Consider the best means of avoiding the danger of professing to honour the word of God while yet you degrade it to purposes most alien from its spirit.
I. First, I would say, study the Scriptures. What a source of mischief is a rude and blind literalism! What ravages have been wrought in the use of Scripture by utter neglect of the context, making its isolated words the talisman to conjure with, while we profanely ignore their application! The whole field of Biblical exegesis is only too rich in error. The guide for moral conduct is to be found in the strength and unity of Scripture teaching, not in this or that precedent or text.
II. Let us be sternly on our guard against that inferential method against which Coleridge warned the Church so long ago. The general teaching of Scripture on all things necessary is plain and clear enough; and if we were not all as narrow, and as fierce, and as ignorant as we are, we might all draw water together in peace from these wells of salvation. Love, not hatred, is the key to open the difficulties of Scripture. Search the Scriptures as Christ bade you; and if you do so in the spirit of love, which is alone His spirit, you will find therein that good news of God which is the sole secret of individual salvation and of the progress, blessedness, and amelioration of the Church and of the world.
F. W. Farrar, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,May 6th, 1880.
I. Strife, controversy, word-war, have gathered round the doctrine of atonement, the theory of justification, the mystery of the new birth, the everlasting sentence of God's predestination, the possibility of falling from grace, the certainty of salvation, the full assurance of faith, the eternity of punishment. In all are "many things hard to be understood." In all these there are what St. Paul calls α ἰνίγματα puzzles, riddles, hard sayings, paradoxes. In this searching of the Spirit into the deep things of God, as in all venturous voyages, no small peril has to be encountered. Happily for mankind, God, when He manifested Himself to the world in the person of His Son, hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes. The doors of the kingdom of heaven were easiest found by those that felt most their need of entrance there, by publicans and harlots sooner than by learned scribes or proud, contemptuous Pharisees. "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo," says old St. Ambrose, "salvum facere populum suum." "They that would do the will should know the doctrine." "The kingdom of God," cries Paul, "is not in word" in a logically developed system "but in power."
II. The very principle of faith, and with it, I venture to think, the only sure and permanent guarantee of holiness, is imperilled from two opposite sides: from the dogmatisers who call upon us to receive as truths propositions from which sometimes our conscience, sometimes our reason, revolts; and from the men of science who bid us, as a duty we owe to truth, give up everything that the reason cannot explain. Both parties make upon us what I cannot but consider unreasonable demands. There are mysteries in science, as well as mysteries in faith; and if philosophers are not disloyal to science by accepting a "working hypothesis," which they cannot fully prove, but which explains phenomena sufficiently well for practical purposes, neither are we disloyal to truth or false to our duty as reasonable beings for accepting as our hypothesis the principle of faith faith which can give a reason for itself in part, though not wholly, and on which we think we can dare to work out our own salvation, albeit in fear and trembling. But the perils from the side of ultra-dogmatism are, perhaps, even greater than the perils from the oppositions of science falsely so called. Under the specious names of catholic dogma or of infallible truth, weak minds are lured to accept propositions about Divine things which, if not simply unmeaning, are utterly incredible, and which when examined are not found to rest on any authoritative or undoubted warrant of God's word, but upon the precarious or over-subtle inferences of fallible man. And when this is discovered, the inevitable law of reaction comes into operation, and those who have believed most get to believe least, and the credulity of the youth is replaced by the scepticism of the man.
III. With regard to points of faith or doctrine, it was a memorable saying of Channing's that men are responsible for the uprightness of their opinions rather than for rightness. The desire to be truthful at all hazards is a nobler temper than the mere desire to be what men call "sound." The spirit of truthfulness is what Christ tells us the Father seeks in those who worship Him.
Bishop Fraser, University Sermons,p. 97.