HOLY SCRIPTURE AND MODERN NEGATIONS
BY
PROFESSOR JAMES ORR, D.D.,
United Free Church
College, Glasgow, Scotland
Is there today in the
midst of criticism and unsettlement a tenable doctrine of Holy Scripture for the
Christian Church and for the world; and if there is, what is that doctrine?
That is unquestionably a very pressing question at the present time. “Is there a book which we can regard as the
repository of a true revelation of God and an infallible guide in the way of
life, and as to our duties to God and man?” is a question of immense importance
to us all. Fifty years ago, perhaps less than that, the question hardly needed
to be asked among Christian people. It was universally conceded, taken for
granted, that there is such a book, the book which we call the Bible. Here, it
was believed, is a volume which is an inspired record of the whole will of God
for man’s salvation; accept as true and inspired the teaching of that book,
follow its guidance, and you cannot stumble, you cannot err in attaining the
supreme end of existence, in finding salvation, in grasping the
prize of a glorious
immortality.
Now, a change has come.
There is no disguising the fact that we live in an age when, even within the
Church, there is much uneasy and distrustful feeling about the Holy Scriptures
— a hesitancy to lean upon them as an authority and to use them as the weapons
of precision they once were; with a corresponding anxiety to find some surer
basis in external Church authority, or with others, in Christ Himself, or again
in a Christian consciousness, as it is named, — a surer basis for Christian
belief and life.
We often hear in these
days reference to the substitution, in Protestantism, of an “INFALLIBLE
BIBLE FOR AN INFALLIBLE
CHURCH”, and the implication
is that the one idea is just as baseless as the other. Sometimes the idea is
taken up, quite commonly perhaps, that the thought of an authority external to
ourselves — to our own reason or conscience or spiritual nature — must be
wholly given up; that only that can be accepted which carries its authority
within itself by the appeal it makes to reason or to our spiritual being, and
therein lies the judge for us of what is true and what is false.
That proposition has an element
of truth in it; it may be true or may be false according as we interpret it.
However, as it is frequently interpreted it leaves the Scriptures — but more
than that, it leaves Jesus Christ Himself — without any authority for us save
that with which our own minds see fit to clothe Him. But in regard to the INFALLIBLE
BIBLE AND THE INFALLIBLE
CHURCH, it is proper to point
out that there is a considerable difference between these two things — between
the idea of an authoritative Scripture and the idea of an infallible Church or
an infallible Pope, in the Roman sense of that word. It may be a clever
antithesis to say that Protestantism substituted the idea of an infallible Book
for the older Romish dogma of an infallible Church; but the antithesis, the contrast,
unfortunately has one fatal inaccuracy about it. The idea of the authority of
Scripture is not younger, but older than Romanism. It is not a late invention
of Protestantism. It is not something that Protestants invented and substituted
for the Roman conception of the infallible Church; but it is the original
conception that lies in the Scriptures themselves. There is a great difference
there. It is a belief — this belief in the Holy Scripture — which was accepted
and acted upon by the Church of Christ from the first. The Bible itself claims
to be an authoritative Book, and an infallible guide to the true knowledge of
God and of the way of salvation. This view is implied in
every reference made to
it, so far as it then existed, by Christ and His Apostles. That the New
Testament, the work of the Apostles and of apostolic men, does not stand on a
lower level of inspiration and authority than the Old Testament, is, I think,
hardly worth arguing. And in that sense, as a body of writings of Divine
authority, the books of the Old and the New Testament were accepted by the
Apostles and by the Church of the post-apostolic age.
Take the writings of any
of the early Church fathers — I have waded through them wearily as teacher of
Church History — take Tertullian or Origen, or others, and you will find their
words saturated with references to Scripture. You will find the Scriptures
treated in precisely the same way as they are used in the Biblical literature
of today; namely, as the ultimate authority on the matters of which they speak.
I really do the fathers an injustice in this comparison, for I find things said
and written about the Holy Scriptures by teachers of the Church today which
those early fathers would never have permitted themselves to utter. It has now
become fashionable among a class of religious teachers to speak disparagingly
of or belittle the Holy Scriptures as an authoritative rule of faith for the
Church.
