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Bending the Bow of Ulysses

There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable.
— Edmund Gosse: Father and Son

A proud William Pirie Smith wrote effusively to his wife from Edinburgh with news of the confirmation, by the Free Church General Assembly, of their son’s appointment to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Literature at the Aberdeen College:1

My Dear Jane,

… It is marvellous how much satisfaction Willie’s election has given to the whole Church…2

and he concludes with two postscripts:

Have we not cause for great thankfulness. I hope you are all well.
W.P.S.

The election has been absolutely without a shade of disagreeable incident.
W.P.S.

William Pirie Smith’s emphasis on the general expressions of goodwill within the Free Church on this occasion affords some indication perhaps of the exceptional nature of such harmony within its ranks over the appointment. Robertson Smith’s father must have been conscious too of the intense canvassing which he and others had employed to promote his son’s cause;3 but it seems unlikely that this caused him any personal qualms, although it was by no means a universal practice.

Prevented by the warfare in Europe from visiting his friend John Black in Seville, WRS holidayed briefly in Braemar and found ample time to prepare for his inauguration to the Aberdeen Free Church College, as well as to practise the (to him) unaccustomed art of preaching, prior to his solemn ordination to the ministry on November 2, 1870.4 Of the inaugural lecture,5 Smith’s biographers wrote, very perceptively:

This … was the most mature and effective of Smith’s writings up to that time, and merits the closest attention both for its own sake and in view of subsequent events. In form it was, as befitted the occasion, a carefully prepared and finished piece of academic prose. The balance of the composition, the clear and dignified conduct of the argument, the occasional touches of restrained eloquence, all showed how much he had profited by his Edinburgh experiences of writing essays and addressing audiences. In substance it showed a corresponding advance in speculative power. As an exposition, or perhaps rather as an interpretation, of the recent progress of German Protestant Theology the lecture could not have been better. The lecturer faced the problem of the relations between theology and historical criticism, not indeed with a complete consciousness of all the issues likely to be raised, but with a characteristic and contagious confidence that he had found the only possible solution.6

Black and Chrystal are right in their evaluation of the craftsmanship reflected in the address but they do not emphasise sufficiently the skilful manner in which Smith gives clear indications of the path which he intends to follow. Robertson Smith engages the sympathies of his audience from the very beginning by making an impassioned call for adherence to Reformation principles, and particularly that of Scriptura sola, whereby the divine Word itself is deemed of supreme value over against “the traditions of men and the decrees of the Church”.7 The great Reformation figures – pre-eminently Luther – had properly warned against “the corruptions and additions of men”8 and had stressed the importance of treating the Bible as a unity.9

The first Gentile Christians had failed “to understand the Old Testament ideas on which the teaching of Christ and the Apostles was based”10 and had unthinkingly asserted “the superiority of the Christian standpoint, as that to which the whole Old Testament pointed, the rights of the Christian Church as the true Israel of God. But a true historical sense of the organic connection between the Old and the New Testament was altogether lacking.”11 The early Church Fathers, as well as the Old Catholic Church, had embraced a spurious and predominantly allegorical Old Testament exegesis – a “truly Procrustean bed, of which not even the earliest thoughts of the Old Testament must fall short”12 – comparable with that practised by Philo and other Hellenistic Jews, and combined with an inappropriate veneration for the sanctity of a text that was “magically endued in every letter”.13 The Reformation, on the other hand, had turned the Bible into:

a weapon that could be wielded for defence or attack with a readiness and effect that were new to the Church and to Theology. If Scripture has a higher place in the reformed than in the Roman Church, it is because the Reformation has learned to wield it better, because it for the first time showed how the bow of Ulysses must be bent.14

From Jerome through to Aquinas and beyond, Catholic theology had become ever more a matter of intellectual assent to dogma – faith as opposed to reason, where faith itself rested “primarily on human authority” rather than upon “a personal trust on God in Christ”.15 Luther’s own story, on the other hand:

is just the story of the inner religious life of one man, who, agonized by a deep sense of sin, finding no rest in the habits and feelings prescribed by the traditional ascetic, at length gained peace when he was able to feel for himself, through personal experience, through the witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart, the meaning of Paul’s great doctrine of justifying faith.16

Smith proceeds to employ the analogy of child development to illustrate the ontological progression from dependence on authority to autonomous judgment – a process admirably exemplified, as we know, in his own boyhood experience17 but equally, as he maintains here, mirrored in the quasi-pubertal realisation of intellectual emancipation represented by the Reformation theology’s transition to a rational understanding of the divine purpose. The medieval theologians had clung to a magical concept of the sacraments (ex opere operato) and:

… the Christian consciousness of the middle ages fell far short of grasping the personality of God’s Word. It was still the consciousness of the child, who does not fully understand either his own life or the life of those around.18

But now, “face to face”, it became possible (in Pauline terms) to perceive “the glory that shone on the Saviour’s countenance”. To understand the inner meaning of words and not simply their outward manifestation (as in the medieval church) was to possess “the mark of a full-grown man”.19 This impressive passage is one of those instances in Smith’s address of the true eloquence to which Black and Chrystal allude. What they do not observe is how close a parallel exists between his attack on the shortcomings of the medieval church and Tyndall’s acerbic remarks in his 1874 address to the British Association.20

