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The Christian religion is a revealed religion.
Its original sources are prophecy, not philosophy.
The Hebrew prophets, of whom our Lord Jesus Christ was the last and greatest,
uttered not what they had discovered by the light of reason
but what God had given them to speak.
Attempts have been made to present Christianity as a philosophy.
It does, indeed, provide us with a consistent attitude towards the universe
that is the object of philosophy.
But it is not merely a philosophy.
It is a philosophy founded on the word of God "who
spake by the prophets".
The preachers of the Christian religion do not offer men a new philosophy.
They offer them the good news that the Son of God is come into the world
and has risen from the dead.
But the acceptance of the Christian revelation requires of us five preliminary beliefs:
God's method of revelation was to choose one particular people who should
receive His message and in due time pass it on to the rest of mankind.
It may be asked how finite man can receive any message from God who is infinite.
We cannot answer this question.
We can only say that the knowledge of God which the Hebrews came to possess
was something to which the Greeks and the Indians both of them far more gifted
peoples never attained, which indeed no one has ever reached except by means
of Hebrew prophecy.
The modern world, so far as it is religious, believes in one God.
But no people has ever come to believe firmly or clearly in one God except
under the influence of the Hebrew prophets,
for Judaism and Islam, as well as Christianity,
have the Old Testament for their foundation.
But God did not reveal Himself, even to the Hebrews, all at once.
The Old Testament is the history of that revelation:
God spake by many portions
and in many manners to the fathers by the prophets
(Heb.1.1).
Modern criticism, by showing us the real order of the various parts of the
Old Testament (which is very different from the traditional order) has made
the progress of that development much clearer to us.
We can now trace it from its first crude beginnings
in the wilderness and in the days of the judges,
through the periods of the kings and the prophets,
the exile and the return from captivity,
to the complete development of the written law,
and to the visions of the apocalyptists,
of which the most important are in the Book of Daniel.
The revelation of God to the prophets, psalmists, sages, and seers of the
Old Testament was the preparation for the full revelation of God in Jesus
Christ.
The New Testament everywhere assumes a knowledge of the Old Testament, without
which it cannot be understood.
This is why we can never do without the Old Testament.
Marcion, at the end of the second century,
tried to separate the Christian religion from its Hebrew background,
and other attempts have been made in modern times;
but such attempts must always fail,
for the Children of Israel were the Divinely appointed means of revelation,
and our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, His Mother, and all His Apostles were
Jews.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is
the effulgence of the glory,
and the very image of the person of the Father
(Heb.1.3).
In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
He is the Word of God (John 1.1, 14) in the fullest sense.
In Him we see all of God that it is possible for man to see.
Therefore there can be no further revelation.
We do not believe that God has added, or ever will add, anything to His revelation
in His Son.
But we can now see many things in that revelation which could not be seen
by those who first received it.
Each generation of Christians, and each people to which the Christian Gospel
is preached, makes its own contribution to the understanding of the riches
of Jesus Christ.
Aspects of it are seen in one century,
which are not so clear in another century, sometimes even a later century.
For instance, the rational Christians of the eighteenth century could not
understand the glories of medieval Christianity (though they were aware of
its defects).
We are only now coming to see the enormous value of the Greek contribution
to Christianity both in ancient and modern times.
We may expect that many peoples still outside the Christian fold will show
as fresh aspects of Jesus Christ, which are yet unknown, as all the great
nations which have accepted Christianity have done already.
The revelation of God had to be written down.
The record of it is found in the collection of books that we call the Bible,
the CANON of Holy Scripture.
It consists of thirty-nine books of the Old Testament
(to which must be added the DEUTEROCANONICAL books
known as the Apocrypha)
and twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
The word Testament means COVENANT.
The Old Testament is God's covenant with Abraham (Gen.17.10).
The New Testament is the covenant with which our Lord Jesus Christ replaced
it
(I Cor.11.25; Heb.8.6; etc.).
The Bible is not revelation but the record of it.
It is not itself the word of God
(though it has often been called so,
especially in the controversies of the Reformation).
Our Lord Himself is the Word of God (John 1.1),
and His message,
the Gospel,
may also be called the word of God.
The Bible contains the record of that message written down by men.
We believe that the writers of it were given a special kind of Divine guidance
which is called Inspiration, and that those who drew up the Canon or list
of the books were also given special Divine guidance to include these books
and no others.
This subject will be dealt with at greater length in the next chapter.
At the same time it is difficult to maintain that the whole of the Bible
is the record of Divine revelation.
