…a study which is
exclusively practical and devotional is necessarily imperfect. There are many things in Scripture which do
not lend themselves to an immediate practical purpose, and which in fact are as
good as shut out from the circle of ordinary Bible-reading. I know that good people often try to hide
this fact from themselves by hooking on some sort of lesson to passages which
they do not understand, or which do not directly touch any spiritual
chord. There is very respectable
precedent for this course, which in fact is nothing else than the method of
topical exegesis that reigned supreme in
the Old Catholic and Medieval Church.
The ancient fathers laid down the principle that everything in Scripture
which, taken in its natural sense, appears unedifying must be made edifying by
some method of typical or figurative application. In principle this is no longer admitted in
the Protestant Churches (unless perhaps for the Song of Solomon), but in
practice we still get over many difficulties by tacking on a lesson which is not really taken out of the difficult
passage, but read into from some other part of Scripture. People satisfy themselves in this way, but
they do not solve the difficulty. Let us
be frank with ourselves, and admit that there are many things in Scripture in
which unsystematic and merely devotional reading finds no profit.
William Robertson Smith
I do not agree with his stance on the Old Testament(higher criticism)
