RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

...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 second question, we must already possess some general theory regarding what qualities a thing must have to serve as a revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. By combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed reach a spiritual judgment regarding the Bible's worth. For instance, if our theory of revelation were to insist that any such book must have been composed automatically, or not by the free choices of the author, or that it must be free of all scientific and historical errors and contain no local or personal biases, then the Bible would likely fail the test. But if, on the other hand, our theory allows that a book may be a revelation despite the presence of errors, human passions, and intentional authorship—provided it is a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled individuals wrestling with the crises of their lives—then our verdict would be much more favorable. You can see that existential facts alone are insufficient to determine value; consequently, the best scholars of higher criticism never confuse the existential problem with the spiritual one. Given the same set of facts, some people reach one conclusion and others another regarding the Bible’s value, depending on how their underlying spiritual judgments differ.

I offer these general remarks about the two types of judgment because many religious people—possibly some of you present today—do not yet make practical use of this distinction. They may therefore feel, at first, a little startled at