The leading cause of
this has undoubtedly been the trend which the criticism of the Holy Scriptures
has assumed during the last half century or more.
By all means, let
criticism have its rights. Let purely literary questions about the Bible
receive full and fair discussion. Let the structure of books be impartially
examined. If a reverent science has light to throw on the composition or
authority or age of these books, let its voice be heard. If this thing is of
God we cannot overthrow it; if it be of man, or so far as it is of man, or so
far as it comes in conflict with the reality of things in the Bible, it will
come to naught — as in my opinion a great deal of it is fast coming today
through its own excesses. No fright, therefore, need be taken at the mere word,
“Criticism.” On the other hand, we are not bound to accept every wild critical
theory that any critic may choose to put forward and assert, as the final word
on this matter. We are entitled, nay, we are bound, to look at the
presuppositions on which each, criticism proceeds, and to ask, How far is the
criticism controlled by those presuppositions? We are bound to look at
the evidence by which
the theory is supported, and to ask, Is it really borne out by that evidence?
And when theories are put forward with every confidence as fixed results, and
we find them, as we observe them, still in constant process of evolution and
change, constantly becoming more complicated, more extreme, more fanciful, we
are entitled to inquire, Is this the certainty that it was alleged to be? Now
that is my complaint against much of the current criticism of the Bible — not
that it is criticism, but that it starts from the wrong basis, that it proceeds
by arbitrary methods, and that it arrives at results which I think are
demonstrably false results. That is a great deal to say, no doubt, but perhaps
I shall have some justification to offer for it before I am done.
I am not going to enter
into any general tirade against criticism; but it is useless to deny that a
great deal of what is called criticism is responsible for the uncertainty and
unsettlement of feeling existing at the present time about the Holy Scriptures.
I do not speak especially of those whose philosophical standpoint compels them
to take up an attitude of negation to supernatural revelation, or to books
which profess to convey such a revelation. Criticism of this kind, criticism
that starts from the basis of the denial of the supernatural, has of course, to
be reckoned with. In its hands everything is engineered from that basis. There
is the denial to begin with,
that God ever has
entered into human history, in word and deed, in any supernatural way. The
necessary result is that whatever in the Bible affirms or flows from such
interposition of God is expounded or explained away.
The Scriptures on this
showing, instead of being, the living oracles of God, become simply the
fragmentary remains of an ancient Hebrew literature, the chief value of which
would seem to be the employment it affords to the critic to dissect it into its
various parts, to overthrow the tradition of the past in regard to it, and to frame
ever new, ever changing, ever more wonderful theories of the origin of the
books and the so-called legends they contain. Leaving, however, such futile,
rationalistic criticism out of account — because that is not the kind of
criticism with which we as Christian people have chiefly to deal in our own
circles — there is certainly an
immense change of
attitude on the part of many who still sincerely hold faith in the supernatural
revelation of God. I find it difficult to describe this tendency, for I am desirous
not to describe it in any way which would do injustice to any Christian
thinker, and it is attended by so many signs of an ambiguous character. Jesus
is recognized by the majority of those who represent it as “the Incarnate Son
of God,” though with shadings off into more or less indefinite assertions even
on that fundamental article, which make it sometimes doubtful where the writers
exactly stand. The process of thought in regard to Scripture is easily traced.
First, there is an ostentatious throwing overboard, joined with some expression
of contempt, of what is called the verbal inspiration of Scripture — a very
much abused term. Jesus is still spoken of as the highest revealer, and it is
allowed that His words, if only we could get at them — and on the whole it is
thought we can — furnish the highest rule of guidance for time and for
eternity. But even criticism, we are told, must have its rights. Even in the
New Testament the Gospels go into the crucible, and in the name of synoptical
criticism, historical criticism; they are subject to wonderful processes, in
the course of which much of the history gets melted out or is
peeled off as Christian
characteristics. Jesus, we are reminded, was still a man of His generation,
liable to error in His human knowledge, and allowance must be made for the
limitations in His conceptions and judgments. Paul is alleged to be still
largely dominated by his inheritance of Rabbinical and Pharisaic ideas. He had
been brought up a Pharisee, brought up with the rabbis, and when he became a
Christian, he carried a great deal of that into his Christian thought, and we
have to strip off that thought when we come to the study of his Epistles. He is
therefore a teacher not to be followed further than our own judgment of Christian
truth leads us. That gets rid of a great deal that is inconvenient about Paul’s
teaching.
