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Construction of Doctrine progressive.

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the same needs, will find much the same things, so that a consent rather than a growth of doctrine may be expected to be the result. So, judging a priori, we might have supposed. But, as we all know, such has not been the case. Evangelical theology is not a mere tame and jejune round of common truths in Christianity on which successive generations of Christians have agreed,―enlarging only at its outer edges by adjustment in details, or by addition of logical inferences. Very different indeed has been its course. Ruled as it has been too seldom purely by believing apprehension of the revelation, swaying as it has done from one extreme tendency to another, running out too long into developments that have been false and mischievous, it has nevertheless moved forward from point to point, mastering one position after another, but only as by hard-won fight. The Church, impelled by the necessities of her warfare with error and evil, led graciously on by her indwelling Head to apply a living faith to the enduring and recorded standard, has so evolved her evangelical theology in the past as to prove that the principle is fitted to bear further fruit and lead to further progress. The result already gathered is not a collection of cut and dry dogmas compassing the circle of belief. It is more like a chain of outposts successively conquered, but pointing hope and expectation onward to further gains. Each theological achievement of the past has been the result of a great outburst of spiritual life and controversial agitation, enabling and compelling the Church to evolve into distinct and permanent doctrine what was furnished for her in Scripture in its element and essence. The relation between the constant and the variable factor in these movements is most suggestive, and illustrates well the mutual help of the two great principles-a living faith and an abiding standard. Every real advance in the region of theology has been at first opposed by some as being novel and therefore false, for "had this doctrine," say its opponents, "been of faith, it could not have been new, it could not have been unknown to those who before us have believed the Scriptures." Those again who know that they are drawing the so-called novel doctrine from the permanent source make overstrained defences of its catholicity, and try to show that it always has been held by the great believers of former times. The fact is usually found to lie between the two extreme con

tentions of enemies and friends. This fresh doctrine which, amid stress and tumult, faith has evolved from the Scripture, has been always in a sense there, always, therefore, implicit in the Church's faith, and thus is old with the eternity of truth; on the other hand, it has never been drawn out in this express form, until the necessary moment came, and is therefore new with the freshness of the everlasting gospel.

Not without significance is the successive order in which these achievements have been won. In the earliest centuries, the Church, in face of errors bred of Oriental and Greek philosophy, had to elaborate from the Scripture, under the guidance of the Greek Fathers, a doctrine of God and of the God-Man which has ever since formed the foundation of her theology in the strictest sense of that word. Next had the Latin Church, through its deeper apprehension of the evils of the world and of the human heart, its greater feeling of the necessity of conversion and the need of holiness, to work out, amid the usual concomitants of heresy and controversy, the doctrine of Scripture concerning Sin and Grace. Then followed at a vast interval-and we wonder oft at the slowness of the process— the great doctrinal advance of the Reformation. This was not only on the whole a new apprehension of God's saving grace and thus as it were a new commencement, but distinguished amid its many doctrinal trophies, especially that one,-demanded by the conscience of awakened Europe, so long oppressed by the legal system of the medieval Church, the grand declaration of the evangelical mode of pardon and acceptance, that doctrine of justification by faith which now. appears to us to shine so plainly in Paul's Epistles. Following close on this great discovery, came a multitude of additions to the doctrinal deposit, among which we may specify the doctrine concerning the Church, so evident to us now as the teaching of the New Testament, but evoked then for the first time in anything like dogmatic completeness by the need felt for the reconstruction of primitive Church principles, when the shackles of the hierarchy had fallen away. In specifying these familiar and capital instances of dogmatic achievement, we do not forget that on every one of the topics indicated there has been living movement since the Reformation. By fixing our attention, however, on the more distant past, we can more easily estimate

Past progress suggests more to come.

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We estimate the progressive

the gains that have been made. principle in theology by contemplating the positive doctrinal achievements of the past. If we could not regard the instances above alluded to as permanent gains, the movements of theology would too much resemble those of philosophy, where we so often have gyration, but no progress. Here, as we believe, it is otherwise, and past gain is the pledge of future advance. Whence it may arise and whither tend are other questions. But we see whole regions of Scripture teaching, e.g. that which we commonly call Eschatology, where the doctrinal positions of the Church are as yet mainly inferential and implicative only,— never having been called out into full and definite articulation. by any sustained and continuous process. In what direction, however, the future departures of theology may lie we cannot tell; and we cannot wonder at our own ignorance. For we find ourselves utterly unable to conceive why theological questions, such as to us seem inevitable, were not debated and resolved in earlier periods of the Church's history. As little will the theologian of the future be able to conceive why the questions which will then be new should have remained by us unstirred. But these "times and seasons" the Head of the Church has re

served in His own power. What we are bound to maintain is the great principle of actual advance from point to point in the dogmatic region, that faith shall ever have full and free recourse to Holy Scripture.