Luther’s conception of the Christian faith is, moreover, at one with Smith’s in the affirmation of a “direct fellowship between the believer and God incarnate in Christ”:

not an impersonal unio mystica such as the middle ages sighed for, but such a personal union as there is between loving human souls, mediated by the twofold streams of God’s personal Word coming down to man, and man’s personal faith going up to God.21

This was a conviction which Smith maintained throughout his life, regardless of the aspersions cast by others on his rationalistic approach to the scriptures. Whether or not he retained this view at the cost of a certain psychological dissociation, it remains clear that it was integral not only to his personal faith but coloured also his characteristic and arguably romanticised view of the origins of religion, which are set out so clearly in The Religion of the Semites,22 and which at the same time appear so much a derivative of his own early life experiences.23 No fellowship, however, could be adequately sustained without an informed knowledge of the Other in the relationship; and it was this truth which underpinned Smith’s faith and served to rescue it from a form of escapism:

The Bible, to use Luther’s own phrase, is the garment of Christ. We do not lay hold of Christ by grasping his garment, we do not have fellowship with Christ by a mere head-knowledge of the Gospel history; but Christ is wrapped up in the historic record, and it is only within this garment that faith can find Him.24

This second principle (that of unwrapping the secrets of the historical record through a systematic historical-critical approach) was, Robertson Smith suggested, still less adequately appreciated in the Reformed tradition than that of personal faith; yet it was fundamental to any truly Protestant exegesis and, if persevered in, would bring a revelatory “flood of fresh light” to the Scriptures and would “unseal” much that had been hitherto hidden under the mask of that “dreary monotonous round of allegory”25 which had been the stock-in-trade of traditional, pre-Reformation Biblical interpretation.

Smith’s peroration was a masterly one and wove together all those major themes which had been adumbrated in his New College essays and Theological Society presentations. Scripture was pre-eminent in value “in virtue of its own perspicuity” and –

Just as it requires a historic sense to understand profane history, so it requires a spiritual sense to understand sacred history.26

The work of ministers of the Gospel was commensurate with that undertaken by the Old Testament prophets, in meeting the spiritual and moral needs of the people; but a true understanding of why the prophets spoke as they did depended upon an accurate historical understanding of all those events, attitudes and beliefs which were contemporaneous with the prophets. Any such comprehensive socio-historical grasp of changing circumstances had been beyond the resources of the original Reformers who necessarily lacked any real concept of “an historical evolution”. To understand the Bible in this sense, declared Smith, required the “honest practice of a higher criticism”:

The higher criticism does not mean negative criticism. It means the fair and honest looking at the Bible as a historical record, and the effort everywhere to reach the real meaning and historical setting, not of individual passages of the Scripture, but of the Scripture Records as a whole; and to do this we must apply the same principle that the Reformation applied to detail criticism. We must let the Bible speak for itself. This process can be dangerous to faith only when it is begun without faith … And so when we draw near in faith to the Bible, we feel ourselves entering into a higher, holier world …27

This was a remarkably subtle and compelling piece of oratory on the young Robertson Smith’s part. Setting out from common ground entirely familiar to his audience, he advanced with the utmost caution – and, as it were, with the founding fathers of the Reformation always marching at his side – into new territory without giving cause for the slightest apprehension amongst his hearers. It would have required a remarkable degree of prescience to detect any trespass into either rationalism or heresy in a lecture so distinguished both by its diplomacy and by its genuine evangelical zeal. Its reception indeed left no doubt as to the new professor’s spiritual ardour and wholesome orthodoxy.28 It needs to be remembered at this point just how stringent were the demands within the Free Church of Scotland for unqualified orthodoxy according to its own confessional standards: a fact emphasised in Norman Walker’s Chapters from the History of the Free Church of Scotland, published in the year following Robertson Smith’s death:

To appreciate the condition of things, it is necessary to remember that at this time the Free Church had the reputation of being perhaps the most orthodox communion in Christendom. Other Churches had their Broad schools, but in it there was hardly one man who had shown a disposition to leave the old paths; and although here and there were scholars who knew that a storm was coming, they had not tried to disturb the prevailing peace, or had not succeeded to any extent in breaking in upon it.29

A similar comment is offered by a later writer:

The Free Church prided itself on its orthodoxy; and as a legacy from the Evangelical movement which had brought it into being, it regarded the Bible as inspired word for word, and as an authoritative oracle of God placed by Him in the hands of believers to be the only sure guide of faith and morals. Throughout the membership of the Free Church the traditional views were held of the structure, authorship and authenticity of the Scripture; and to depart a hairsbreadth from these was an offence so shocking as to be almost unthinkable.30

Smith’s biographers understood this well and remark:

Smith’s teaching in substance was at this time probably in essence little more advanced than that which his master Davidson had been carrying on for years; but he was far more outspoken in giving his programme to the world, and at the very outset of his career he had carried the claims, though perhaps not the practice, of the “believing critic” a step further than the last generation had ventured to do.31

A letter from “Rab”

