The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question,
What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders
of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize
this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a
little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have
referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of
inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it
come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once
here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment
or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what
the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate
a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately
from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations,
and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and
then adding them together
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two
orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its
derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher
criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential
point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what
biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various
contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their
several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These
are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the
answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use
should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so
defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other
question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory
as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for
purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a
spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we
might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible’s worth.
Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to
possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free
caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic
errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would
probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory
should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and
passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of
the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of
their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that
the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the
value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never
confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same
conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another,
of the Bible’s value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment
as to the foundation of values differs.