These illustrations of progress have been given upon the largest historical scale. But they are no less pertinent to stimulate the individual believer, to encourage to progress in the faith each particular Church and each school of Divinity. For even individual apprehensions of truth, as Dr. Dorner has pointed out, possess an intrinsic right to self-preservation and continuance. Nay, our collective Protestantism "is compelled upon its own principles to confess that what it realises of Christianity it represents in an individual manner, and that other forms of the Christian spirit may yet show themselves upon the same stage, should the Churches in which they lie hid attain, by God's blessing, to an era of evangelical life."1

1 Dorner's History of Protestant Theology; Introduction.

II.

Let us now examine for a little the relation of theology to its supreme source and authoritative standard, that we may see what pledge of its progress is implied in that relation, and in the nature of the standard itself.

The relation is commonly misrepresented by the foes of evangelical theology. It is their cue to imply that orthodox Protestants put the Bible, the ipsissima verba of Scripture, in the same relative position as that in which Romanists place the authority of the Pope and of the Church-the representation being meant to prepare for the inference that their beliefs must be equally hidebound and lifeless. It is notorious that evangelical teaching takes quite a different course. It does not first require faith in the inspiration of the Book, that upon its special authority Jesus may be received as a Saviour. Its method is the reverse. It directs the soul first to a living Redeemer, to whom the Word, the Spirit, and all history bear witness. It seeks to bring the soul into a living relation to that Redeemer. Then to that believing soul and to every company of such believers the Scripture-the word of Christ -becomes the rule of doctrine and of life, and dwells richly in them in all wisdom. The Evangelical Church owns no Head and no supreme authority but that of the Lord Himself. As to doctrine, that authority has expressed itself thus: "I have given them thy word." His Church knows where to find that word, viz., in those Old Testament Scriptures, of which He said, "They testify of me;" in those New Testament deposits, of whose first keepers He said, " I have given unto them the words Thou gavest me." Let any believer in the Lord Jesus Christ submit his mind to the undiluted force of these repeated and majestic expressions of His about this body of truth received by Him from His Father, committed by Him to His disciples, to be illumined and interpreted by His promised Spirit; then, I venture to say, he will find himself substantially at one with the Evangelical Church in her declared relation to Scripture, namely, that the Word of God is the supreme source and the ultimate standard of all her deductions and declarations of truth.

Now let us notice what that is in the nature of the standard

Scripture only progressively understood.

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itself which keeps advance ever open to all believing inquirers, -progress in the understanding and exhibition of its contents. It is the inexhaustible character of the Revelation, the adorable fulness of its inspired communication, a fulness of Divine truth. to the comprehension of which we constantly reach forward, but can never fully attain. Progress in believing theology is not only possible or probable, but certain, from the analogy of the past; for what has its past course been but a gradual advance in the understanding and elaboration of Scripture doctrine? The perplexing slowness as well as the probable method of that advance may be illustrated by another analogy, which our great English master in that form of reasoning shall state for us :

...

"In this respect," says Bishop Butler, "there is a great resemblance between the light of nature and of revelation. As it is owned the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, so if it ever comes to be, . . . it must be in the same way as natural knowledge is come at; by the continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, and by particular persons attending to, comparing and pursuing intimations scattered up and down in it, which are overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world. For this is the way in which all improvements are made, by thoughtful men's tracing, on obscure hints, as it were, dropped us by nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our minds by chance. Nor is it at all incredible that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths as yet undiscovered. For all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investigation from which such great discoveries in natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand years before. And possibly it might be intended that events as they come to pass should open and ascertain the meaning of several parts of Scripture."1

But without dwelling longer on the general character of Revelation as promising advance to a believing theology, let us direct our attention to some particular characteristics of it which bear very closely on our topic. And here one must first attempt, with due diffidence, a correction upon a mode of statement which is very common, a correction which glances back on the quotation just made from Bishop Butler. The relation between doctrine as contained in the Bible and doctrine as arranged and exhibited in our systems, has usually been put as if it were simply that between riches in a treasury of undigested stores, and the same wealth minted, told, and ledgered.

1 Analogy, Pt. II. chap. iii.

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