Seemingly settled in Aberdeen, and relatively close to the parental home, Robertson Smith now communicated by letter with his Edinburgh friends. The letter to Tait on Nabla was written the week after his inaugural address and his friend Lindsay wrote on November 11 expressing the hope that the address would be published – adding, somewhat tongue in cheek, that “Tait said today that he did not understand it at all”.32 Later that same month, Smith received a lengthy epistle from Dr John (“Rab”) Brown, the then highly-esteemed Edinburgh physician and essayist,33 whom Smith had met originally through the Edinburgh Evening Club.34 The letter thanks Smith profusely for his helpful comments on Brown’s anonymously published book entitled, If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical – What Then?35 and proceeds to recapitulate the arguments of the book in such detail as plainly to imply a severe personal crisis of faith.36 At the same time it casts light on the prevalent unease over the traditionally accepted “evidences” for Christianity and obliquely offers some insight into Smith’s own thinking:

[The book’s] aim is not in any way to determine what constitutes Christianity – but rather to point out how Christianity can be best approached. I felt how unsatisfactory were all books on the external evidences – how they brought you no nearer to Xty than you were before – how utterly insufficient they were as a Scriptural basis for Xy. In fact I almost felt as if those & the dogmatic teaching of Xy acted like chevaux de frise & repelled from rather than attracted to the religion of Revelation. I thought therefore that if an Inquirer into Christianity instead of, in the first instance, having any demands made upon his belief at all, could be merely induced to study the details of the Evangelistic narrative, while he watched at the same time the facts of his own Spiritual progress, he might in this way get himself involved in the Faith of Christianity before he was aware of it, & without any of his antagonistic principles of belief being alarmed or shocked.
Now that such a manner of proceeding is an entirely feasible one I think you entirely admit. You expressly recognise, as I understand you, the possibility of what you appropriately call “a reading of oneself into the Spirit of Xt’s life”…37

In his “little book”, as he calls it, Brown describes Christianity as “the art of living a good life” but the greater part of its eighty-one pages is taken up with the writer’s sense of impotence in acquiring that art:

“All is lost”, we exclaim, “if we cannot escape from the vile pollution and debasement of sin;” and forthwith the motives to suicide present themselves with an urgency and reasonableness which it seems impossible to resist.38

Prayer, he decides, rarely avails; momentary relief gives way to a recurring sense of despair “in which suicide or madness appears to be its only outlook”.39 When (and if) the miracle of a sudden conversion does occur, however:

the will no longer struggles against the conscience, and the practical is now in accord with the speculative or idealizing nature. And this great change, though in its origin thus sudden, instantaneous, and unaccountable, proves in [the] event to be abiding .40

Such conversion, Brown concludes quite illogically, can only be the result of an effort of will and may occur irrespective of the truth of the Gospels. In Christ, an ideal is presented to the mind which, if aimed at steadfastly and with utter humility, will be attained eventually –

And at length the intercourse between the weak human soul, ever needing and ever asking for new strength, and the unseen beneficent power, ever granting what was needed, became like the answering of heart to heart. The most deeply hidden wants, the hardly articulate prayer, the obscure cravings and groanings of our spirit, being constantly replied to by the conferring of blessings of the most subtle and perfect adaptation to its requirements, made God known to us, not as a blind beneficent power, but as a deeply penetrating, sympathizing personality, a distinctly cognisable personality, with whom we might (hardly in a figurative sense) talk, confer, hold the closest and most intimate communion, and towards whom the most inevitable feelings of our souls were, not as in the other and more imperfect forms of religion – awe, wonder, or terror – but sympathy, gratitude, trusting faith, love, longing.41

This highly-wrought passage is, in its essence, closely akin to Robertson’s Smith’s expression of a personal faith in the reality of direct, man-to-man communion with God. Smith would surely have endorsed that aspect, while discarding the greater part of the decidedly simplistic and often self-contradictory arguments in Dr Brown’s book – in particular, that it was sufficient to view Christ as an “ideal” in order to become a Christian. Brown’s understanding of inductive logic is decidedly limited42 but in his letter to Smith he expresses the hope (with a kind of despairing optimism) that a scientifically rational approach to Christian belief will prove attainable:

Persons accustomed to scientific investigation can recognise no analogy to their own process of induction in the ordinary reasoning of Theologians and they therefore draw the conclusion that Xy must be rejected. But in what I have attempted to do in my little book, a real process of induction, is I think so far distinctly traceable. It shows how Xt is appreciated, sought after, and in some manner perhaps found. What is still wanted is to unfold the proofs by which the Soul comes to believe in Xt as real – (not merely ideal). You are inclined to think that the process of appreciation almost of necessity involves the process of realization. But even if it does, this does not set aside the necessity for a special analysis of this latter process. For when you say that belief of appreciation implicitly if not explicitly involves also belief of realization, all that you mean is that certain of the facts or ideas brought before the mind in appreciation are also adequate to establish reality. But still the question is –Which are those facts or ideas? – How do we <reasonably?> assess them? – and does our reasoning fully warrant the conclusion of Evangelic historicity at which we have arrived? If these questions can be properly answered, the outcome ought to be the exhibition of a perfect analogy between the reasonings which result in religious belief and those which result in scientific belief. I cannot resist the impression that some such analogy must be discernible. – & if you don’t strongly discourage me – I think of setting about trying to discern it.43