There are many chapters, such as
Gen.36 (the list of the descendants of Esau), or Ezra 2 (the list of the
Jews who returned from exile with Zerubbabel), which may have some historical
value but can hardly be said to have any religious value. The old method
of using such chapters was to give them an allegorical meaning (though even
this would be difficult in the case of the chapters mentioned!).
Without denying the value of allegorical interpretation,
which is constantly used in the New Testament,
it seems better to say that Holy Scripture CONTAINS,
rather than IS, the word of God.
So Article 6 says, "Holy Scripture containeth all
things necessary to salvation",
and the question addressed to priests at their ordination is:
Are you persuaded that the Holy Scriptures contain sufficiently all doctrine required of necessity for eternal salvation through faith in Christ Jesus?
(The question addressed to deacons at their ordination,
Do you unfeignedly believe all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament?
is to be understood in this sense:
as was made clear in the 1928 revision by the addition of the words
as given of God to convey to us
in many parts and in divers manners
the revelation of Himself which is fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ.)
Christians receive the Old Testament on the authority of our Lord Jesus
Christ who constantly quoted it as having Divine authority.
Christians accept the Canon or list of books drawn up by the Jewish Sanhedrin
at Jamnia (AD 90).
The New Testament is received on the authority of the Church.
The formal authority ("imperium") of all parts of the Church
has been given by various Councils;
beginning with the Council of Carthage (397) in the West,
and the Quinisext Council (692) in the East.
The authority of the Anglican Communion is found in Article 6.
But behind this formal authority lie the general consciousness and witness
of the Church.
A few of the minor books did not receive full acceptance before the fourth
century, and one or two of the remoter Eastern churches are still a little
doubtful about the Revelation of St. John.
But apart from this, all Christians everywhere agree about the Canon of the
Old and New Testament, except for differences on the position of the "Apocrypha".
The Reformation made no difference.
Luther, Calvin, and the sects all accepted the traditional Canon of Scripture.
The one exception to this universal agreement is the collection of books
commonly called the Apocrypha that was admitted to the Greek translation
of the Old Testament used by the first Christians but was not in the Hebrew
Canon.
It consists of nine books:
I and II Esdras (or III and IV Esdras),
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch,
I and II Maccabees,
together with additions to II Chronicles, Esther, and Daniel,
fourteen in all.
Various opinions have been held about these books both in ancient and modern
times.
None of them was ever quoted by our Lord or by any New Testament
writer.
The Jews do not recognize them as canonical.
The Anglican attitude towards them is stated in Article 6:
The other books, as Jerome saith,
the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners:
but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.
This intermediate position is called "Deuterocanonical".
(The Church of Ireland, however, has since 1874 fallen below the Anglican
standard;
for though Article 6 is retained, the lessons from these books
have been withdrawn from the Irish lectionary.)
The same "deuterocanonical" position is given to the Apocrypha
by the Eastern churches, as it was by many medieval Western theologians down
to Cardinal Ximenes and Erasmus;
also by the Old Catholic churches, and the
Lutheran churches in Scandinavia.
Luther's Bible included the Apocrypha printed as in the English version.
In the period of the Reformation, II Macc.12.43-45, which expressly teaches
prayer for the dead, became a highly controversial passage.
Calvin and his followers, who believed that the elect went straight to heaven
at death and the reprobate straight to hell, prohibited prayers for the dead.
Probably for this reason the Westminster Confession (1643) entirely rejected
the claim of the Apocrypha to be in any sense
"Scripture". This is the position of all the English-speaking
non-Episcopal bodies.
The British and Foreign Bible Society was in 1827 induced by the Presbyterian
members of its committee to adopt the policy of refusing to publish the Apocrypha;
and most English Bibles are now printed without it, though the official Bible
of the Church of England includes it.
The Roman Communion, on the other hand,
regarding II Macc.12.43-45 as an important witness to dogmatic truth,
laid down at the Council of Trent that these books are part of the Canon
of Scripture,
and draws no distinction between them and the other books.
But it does not include II Esdras or the
Prayer of Manasseh,
which it does not recognize at all.
In the Latin Bible as in the Greek Bible, the additions to Daniel and Esther
appear attached to those books, not in a separate section as in the English
Bible;
and the order of the books is different from that to which we are
accustomed.
The Apocrypha is very important for the history of religion,
and does not deserve the neglect into which it has fallen,
though only parts of it are suitable for reading in church.
The parts of it that are read in English churches are the Song of the Three
Children, the Prayer of Manasseh, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and I Maccabees,
and very occasionally parts of Tobit, Baruch, and II Maccabees.
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