The G. Campbell Morgan Archive

MORGAN'S HERMENEUTICS
he issue of hermeneutics deals with how the preacher makes the “contemporary jump,” that is, how he moves from what the Scripture meant to what the Scripture means. Of special importance in evaluating Morgan's preaching is examining how it is that he moved from his detailed exegesis to modern application, that is, how he interpreted the text. Morgan's hermeneutics are rooted in his dispensational theology. It is in this light that we must understand the nature of his hermeneutics and evaluate them.
o understand dispensationalism, one must become acquainted with John Darby and C. I. Scofield. Scofield’s influence on Morgan has already been alluded to. Darby is usually referred to as the father of modern dispensationalism. He was a lawyer until he joined the Brethren movement in 1827 (Cox, p. 6). Following his joining the Brethren he claimed to have received many "rediscovered truths" which became the main teachings of dispensational ism. Arnold Black Rhodes edited a work that contains a summary of these beliefs (p. 95):
1. The Jews are to be saved by repentance; they are to be left here on earth as God's earthly people.
2. The Gentiles are to be saved by faith; they will be taken to heaven after the Rapture.
3. The church is a parenthesis in God's plan and will end in apostasy.
4. The kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God are sharply differentiated, the first being the Davidic kingdom and the latter being God's universal world-wide kingdom.
5. God deals with men according to seven dispensations.
arby's great personal magnetism dominated the Brethren movement of that period and he put together a fascinating system of theology that has always been very attractive to those who are impressed with system (Bass, p. 48, 54). However, he would probably be unheard of today if it were not for C. I. Scofield who popularized his dispensational theology.
cofield, like Darby, was a lawyer before he became a minister and had no formal theological training. He was a devoted follower of Darby and in 1909 he published The Scofield Reference Bible which incorporated dispensational theology and continues to popularize it to this day (Cox, p. 13). This reference Bible (p. 5) deals with the seven dispensations of the system: innocency, conscience, human government, promise, law, grace, and kingdom. During each of these dispensations a new and different method of testing mankind was in effect. Obedience to the method of the dispensation results in God's approval. In truth, each results in man's judgment. Also, four different gospels are preached at different periods of time (Scofield Reference bible, p. 1343). The first is the gospel of the kingdom. This was the proclamation that God had promised to set up an earthly kingdom that was to be political, spiritual, Israelitish, and universal. Jesus as the descendant of David would rule it and it would last one thousand years. The second was the gospel of God's grace. This was the proclamation of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. The third is the everlasting gospel which will be preached by Jews after the church is raptured and until the beginning of the millennium. It is simply the proclamation that those who have survived the tribulation will enter the millennial reign. And finally there is Paul's gospel. This is the proclamation of the gospel of grace but with a fuller development than that preached by Jesus and the Apostles. According to dispensationalism, John the Baptist and Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom but the Jews rejected the Kingdom and it had to be postponed while Jesus death and resurrection initiated the church age. After God's plan for the Jews had been thwarted, Jesus switched to preaching the gospel of God's grace which the apostles also preached until Paul received a fuller revelation. The everlasting gospel will not be preached until the rapture. Another basic position of dispensationalism is a premillennial eschatology which has been discussed. To be fair it must be noted that Morgan, while holding to basic dispensational beliefs, also criticized Scofield at times. The development in Morgan's eschatology has already been referred to. Nevertheless he is properly described as a dispensationalist. As Clarence Bass says:
he line of continuity From Darby to the present can be traced unbroken From the works of his contemporaries: C. H. Mackintosh, William Trotter, William Kelly, and F. W. Grant, through the intermediary works of W. E. Blackstone, James Hall Brooks, A. J. Frost, G. Campbell Morgan, Harry Ironside, A. C. Gaebelein, C. I. Scofield and the Scofield Bible, to the contemporary adherents of his views. (p. 17-18).
he major weakness of dispensationalism is that it denies, in practice, both the unity of the purpose of God and the deity of Jesus Christ. How does it do this? It denies the unity of the purpose of God by teaching that there are and have been different plans of salvation and different gospels for different periods of time. There are no less than seven plans of salvation. In each of the seven dispensations man gains God's approval in a different way and by measuring up to different criteria. And there are no less than four different gospels--and they have different messages. God has not one message but many. He has tried to save men in a variety of ways at different times. He did not have in mind a single message or a single strategy for saving man which unfolds throughout the Scripture. Instead God constantly adjusts His work to each of man's failings. He even sent Jesus Christ at the wrong time. Christ was sent to establish the earthly Messianic Kingdom but the Jews were not ready to accept Him. This raises the second question: could Jesus then be God if he attempted to establish the Kingdom but was unable to do so without the help of men? This is the case according to dispensational theology. In fact, the atoning death of Christ, the resurrection, and the Church were simply the way that God counteracted the failure of the Jews to assist Him. They are a parenthesis in God's plan rather than a part of a single purpose which He had from the beginning. Honest exegesis does not provide this information for us. Rather it is a particular interpretation demanded by dispensational theology because of its insistence on literal interpretation of all prophecy. This system enables them to explain how the Old Testament prophecies about Israel will still be fulfilled literally.