A scientific and rational (but not rationalistic) approach to the Bible, and thus to Christianity, was unquestionably Robertson Smith’s aim also, but he possessed a very much clearer understanding of the problems involved than did Dr Brown. Central to the whole issue was the existence of the supernatural, of which prophecy was, as we have seen, a significant constituent. Smith embarked immediately on a course of lectures to his Aberdeen students on the topic of prophecy and these admirably represent his perception of the logical and theological difficulties.44

Wrestling at the ford

Prophecy, Smith affirmed, was “a fact of history”45 and the work of the Hebrew prophets exerted a major influence on Israel’s history, for the most part in the pre-exilic period.46 Their teachings and writings had a major impact upon the social, spiritual, intellectual and moral development of the people as a whole, precisely because the prophetic utterances “stood in a living relation to the historical circumstances of [their] own time, and exercised a living influence, first on [their] own contemporaries and then upon those who came after”. This impact, Smith was at pains to add, was not simply historical but also theological:

To us the prophets are not merely the leaders of the religious life of Israel and the guides of the nation in its highest attainments; they are men who bore upon their lips the word of the only true God, a word that endureth for ever, and which is God’s Word to us now as it was of old to Israel.47

The evangelical strain of that carefully interpolated qualification sits somewhat uneasily with the clear and analytic style of the lectures as a whole. What Smith is primarily concerned with is the historicity of the prophetic material and it is in this regard that he deserves recognition for being the first Scottish theologian to bring the prophetic writings within the ambit of human history, viewed and studied systematically in developmental and evolutionary terms. This approach, he notes, is quite contrary to that of those theologians for whom “all human and historical aspects are vanishing quantities in comparison [to the divinely inspirational aspect]”. Those theologians regard the historico-critical approach as essentially frivolous, if not actively profane.48 Smith’s contention is that any such attitude (which ignores the facts of history and seeks only to derive, in an arbitrary fashion, homiletic material addressed to the present day) represents a quite sterile and academically reprehensible form of exegesis.

The prophetic material of the Old Testament, Smith insisted to his students, was part of the historical data relating to contemporary events and as such was “in great measure concerned with matters of local and temporary interest”.49 Moreover:

Like all men who have left their names in the record of human events, they were formed by circumstances. They were the children of their country and of their age. All that they did and said was conditioned by their historical surroundings. Their inspiration itself was limited by the law that supernatural revelation never breaks the historical continuity of man’s free agency and man’s responsibility.50

One could hardly have a more succinct and emphatic expression of psychological determinism; yet Smith counters it immediately with:

On the other hand, these same prophets form part of the chain of the history of Revelation, and their words are part of that progressive series of Divine Self-manifestations which culminated in the manifestation of Christ and in the bringing in of a salvation which is free from all natural limitations, from all local and temporary colouring.51

Presented thus, in such stark juxtaposition, those two statements appear irreconcilable: the first a wholly naturalistic description of the prophets as human beings conditioned by their circumstances; the other, a completely traditional Christian representation of the Hebrew prophets as messengers of a divine revelation which constituted a fundamental link in the chain of non-naturalistic (or supernatural) events leading to the New Dispensation. Far from fudging the issue, Smith acknowledges the apparent incompatibility of those contrasting viewpoints; and he goes on, logically, to observe that they are part of an even more difficult question –

Unless we are prepared to throw away the Old Testament altogether, and to say with ancient and modern Gnostics that the God of the Jews is not the God of Christians, we must face the fact that from Moses to Christ all knowledge of the true God and of his plan of Salvation was encased in local, national, temporary, earthly forms. The limitations of prophecy are the historical limitations of the whole dispensation, and from these limitations prophecy could not have been freed without ceasing to be Old Testament prophecy at all.52

Resorting to a straightforward, naturalistic explanation, Smith suggests that mankind was not ready, in developmental terms, to receive God’s revelation in all its fullness until a certain stage of maturity had been reached. This was precisely the argument hinted at in his inaugural address53 and now re-expressed with greater emphasis. It illustrates a tacit acceptance on Smith’s part of the broad principles of social evolution (as expounded particularly by Herbert Spencer) coupled with a simultaneous and staunch adherence to an entirely non-Positivist belief in supernaturalism. Specifically, Smith’s students were to conceive of the long process of human redemption by God as “a gradual training process extended over many centuries”.54 Hence the historical process was not, in Smith’s eyes, one of blind determinism – “a blind sequence of cause and effect” – but a God-directed sequence reflecting divine purpose. Israel’s history differed from paganism only in that the prophets possessed some true consciousness of divinity: and to that extent one might properly speak of supernatural inspiration in relation to prophetic utterance.

It is at this point, conscious perhaps that his argument has not been without its flaws, that Robertson Smith presents his students with his own view of the Whewellian-Baconian inductive process, set out in a much more sophisticated and accurate form than construed by his old teacher, A.B. Davidson.

