Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/40

BIBLE. power of rationalism, however, was broken by the philosopliy of Kant, Avliose system left rea- son essentially robbed of its ability to stand in judgment over ScriijUire. To produce order out of the destructive wredvajre of this onslaught, there was needed a constructive force, which was largely supplied by Schleiermacher and his followers, whose attitude to Scripture was one which, in proportion as it rejected all idea of mechanical inspiration, emphasized the practical character of the divine message to the soul, and the results of whose Scripture study were seen not onlv in constructive work in the field of gos- pel and apostolic history, but also in a profound quickening of the religious life of the time.

A final effort, however, was made by rational- ism in the pliilosophy of Hegel, who returned to the theorv that Scripture must be judged by rea- son, and "whose philosophy and history furnished the fundamental basis for that intcrjnetation of the Xcw Testament which characterized the Tu- bingen School of biblical criticism, the influence of which on Scripture interpretation was in its <lay well-nigh universal. This effort failed, and its failure was due as largely as anything to the work of Ritschl, who showed the essential dis- agreement of this philosophy of history with the historical facts given in the New Testament record, and who, especially whose followers, in Serii)ture interpretation, returned practically to the spirit of Schleiermacher's position — that the Scriptures constitute a divine message to the soul. Involved in this position there was not only a denial of all mechanical inspiration, but of all objective autliDrity as attaching to Scrip- ture, ami a conception of the Church, not as an ecclesiastical organization whose doctrines were to be proved by Scripture, but as a spiritual community whose religious consciousness inter- prets for "itself the Scripture contents. At the same time, in spite of these spiritual conceptions of Scripture and the Church, the Ritschlian method of interpretation essentially emphasized the historical sense of Scri])ture to the exclusion of all hidden senses beliind it.

The extensive influence of Ritschlianism as a school of theology- has had its effect upon inter- pretation, especially in its aflirmation of the purely spiritual authority of the Scriptures and the spiritual relation to them of the Church. As a consequence the inspiration of the Scriptures has come quite widely to be considered as largely of the same kind as'all religious literature, and the authoritv of its message as more and more distinctly of' a purely spiritual sort. Added to this Ritschlian influence on interpretation have been the general acceptance of the principles of evolutionarv philosophy, which have brought to light the possible presence in the process of Scripture revelation of the natural laws of de- velopment, and the general prevalence of the principles of a newer biblical criticism, which in the line of these same evolution principles have shown the large probability of a natiiral docu- mentarv- development of the historical portions of the 'Scriptiirc record, particularly in the Old Testament. These things have all combined to make Scripture interpretation to-day very large- ly the interiiretation of religious books belong- ing to the ancient literature of the .Jewish people and the Christian Church, inspired essentially as all religious literature is inspired, and intended for the'^spiritual edification rather than for the dogmatic establishment of the Church. Formally the authority involved in interpretation is ac- knowledged as resting with the .Scriptures; to a large degree it is made practically to rest with the religious sense of the interpreter, while the one general principle which universally controls the jiresent interpretative method, both in the- ory and in practice, is a principle brought out by Semler at the beginning of this modern stage of the science, and increasingly dominant ever since — that to be interpreted rightly, and, in fact, to be interpreted at all, the Scripture pas- sage must be considered not so much in its lit- eral, grammatical sense as in the light of the historical surroundings in which it was written.

(.) Canon of the Old Testament. The word canon is a Semitic loan word in Greek, meaning literally a rod or pole, a carpenter's rule; figuratively a model or standard; and in Alexandrian writers sometimes a list of classics. It was used by the pseudo-Aristeas (c.20 a.d.) to indicate the character of the Law; by the Gnostic Ptolemy (c,200 a.d.) to denote the authority of the sayings of Jesus, and by Athanasuis in A.D. 367 to designate the collection of sacred books. In the churches, and probably already in the sjTiagogues of Alexandria, volumes [lulilicly read as sacred and inspired were termed "canoni- cal,' in distinction from esoteric or here.tical writings withheld from public use. Among the Palestinian Jews such books were at first sim- ply said to he 'holy.' But in the First Century A.D. the Pharisees maintained that holy books "made the hands unclean," and that consequently an ablution was necessary after contact with them. The Sadducees jirotested in vain against ascribing to them the same kind of sanctity that attached to heave-olTerings and dead bodies. This new ritual naturally tended to fix the limits of the canon. In the case of each hook used in the synagogue, the question must be raised whether a washing was obligatory. Thus the freedom of introducing new books was necessarily curtailed, and doubts were suggested as to the fitness of some works that had been used.

As in the ease of the New Testament, the final- ly established canon of the Hebrew Bible was the result of a critical process reducing the number of books approved for public reading. Many works that maintained their jilace in the Alex- andrian canon, such as Kcidesiastieus. .Judith, Tobit, Baruch, and I. Maccabees, lost somewhat of the prestige they had had when they were first translated from the Hebrew or Aramaic original. Books like the .Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon, the Apocalypses of Enoch, Noah, Baruch. Ezra, and others were crowded out of the sjiiagogiie. A sphere of antilegomena wa.s created: Ezekiel, Esther, Canticles. Ecclesiastes, and probably also Daniel, were held by some not to "render the hands unclean." while others deemed them worthy of a place with the accepted writings. This criticism naturally sought likewise to free the text from all supposed later accretions. Thus various additions to Daniel. Esther, and other books were removed. The critical eye was not keen enough to perceive the numerous inter- polations in Job. Jeremiah, and elsewhere, and the best guide, the earliest Greek versiim. was distrusted. But to this critical movement we