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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 10. Muddy Scholarship, and the Real
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Muddy Scholarship, and the Real
I have put the thing in this simple direct positive way because of the muddy scholarship that has such wide sway today. That is, it passes for scholarship, and it is certainly muddy. It is marked by the absence of clear vigorous thinking, and of clean-cut utterances.
There has grown up a system of instruction which uses the fine old name of scholarship. It sits in high places, in universities and divinity schools. And its text books and influence are in the lower schools. Its dominant method is to raise questions and leave them hanging in the air, the biggest thing in view. With elaborately spun speculation, which has a fine scholastic tinge and tang, it incubates doubt. And the incubated brood far outnumbers those of a natural mother, as in many a commercialized poultry yard.
In choice scholarly language, with impressive repetition of names prominent in the modern scholarly world, it breathes out a gray be-dimmed foggy atmosphere of doubt. Such authenticated facts as would conteract their theories are ignored, or minimized, or skilfully slurred over.
It has become a common thing for young peopie, trained in Christian homes, and in simple old-fashioned church circles, and in the old-fashioned beliefs in the essential facts of Christian truth, to be inoculated with these germs. The disease becomes chronic, and a break of moral fibre is a result not slow in arriving.
We must all be grateful for true scholarship. Our debt to it can never be paid. It is striking to note that the best scholarship of the ages is headed in point of time and of preeminence, by one who may be thoughtfully called the greatest of all scholars. And his scholarly research work brought him to the acceptance of a direct distinctive revelation from God.
He was learned in all the vast learning of the Egyptian schools, which were the world's universities of that day. And he had more than learning. He had that rare scholarly instinct for independent research regardless of where it leads, which constitutes the real scholarly genius.
He went to the original sources as has none other. Following the Egyptian University work, and the long post-graduate course in the University of the Desert, were two exceptional post-graduate courses, of six weeks each, most intensive research work, on Horeb. That was indeed a going to the original sources.
Real scholarship's results are close at hand in every library of standard works, for him who wants the facts. And nothing is better settled than the utter dependability of this old Book, and the essential accuracy of its transmission to us. We have the Book's message with remarkable dependability and accuracy, as it came from God to and through its writers, under the holy spell of God's Spirit,
That there is a revelation from God is a fact. That fine word revelation is used here in its old-fashioned full meaning. There's no thinning out or watering of its meaning, after modern usage. It is a revelation of something that could have been gotten in no other way.
It is a something that never has been gotten in any other way. It does not belittle reason. It uses and honors reason. It is meant to fit into reason's processes. It meets reason at the line of reason's highest achievement, and leads it into higher fields.
Reason with its marvellous God-like powers, slowly works its way up to certain conclusions, and then stops. It must stop. It can go no further. This revelation tells what reason cannot find out, because of its natural limitations. Reverent God-touched reason accepts reverently God's revelation, and finds it in complete accord with, and supplementary to, all that itself has done, and in revealing what it could never find out. This is the fact of revelation.
Further, it is noteworthy that this revelation is in full accord with the moral character of the Book which contains it. It is in perfect accord with the character of God and of Christ. It is such a revelation as one would rationally look for from such a source. In this it stands in sharpest contrast with other literature dealing with such matter.