The inductive method will simply take note of the result which we have already reached – the fact that no other religion presents phenomena strictly parallel to the self-consciousness of the prophets of Israel. It will then endeavour to describe the phenomena of Hebrew prophecy as fully as possible without, in the first instance, assuming that they are necessarily supernatural. Having got the phenomena arranged, it will then begin to ask what the phenomena involve, and will either seek a natural explanation for them, or, failing to find any natural explanation, will infer, with more or less confidence the reality of a special divine power in the prophets.
If such a rigorous investigation could really be applied in all strictness and carried through to a successful conclusion, there is no doubt that it would prove most valuable. It may, however, be doubted whether in the nature of things any purely religious fact falls within the range of strict induction. The facts of religion are transcendental; they involve the possibility and reality of relations between God and man which rise quite above the region of phenomena, i.e. which cannot be defined in time and place.55

Here then we find Robertson Smith, having pondered long and hard as to the nature of the inductive process as applied in scientific research, concluding, with obvious regret, that the method is not strictly applicable to the study of religion, which by definition deals with the noumenal and not the phenomenal. Interestingly, he cites conversion as an example of an experience which cannot satisfactorily be studied scientifically: such an investigation “will no doubt reach a valuable negative conclusion”; but, essentially, “the phenomena are of a kind which baffle the psychologist”.56 Smith’s attitude towards conversion was always ambivalent57 and, while he would have fully accepted his father’s testimony that a “work of grace had been wrought upon him” in childhood, it is more than likely that he would not have regarded his father’s “evidences” of this transformation as veridical.58

There were, of course, many purely phenomenological aspects of a religious experience such as conversion which could be studied – and Smith exemplified the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola as an attempt to offer the would-be convert a kind of learning manual, wherein spiritual progress might be measured by observable data; but he argued that any supposedly empirical route of this kind towards God was deceptive. For Robertson Smith, the conversion process was, of necessity, “an instance of a transcendental religious reality surpassing induction – as in fact all true cognition of God, so far as it becomes a personal thing, and above all true personal knowledge, even of our fellow-men, is above inductive science”.59 Similarly, prophetic activity, as the expression of a special personal relationship with God, lies beyond the scope of inductive enquiry. In that regard, the endeavours of Abraham Kuenen to analyse prophetic inspiration naturalistically and phenomenologically were misconceived.60 Because they followed a rationalistic or quasi-scientific evaluative technique by measuring prophetic outcomes in terms of predictive accuracy, they missed the point of God’s transcendental revelatory purpose in working in and through the prophets.

Thus, argued Smith, the analytic assessment of predictive accuracy was not a valid criterion of the prophetic function; and he alludes to a contemporary cause célèbre – that of Dr Slade the medium61 – to discount the notion that predictive accuracy implies true prophetic activity:

… if prophecy is not to neutralise human freedom and destroy moral responsibility, it is impossible for all that lies in omniscience to be revealed to us. How much of the future God is to reveal to the prophet, and what limitations of form are to apply to the revelation is a question which depends on a variety of considerations which cannot be rightly weighed until we rise above the empirical standpoint and look at the details of the question in the light of the ideal design of prophecy as the expression of a personal and confidential fellowship of God with his people. The question of the fulfilment of prophecy is not the first question to be taken up in dealing with prophetic inspiration, but the last. Instead of forming our ideal of prophecy from the empirical facts, let us remember that the empirical details are only intelligible in the light of the idea of prophecy.62

As if to mark, quite unambiguously, his rejection of the inductive process in dealing with religion, Smith then compares Kuenen’s method to “the argument which men of science lately sought to apply to the subject of prayer”. This of course referred both to Tyndall’s proposal that the efficacy of prayer should be experimentally tested by its application, under controlled conditions, within a hospital ward,63 and also to Galton’s pioneering statistical study of the relationship between longevity and the differential volume of prayer offered up on behalf of various groups within the community.64 By citing such instances of modern rationalism and anti-supernaturalism, Smith reveals not only his close reading of the contemporary periodical literature but also the depth of his personal heart-searching on the matter. The atheistic implications of such articles forced Robertson Smith towards a partial abandonment of his earlier adherence to the universal application of the “scientific method” and may be seen as one factor determining the gradual transfer of his scholarly interests from Christian theology towards less personally-threatening topics.

Smith’s response to the rationalistic attack on prayer may be conceived as disappointing, characterised as it is by the “conventionality” attributed to his sermons. Petitionary prayer is valuable, Smith argued, not because one necessarily expects to have one’s wishes granted but because regular prayerful activity reflects the essential trust that should subsist within the relationship between man and his God:

… we find our whole lives ordered by His grace, and are enabled to trace His good hand upon us in every crisis of our need. The most certain answers to prayer are often not those in which God’s help comes just in the form in which we asked for it, but those in which God answers the spirit of our prayer by denying the letter of it. Such answers cannot be measured and numbered by inductive science.65

Finally, Smith returns to the question of prophecy, which he contends is of an exactly similar nature: in other words, the manner in which prophecy is or may be fulfilled has no necessary relation to our human expectations or anticipations. The outcome of prophecy must be spiritually fulfilling and is not to be measured by Kuenen’s mode of “empirical analysis”. The apparent test of prophetic authenticity (Deut. 18:21) on the basis of whether or not the foretelling actually comes to pass, “would stultify prophecy altogether if raised to the rank of a universal rule”.66 Like the experimental evaluation of prayer, it was “purely a negative rule”, useful for detecting fraudulent soothsayers but otherwise inapplicable in judging the value and integrity of the Old Testament prophetic books. Smith acknowledges that Kuenen, secondarily, accepted the moral rôle of the prophets and that he credited them with promoting “ethical monotheism”, but he is critical – as in his BQR paper of 1870 – of Kuenen’s emphasis on prediction.