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND
THE CRITICS
If these things are done
in the “green tree” of the New Testament, it is easy to see what will be done
in the “dry tree” of the Old. The conclusions of the more advanced school of
critics are here generally accepted as once for all settled, with the result —
in my judgment, at any rate — that the Old Testament is immeasurably lowered
from the place it once held in our reverence. Its earlier history, down to
about the age of the kings, is largely resolved into myths and legends and
fictions. It is ruled out of the category of history proper. No doubt we are
told that the legends are just as good as the history, and perhaps a little
better, and that the ideas which they convey to us are just as good, coming in
the form of legends, as if they came in the form of fact.
But behold, its laws,
when we come to deal with them in this manner, lack Divine authority. They are the products of human minds at various
ages.
Its prophecies are the
utterances of men who possessed indeed the Spirit of God, which is only in
fuller degree what other good men, religious teachers in all countries, have
possessed — not a spirit qualifying, for example, to give real predictions, or
to bear authoritative messages of the truth to men. And so, in this whirl and
confusion of theories — you will find them in our magazines, you will find them
in our encyclopedias, you will find them in our reviews, you will find them in
many books which have appeared to annihilate the conservative believers — in
this whirl and confusion of theories, is it any wonder that many should be
disquieted and unsettled, and feel as if the ground on which they have been
wont to rest was giving way beneath their feet? And so the question comes back
with fresh urgency. What is to be said of the place and value of Holy
Scripture?
IS THERE A TENABLE
DOCTRINE FOR THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF TODAY?
One of the urgent needs
of our time, and a prime need of the Church, is just a replacement of Holy
Scripture, with due regard, I grant, to any really ascertained facts in regard
to its literary history, in the faith and lives of men, as the truly inspired
and divinely sealed record of God’s revealed will for men in great things
of the soul. But then, is such a position tenable? In the fierce light of
criticism that beats upon the documents and upon the revelation of God’s grace
they profess to contain, can this position be maintained? I venture to think, indeed,
I am very sure, it can. Let me try to indicate — for I can do hardly any more —
the lines along which I would
answer the question,
Have we or can we have a tenable doctrine of Holy Scripture?
For a satisfactory
doctrine of Holy Scripture — and by that I mean a doctrine which is
satisfactory for the needs of the Christian Church, a doctrine which answers to
the claim the Scripture makes for itself, to the place it holds in Christian
life and Christian experience, to the needs of the Christian Church for
edification and evangelization, and in other ways — I say, for a satisfactory
doctrine of Holy Scripture it seems to me that three things are indispensably
necessary. There is necessary, first, a more positive view of the structure of
the Bible than at present obtains in many circles. There is necessary, second,
the acknowledgment of a true supernatural revelation of God in the history and
religion of the Bible. There is necessary, third, the recognition of a true
supernatural inspiration in the record of that revelation. These three things,
to my mind, go together — a more positive view of the structure of the Bible;
the recognition of the supernatural revelation embodied in the Bible; and a
recognition in accordance with the Bible’s own claim of a supernatural
inspiration in the record of the Bible. Can we affirm these three things? Will
they bear the test? I think they will.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE
BIBLE
First as to the
structure of the Bible, there is needed a more positive idea of that structure than
is at present prevalent. You take much of the criticism and you find the Bible
being disintegrated in many ways, and everything like structure falling away
from it. You are told, for example, that these books — say the Books of Moses
are made up of many documents, which are very late in origin and cannot claim
historical value. You are told that the laws they contain are also, for the
most part, of tolerably late origin, and the Levitical laws especially are of
post-exilian construction; they were not given by Moses; they were unknown when
the Children of Israel were carried into captivity. Their temple usage perhaps
is embodied in the Levitical law, but most of the contents of that Levitical
law were wholly unknown. They were the construction — the invention, to use a
term lately employed of priests and scribes in the post-exilian
period. They were put into shape, brought before the Jewish community returned
from Babylon, and accepted by it as the law of life. Thus you have the history
of the Bible turned pretty much upside down, and things take on a new aspect
altogether.