ow does all of this relate to our discussion of Morgan's hermeneutics? Bass points out that dispensationalism may be reduced to two basic features: a certain chronology of events which it arbitrarily constructs and a specific hermeneutical principle of interpretation. The manifestation of dispensational tendencies in Morgan's preaching is not primarily in references to dispensational chronology and eschatology. Such references can be found in his sermons. They are not frequent, though, and Morgan usually made an effort to downplay those themes so as to avoid controversy over millennial views. The lack of sermons and books from Daniel and Revelation is significant in this regard. In total, over 70 of Morgan's books were printed, all of an expository nature. Conspicuous for their absence are commentaries on Daniel and Revelation. A First Century Letter to Twentieth Century Christians is the only work on Revelation, but it deals only with the letters to the" seven churches. There are no works on Daniel. Of the 260 sermons in The Westminster Pulpit, only four are from Revelation and only one is from Daniel. There are only seven sermons from the twelve minor prophets and twelve from the major prophets, eight of which are from Isaiah. In none of these sermons are dispensational themes prominent. In fact, those dispensational themes which do appear are downplayed. For example, in a sermon from Revelation 1:9, when dealing with the Kingdom theme, Morgan says:
he word "kingdom" connotes the rule and the realm of a king. Here, of course, the reference is to the Kingdom of God, and not to any dispensational interpretation of the phrase, not to any dispensational application or value, but to the fact of the Kingdom of God (Westminster Pulpit, Vol. IX, p. 262).
nd in his sermon from Revelation 19:16, he downplays dispensational eschatology:
.... I pray you, look on to the Advent. Place it where you will; I care nothing for the sake of the present argument and illustration as to your view concerning the relation to each other of the various aspects of that Advent. (Westminster Pulpit, Vol. V, p. 252)
herefore, it can accurately be said that Morgan himself held to dispensational positions but they do not find a central place in his preaching. The more important manifestation of dispensationalism in his preaching lies in the second basic feature which Bass has described: its specific hermeneutical principle which Cox describes as "hyperliteralism" (p. 25). It is significant that both the rise of dispensationalism and the preaching ministry of Morgan paralleled the growth of humanistic attacks on" the authority of the Bible. It was an age when not only dispensationalists but many other "conservatives" boasted of their literal interpretation of Scripture and identified any sort of non-literal interpretation with "liberalism" and a denial of the validity of the Bible. Morgan practiced this principle of literalness and pressed it upon the Bible in a very rigid manner. The most important consequence of this in the dispensational system is that it forces prophetic Scripture into the pattern of exact literal interpretation. The whole pattern of dispensational division between Israel and the Church follows. This "hyperliteralism" works itself out in a variety of forms in Morgan's preaching. He does not always give adequate consideration to the different literary types (or genres) found in the Bible. He treats many different kinds of passages alike, practicing something of a "cookie cutter" exegesis. This can be seen in the way he interprets the millennium mentioned in Revelation (Teaching of Christ, pp. 306f) without taking into account the nature of apocalyptic literature and its use of numbers. In The Parables and Metaphors of Our Lord his opening chapter is entitled "The Parabolic Method" but it really only deals with the reason for the use of parables (to reveal or conceal) and never deals the features of the parable or how this affects interpretation. The same tendency comes to the fore in his word studies. He tended to practice an "unwarranted restriction of the semantic field" (Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, p. 57). Rather-than recognizing that words have semantic ranges of meaning, he simply assigns a word a single meaning regardless of the context in which it occurs. There are even times when he takes the meaning of a figure as used in a parable and applies it to the same word in other contexts. The question which must be raised and addressed is how this "hyperliteral" hermeneutic affects the issue of intentionality. How is the meaning of a text related to the intended meaning of the author? The contention here is that if God inspired the writers of the Scripture then an important question which the interpreter must ask is "what did the writer intend?" This should include a consideration of whether the author intended to be taken literally or figuratively (even in terms of his choice of literary genre). Unless we determine both what the Scripture meant and what the Scripture means in light of the writer's intention, then the entire question of meaning becomes open ended and there is even no way to contend that it is singular in nature rather than plural and whether the authority in interpretation exists in the text or in the reader. Hence, hyperliteralism, in avoiding the issue of intentionality, makes the same basic mistake as do the spiritualizing and allegorizing extremes it attempts to avoid.
here is nothing that affects the content of a preacher's message more than the issues raised in this chapter. Morgan's approach to general preaching preparation, systematic approach to Bible study, and hermeneutical model determined the content of his preaching. What did he have to say? What did he proclaim? An analysis of the content of the preaching that flowed from Morgan's study and hermeneutic is contained in the next chapter.