Here, Smith covers very much the same ground as before and reaches the same conclusions:

God gives His prophets these promises and threats to address to the people, and, of course, gives them in a form applicable to the times then present… But, of course, as time moves on, as the church emerges from the childhood of the Old Testament to the full-grown manhood of Christianity, it would be no longer fitting to give an Old Testament fulfilment to the deferred promises. The promise will be fulfilled, but in a better, a spiritual form.67

On the one hand, Smith’s argument has to ignore the specifically Messianic prophecies; on the other, by utilising the developmental analogy, it necessarily devalues the stature of the Hebrew scriptures. So he charges Kuenen with failing to take into account mankind’s evolutionary progress from spiritual infancy, through childhood to maturity:

He [Kuenen] wishes to banish from God’s dealings with man not only all that is anthropopathic but all that is anthropomorphic. God’s purpose [i.e. for Kuenen] must not only be absolute in its aim but rigidly mechanical in its execution. It is to be wrought out in human history, but God must not take man by the hand and adapt His language to man’s weakness as a father speaking with a child.68

The attack on Kuenen (and on Continental theology generally) at this point has become unexpectedly fierce and is very much at odds both with the views Smith was later to express frankly and with the critical conclusions he was already reaching in his own studies of the Old Testament. Certainly there was no risk that the content or thrust of his lectures could be deemed heterodox or rationalistic. Yet it is difficult to accept that Smith, with all his intellectual and critical acumen, could have remained unaware of the seriously weak links in his chain of argument. Perhaps the most prominent of those is the postulate intruded at the very start of his discussion of the inductive approach – “the fact that no other religion presents phenomena strictly parallel to the self-consciousness of the prophets of Israel” – and it is more than a little ironic that this should come from a man widely regarded as the founder of the scientific study of comparative religion. Indeed, Smith concludes with a vehement defence of the “old theology” against the new:

The so-called modern school sets before it an entirely different question from that of the old theology. The old theology treated of God, His attributes, His manifestation, His dealings with men. The new school treats of religion. Its theology is a discussion of man’s beliefs about God, of man’s religious actions and feelings. When these have been analysed, and when their development has been traced, the modern theologian is perfectly happy. Religion has been genetically explained from its beginnings down to the present time…
It is plain, I think, that no one can rest satisfied with a view like this unless he has first accepted some form of absolute philosophy, some pantheistic theory according to which everything in human history is the mechanical evolution of a hidden principle working by equally inflexible laws in the moral and physical sphere.69

It must be taken as certain that Robertson Smith, with his “single-minded devotion to truth”,70 could never consciously dissimulate and we must conclude therefore that he remained faithful to his core belief in “the idea of a personal converse with God”.71 Indeed, Smith affirms this impressively in his concluding words:

If Christianity is a reality among us now its vitality is due, not to the lofty theories of advanced thinkers, but to the personal hold of a personal God which is still given to the believer by a truly supernatural work of the Spirit of Christ… It is absurd to say that the very features in the religious consciousness of the prophets which gave them their courage, their power, the might to sway men’s minds, is a mere accident in their belief which truer insight sweeps away as false.72

The Last Word

Of all Robertson Smith’s books, The Prophets of Israel is possibly the most accessible to the general reader. In his introduction to the second edition (1907) T.K. Cheyne wrote (with only slight exaggeration): “It is not too much to say that the present work, though it only now appears in a second edition, has achieved one of the greatest known literary successes in the department of theology”; and he continued:

In their original form, the Lectures are not only a monument of a stirring crisis in the Church to which he [Smith] belonged, but a persuasive presentation of a view of the earlier prophets and their times, which may still be assimilated with great advantage by students.73

Presented as they were, however, to “large popular audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow”74 in the winter of 1881-82, the lectures dealt, as Black and Chrystal observe, only with Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, and were “by no means controversial in form or tone”,75 although, in his Preface to the published Lectures, WRS did allow himself one savage gibe at “the Courts of the Free Church” who had so traduced his name.76 The lectures, moreover, did incorporate and systematically expound two fundamental principles: that of the O.T. prophetic literature as a historical development – an evolutionary process;77 and that of the re-dating of the Pentateuch, which (Smith concluded) had now been adequately demonstrated by the scholarship of Kuenen and Wellhausen.78

Nevertheless, The Prophets of Israel did not represent Smith’s ultimate thoughts on the topic and Cheyne issued the following warning in his introduction to the second edition:

I would beg leave, at the outset, to caution the student against identifying the author too closely with the results he sets forth. In reading these Lectures it is of great importance to remember the date at which they were composed, and the relentlessly progressive intellect of this brilliant and fearless scholar… If Robertson Smith had lived, and had possessed the requisite leisure for a thorough inquiry, I have no doubt that he would have as much surprised lay-readers by his revised views on the Prophets as Kuenen must have surprised them by his changed views on the Hexateuch.79

It is instructive therefore to examine briefly Smith’s article “Prophet” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,80 since this may be taken, with some reservations, to represent his definitive views on the topic,81 bearing in mind that the article was written, not only to a wider audience, but expressly in accordance with the editorial criteria set out most emphatically by Spencer Baynes in his Prefactory Notice to EB9:

The higher problems of philosophy and religion … are being investigated afresh from opposite sides in a thoroughly earnest spirit, as well as with a directness and intellectual power which is certainly one of the most striking signs of the times. This fresh outbreak of the inevitable contest between the old and the new is a fruitful source of exaggerated hopes and fears, and of critical denunciation and appeal. In this conflict a work like the Encyclopaedia is not called upon to take any direct part. It has to do with knowledge rather than with opinion, and to deal with all subjects from a critical and historical, rather than a dogmatic point of view. It cannot be the organ of any sect or party in Science, Religion, or Philosophy. Its main duty is to give an accurate account of the facts and an impartial summary of inquiry and research.82

Baynes’ requirement, that every subject dealing with philosophical or religious matters should be approached non-dogmatically from a critical and historical perspective, accorded wholly, as we have seen, with Smith’s own aims and in the article, “Prophet”, dogma and doctrine are pared to the core:83 Retained alone is the orthodox conviction that the new dispensation of Christianity constituted (in a radically new form) the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy:

Not external details but the spiritual ideas of the prophets find their fulfilment in the new dispensation, and they do so under forms entirely diverse from those of the old national kingdom of Jehovah.84

Not unexpectedly, the article “Prophet” is densely written and severely compressed. Smith’s train of thought is, accordingly, sometimes quite hard to follow and his “developmental” history of Old Testament prophecy (to which the article exclusively refers) is in certain respects obscure.85 Beginning with a short etymological discussion of the Canaanite origin of the Hebrew , Smith asserts one of his own cardinal beliefs: that of the essential uniqueness of O.T. prophecy.86 Using the “vivid and exact” narrative of I Sam. ix as a key to the historical origins of O.T. prophecy, Smith accepts the distinction made there between the old seer, represented by Samuel himself, and the emerging “professional” prophet. The former was someone endowed with “exceptional insight … a man of prominent individuality and held in great respect”;87 the latter “appear not individually but in bands” and were members of a discrete religious class or grouping, who developed divinatory techniques associated with “dance-music” and “strong excitement”.

Robertson Smith acknowledges the explicit link in the text between Samuel the seer and the band of prophets with whom Saul so incongruously associates but notes that Samuel himself is, with one exception, never described as a nabî. Rather, he constitutes, like Moses, Nathan and Elijah, a kind of Carlylean hero figure. Clearly, though Smith does not express this fully, the later “classical” prophets derived their moral courage, independence and closeness to God from these prototypical figures; at the same time, the “professional” prophet class are a significant developmental link in the evolutionary sequence. Inspired originally by an outpouring of patriotic feeling (“the deep pulse of patriotism”) in the face of external threats (by the Philistines) to the newly-developed sense of national identity, the nebî’îm become an accepted element within the community: “A wave of intense religious feeling passes over the land and finds its expression, according to the ordinary law of Oriental life, in the formation of a sort of enthusiastic religious order”.88 As the political circumstances change with time, however, these state-approved functionaries inevitably become conservative, conventional, thoroughly orthodox and indeed reactionary in outlook.89 They were not “impostors” but were nevertheless “false” to the true vision of Jehovah’s character and purpose, content to appeal to popular sentiment and to retain elements of superstitious practice side by side with the “higher ideas” instituted by their great forebears, such as Moses and Elijah.

In those terms, therefore, the “true” prophets were the radical reformers, returning to the older ideals of prophetic practice, vision and purity. Amos and his successors in this reformed tradition disowned their orthodox colleagues and in doing so introduced their characteristic strain of “pessimism” – in essence the repeated judgment that Israel “and the whole fabric of society must be dissolved before reconstruction is possible”.90 They are enabled to discern Jehovah’s purpose in the events of contemporary history – “the signs of the times”; they preach His moral demands rather than endorse the traditional imposts – “mere payments of service and worship at Jehovah’s shrines”;91 and, above all, they proclaim Jehovah’s universal and supra-national impartiality – “a really broad and fruitful conception of the moral government of the whole earth by the one true God”.92

The writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah represented the high point of this reformed prophetic movement, with its concept of “the remnant, the holy seed, never lost to the nation in the worst times, never destroyed by the most fiery judgments”.93 The secular nation may be dispersed but the transcendental image of universal nationhood, Zion, remains unscathed and, phoenix-like, will be resurrected in Christianity and will lead to the conversion of all nations..94 Henceforth, religion is transformed from a contract between Jehovah and the people collectively, into a personal spiritual relationship formed on an individual basis between God and the believer. Ideally, the community of such believers could certainly constitute a spiritual society of faith; but this could never correspond pragmatically to any identifiable social grouping. This (Smith admits) is inferred from Isaiah’s words rather than representing their substance, for: “This connection of ideas was not of course explicitly before the prophet’s mind … When we put down in black and white what is involved in Isaiah’s conclusion of faith we see that it has no absolute validity”.95 The destruction of Sennacherib was misinterpreted by Isaiah as heralding the new spiritual era; it was only one step on the road.