Must I then, in
deference to criticism, accept these theories, and give up the structure which
the Bible presents? Taking the Bible as it stands, I find and you will find if
you look there also, without any particular critical learning you will find it
— what seems to be evidence of a very definite internal structure, part fitting
into part and leading on to part, making up a unity of the whole in that Bible.
The Bible has undeniably a structure as it stands. It is distinguished from all
other books of the kind, from all sacred books in the world, from Koran and
Buddhist scriptures and Indian scriptures and every other kind of religious
books. It is distinguished just
by this fact, that it is
the embodiment of a great plan or scheme or purpose of Divine grace extending
from the beginning of time through successive ages and dispensations down to
its culmination in Jesus Christ and the Pentecostal outpourings of the Spirit.
The history of the Bible is the history of that development of God’s redemptive
purpose. The promises of the Bible mark the stages of its progress and its
hope. The covenants of the Bible stand before us in the order of its unfolding.
You begin with Genesis. Genesis lays the foundation and leads up to the Book of
Exodus; and the Book of Exodus, with its introduction of the law-giving, leads
up to what follows. Deuteronomy looks back upon the history of the rebellions
and the laws given to the people, and leads up to the conquest. I need not
follow the later developments, coming away down through the monarchy and the
prophecy and the rest, but you find it all gathered up and fulfilled in the New
Testament. The Bible, as we have it, closes in Gospel and Epistle and Apocalypse,
fulfilling all the ideas of the Old Testament. There the circle completes
itself with the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Here is a structure; here is the fact; here is a structure, a connected story,
a unity of purpose extending through this Book and binding all its parts
together. Is that structure an illusion? Do we only, and many with us, dream
that it is there? Do our eyes deceive us when we think we see it? Or has
somebody of a later date invented it, and put it all, inwrought it all, in
these earlier records, legends and stories, or whatever
you like to call it —
skillfully woven into the story until it presents there the appearance of
naturalness and truth? I would like to find the mind capable of inventing it, and
then the mind capable of putting it in and working it into a history once they
got the idea itself. But if not invented, it belongs to the reality and the
substance of the history; it belongs to the facts; and therefore to the Book
that records the facts. And there are internal attestations in that structure
of the Bible to the genuineness of its contents that protest against the
efforts that are so often made to reduce it to fragments and shiver up that
unity and turn it upside down. “Walk about Zion ... tell the towers thereof;
mark ye well her bulwarks;” you will find there’s something there which the art
of man will not avail to overthrow.
“Now, that is all very
well,” I hear some one say, “but there are facts on the other side; there are
those manifold proofs which our critical friends adduce that the Bible is
really a collection of fragments and documents of much later date, and that the
history is really quite a different thing from what the Bible represents it to
be.” Well, are we to sit down and accept their dictum on that subject without
evidence? When I turn to the evidence I do not find them to have that
convincing power which our critical friends assign to them. I am not rejecting
this kind of critical theory because it goes against my prejudices or traditions;
I reject it simply because it seems to me the evidence does not sustain it, and
that the stronger evidence is against it. I cannot go into details; but take
just the one point that I have mentioned —
this post-exilian origin
of the Levitical law. I have stated what is said about that matter — that those
laws and institutions that you find in the middle of the Books of the
Pentateuch — those laws and institutions about priests and Levites and
sacrifices and all that — had really no existence, had no authoritative form,
and to a large extent had not existence of any kind until after the Jews
returned from Babylon, and then they were given out as a code of laws which the
Jews accepted. That is the theory which is stated once and again. But let the reader
put himself in the position of that returned community, and see what the thing
means. These exiles had
returned from Babylon.
