature began to work. In the persecution under Diocletian the precious parchments of the Bible had been secretly carried from house to house. The charge that a Christian had given up the sacred Book in order to save himself from death was one of the most serious that could be presented. Many martyrdoms occurred because men preferred the Bible above their own lives. Though circulated under such difficulty, and though made into readable parchments at such expense of labor and money, the Bible was slowly impressing its doctrine of man upon the stubborn period. We are often smitten with horror as we read stories which show how lightly human life was regarded by the Romans. Those dreadful scenes in the arena, where thumbs so often declined to turn down as a sign of mercy, are dire mysteries to men who have gotten the biblical standpoint. We are distant from that heartless mood because we are near to the Bible. The Book and the gladiator could not live together in peace. The Book at once began to call men from the tiers of bloody pleasure. With the conversion of Constantine, superficial as it may have been, the change began. The emperor ordered many splendid copies of the Bible for the churches of his capital. He himself came under the spell of its human doctrine. Zealous Christian teachers may sometimes overstate the influence which the Bible exercised over later Roman law. Still there are some undoubted evidences of that influence. Constantine made a law forbidding that a criminal should be branded on the face, and he gave as his reason for the law that the image of God should not be marred! This leaves us in no doubt as to what had inspired the legislation. It was the simple beginning of a program that has not yet come to its consummation. The biblical idea of man routed one form of slavery, and it will yet rout all other forms. When men come to believe that man is made in the divine image all good movements for the betterment of life are set in the way to victory.

The legal portions of the Bible give us the like lesson, even though the approach to the lesson is different. Here we discover that humanity is worthy enough to call for conservation and protection. The legislation reaches to hygienic and sanitary details of minute character. The whole effort is to build a protecting fence about men. The Ten Commandments, studied in this light, become a very human document. Their harsh and negative quality is softened into gentleness. They guard the goods of man—his property, his wife and children, his body, his good name. It would be possible to regard the Decalogue as a series of prohibitions in which the word “not” occurs with forbidding frequency. In this case the appropriate accompaniment is thunder and lightning, and the appropriate scroll for the writing is stone. This viewpoint is one sided and unfair. The Ten Commandments are prohibitions only because they are protections. They have been through many ages the kindly sentinels of society. They have taken the side of God, of his dumb creatures, and of men and women and little children. Considered in any just way, the legal portions of the Bible are a tribute not merely to divine authority, but to human worth.

The prophetical books add their lesson, and from a still different angle. They are filled with protests against man’s conduct, with wrath against his insincerities, and with predictions of his coming woe. The mouths of the prophets were not filled with compliments. Those stern men were not the flatterers of their own generations. Their sayings could be so elected as to make a degrading estimate of men. But here again we must get the full meaning of the message. In their last analysis the prophecies are a marked tribute to potential man. Beyond the disturbed present they see the peaceful future. Beyond the clash of swords and the swish of spears they see the mild and productive era of the plowshare and the pruning hook. Beyond the unreal altars they see the incense of true worship arising to God. The prophets were, in the best sense, optimists, and they were optimists because they believed that all men would some day yield to the Lord. They beheld the whole earth filled with righteousness. They saw the stone cut loose from the mountain and filling the wide world. The healing river was to flow to all peoples. Jerusalem was to be the universal joy. The day would dawn when it would be unnecessary to say to any man, “Know thou the Lord.” The most dismal of the prophets foretold the perfect day. But all this means that the prophets foretold the perfect man and the perfect race. To proclaim that humanity, under the guidance of God, is so capable is to dignify human life beyond measure.

Nor are we lacking among the prophets an individual example of the power of self-respect. Nehemiah may not be the premier among his fellows, but he talks with a royal self-consciousness. When messengers come, desiring that he shall go down into the plain for a parley with Sanballat, he declines by saying, “I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.” Again he is told that the enemy is coming, and he is counseled to go into the temple and cling to the altar for protection. Once more self-respect comes to the rescue; the reply is, “Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in.” Here the potential man, foretold by the prophet, was the actual man. He had reached such a high doctrine of his own nature that the doctrine itself became the prevention of triviality and of cowardice. The rebuilded walls of Jerusalem arose from that spirit. Those walls were likewise an expression of the prophet’s faith in the future of his people. The prophetic confidence in man was second only to the prophetic confidence in God. This form of tribute to humanity is preeminent in the books of the prophets.

In the devotional part of the Bible we should not naturally expect that tribute would turn manward. The tendency is seen in those sections of prophecy where the prophet himself has close dealings with God. When the greatest of the prophets sees the ineffable One and hears the awful trisagion of the seraphim, the prime confession is that his own lips are unclean and that he dwells in the midst of a people of unclean lips. Inasmuch as the Psalms are in large measure a liturgy of worship, their emphasis is on the greatness of Jehovah. Yet sometimes the emphasis turns toward man. The most striking illustration occurs in the eighth psalm. The writer there utters the feeling that we have all shared. The limitless expanse of the heavens, the shining of moon and stars in the far heights, the workmanship of the Lord in the vast universe—all this makes the psalmist feel that he is a mere speck in the scheme. Tried by those celestial measurements, he drops into insignificance. He is rescued from self-contempt only by a return to the message of Genesis. His despairing cry issues in a shout of personal triumph. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” If materialism should conquer the Bible there is but one answer. The psalmist is saved by the Scripture, “Thou hast made him a little lower than God, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” It is no marvel that the first translators lowered the tribute and substituted “the angels” for God. The reverence that so often used a sign for the divine name trembled on the verge of such a human tribute. Still that tribute was a return to the doctrine that God had made man in his own image and had given him dominion over the works of his hand. In addition to all this, the Psalms are girded with the consciousness that man can enter into the august presence of the Lord. The mutual element in worship is an exaltation of man. The greatness of Jacob is greater when he meets with the heavenly visitant by the Jabbok brook. He becomes a prince. In the devotional books man claims his princely heritage. He treads the courts of the infinite King.