Jeremiah, Smith continues, was an even more socially-isolated figure than Isaiah, predicting still more starkly the doom of the Israelite nation; yet Jeremiah could not, any more than his predecessor, truly comprehend the New Testament vision of a wholly spiritual kingdom.96 Nevertheless, in looking towards an eventual restoration of the nation, Jeremiah did point the way to the principle of individual faith commitment which lies at the heart of true religion:

To gather the dispersed implies a call of God to individuals, and in the restored Israel the covenant of Jehovah shall be not merely with the nation but with men one by one, and “they shall no more teach everyone his neighbour saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know me from the least of them even to the greatest of them” (Jer. xxxi. 33 sq.).

It is in this specialised sense, then, that the great prophets predict: not in any literalistic way, but through a visionary anticipation of what shall surely come to be. The sentiment expressed is echoed in the words of Smith’s contemporary, John Addington Symonds, and immortalised in John Ireland’s setting, These Things Shall Be.97 Jeremiah’s “great idea of the new covenant in which God’s law is written on the individual heart” represents the real link between Old and New Testaments98 – and not the words of the post-exilic prophets, which were only “the last waves breaking on the shore after the storm which destroyed the old nation”.99

Hebrew prophecy thus analysed reveals a complex pattern of development which cannot, Smith argues, be “reduced to a formula” or defined simplistically. It is a “living institution”, capable of being fully understood only in terms of its historical context and its interaction with historical events. All religions, he acknowledges, conceive of some form of “two-sided” intercourse with “the object of worship”, but classical biblical prophecy was unique – for the true prophet of Israel was “an organ of Jehovah’s kingship over His people”100 with a greater clarity of spiritual insight and a deeper discernment of history. Even so, Old Testament prophecy is “only one stage in a larger development” and:

… the conclusive vindication of the prophets as true messengers of God is that their work forms an integral part in the progress of spiritual religion, and there are many things in their teaching the profundity and importance of which are much clearer to us than they could possibly have been to their contemporaries, because they are mere flashes of spiritual insight lighting up for a moment some corner of a region on which the steady sun of the gospel had not yet risen.101

The predictive element was unimportant: the prophets required no such “historical verification”, for their words carried within themselves their own verification:

The word of God carries its own evidence with it in its searching force and fire . . . To the prophet himself it comes with imperious force … and it is this force of moral conviction which ought also to commend it to the conscience of his hearers.102

There are a number of striking features in this encyclopaedia article, all the more so since it is one of Smith’s latest and most mature contributions to a major theological topic of especial interest to himself. While in many ways it is a masterly piece of writing by an adept theologian at the height of his powers, there are certain elements of cultural and temporal bias which cannot be ignored. Although the powerfully shaping influence of Kuenen and Wellhausen is strongly apparent throughout the article,103 Smith’s fundamental beliefs have, for the most part, remained unchanged and are propounded with a firm and steady insistence that might be judged today scarcely consistent with modern standards of analytic objectivity. Chief amongst those beliefs, of course, are, firstly, the assumption that the new dispensation of Christianity is patently the fruit borne of the flower of Old Testament prophecy; and, secondly, that the essence of “true” or “spiritual” religion is to be found in a purely personal relationship between the individual and his God, however perceived or understood.

At the same time, one is always conscious (as in all Smith’s writings) of a continuing process of active internal debate. Just below the surface text, there lies much that is plainly self-referential. Not only does Robertson Smith empathise with his favourite prophets, identifying himself with their own successes and failures;104 he provides also, it may be argued, a covert but unmistakable commentary on the contemporary social and ecclesiastical scene.105

Of the changes in Smith’s theological perceptions, perhaps the most interesting is that the rôle of the supernatural has now become very attenuated indeed. Where reference is made to the supernatural at all within the article, it is couched in terms which could be construed as describing a purely psychological experience – as in the statement that the highly-wrought prophets “were so overpowered [by the ] that they seemed to lose their old personality and to be swayed by a supernatural influence”.106 Lastly (but by no means least) the modern reader is repeatedly jolted by the cultural stereotyping implicit in the references both to Jewish culture and to the wider Semitic world. The prophetic enthusiasm (as described in I Sam. x) is, for example, “exceedingly like what is still seen in every zikr of Dervishes”;107 the “Mohammedan” concept of prophecy was “borrowed, somewhat unintelligently, from later Judaism … and lends no countenance to the statement often made, and at first sight plausible, that prophecy is a phenomenon characteristic of Semitic religion generally”.108 In making such comments, Robertson Smith did no more than adopt many of those western cultural stereotypes that are still prevalent today, but the topic raises important religious as well as political and social issues for the modern world.