They had been organized into a new community. They had rebuilt their Temple,
and then long years after that, when things had got into confusion, those two
great men, Ezra and Nehemiah, came among them, and by and by Ezra produced and
publicly proclaimed this law of Moses — what he called the law of Moses, the
law of God by the hand of Moses — which he had brought from Babylon. A full
description of what happened is given in the eighth chapter of the Book of
Nehemiah.
Ezra reads that law from
his pulpit of wood day after day to the people, and the interpreter
gives the sense. Now, mind you, most of the things in this law, in this book
that he is reading to the people, had never been heard of before — never had
existed, in fact; priests and Levites such as are there described had never
existed. The law itself was long and complicated and burdensome, but the
marvelous thing is that the people meekly accept it all as true — meekly accept
it as law, at any rate — and submit to it, and take upon themselves its burdens
without a murmur of dissent. That is a very remarkable thing to start with. But
remember, further, what that community was. It was not a community with oneness
of mind, but it was a community keenly divided in itself. If you read the
narrative you will
find that there were
strong opposing factions in that community; there were parties strongly opposed
to Ezra and Nehemiah and their reforms; there were many, as you see in the Book
of Malachi, who were religiously faithless in that community. But marvelous to
say, they all join in accepting this new and burdensome and hitherto unheard of
law as the law of Moses, the law coming down to them from hoary antiquity.
There were priests and Levites in that community who knew something about their
own origin; they had genealogies and knew something about their own past.
According to the new theory, these Levites were quite a new order; they had
never existed at all before the time of the exile, and they had come into
existence through the sentence of degradation that the prophet Ezekiel had
passed upon them in the 44th chapter of his book. History is quite silent about
this degradation. If anyone asks who carried out the degradation, or why was it
carried out, or when was it done, and how came the priests to submit to the
degradation, there is no answer to be given at all. But it came about
somehow, so we are told.
And so these priests and
Levites are there, and they stand and listen without astonishment as they learn
from Ezra how the Levites had been set apart long centuries before in the
wilderness by the hand of God, and had an ample tithe provision made for their
support, and cities, and what not, set apart for them to live in. People know a
little about their past. These cities never had existed except on paper; but
they took it all in. They are told about these cities, which they must have
known had never existed as Levitical cities. They not only hear but they accept
the heavy tithe Burdens without a word of remonstrance, and they make a
covenant with God pledging themselves to faithful obedience to all those
commands. Those tithes laws, as we discover, had no actual relation to their
situation at all. They were drawn up for a totally different case. They were
drawn up for a state of things in which there were few priests and many
Levites. The priests were only to get the tithe of a tenth, But in this
restored community there were a great many priests and few Levites. The tithe
laws did not apply at all, but they accepted these as laws of Moses.
And so I might go over
the provisions of the law one by one — tabernacle and priests and ritual and
sacrifices and Day of Atonement — these things, in their post-exilian form, had
never existed; they were spun out of the inventive brains of scribes; and yet
the people accepted them all as the genuine handiwork of the ancient law-giver.
Was ever such a thing heard of before? Try it in any city. Try to get the
people to take upon themselves a series of heavy burdens of taxation or tithes
or whatever you like, on the ground that it had been handed down from the
middle ages to the present time. Try to get them to believe it; try to get them
to obey it, and you will find the difficulty. Is it credible to anyone who
leaves books and theories in the study and takes a broad view of human nature
with open eyes? I aver
that for me, at any
rate, it is not; and it will be a marvel to me as long as I am spared to live,
how such a theory has ever gained the acceptance it has done among
unquestionably able and sound-minded men. I am convinced that the structure of
the Bible vindicates itself, and that these counter theories break down.
A SUPERNATURAL
REVELATION
I think it is an
essential element in a tenable doctrine of Scripture, in fact the core of the
matter, that it contains a record of a true supernatural revelation; and that
is what the Bible claims to be not a development of man’s thoughts about God,
and not what this man and that one came to think about God, how they came to
have the ideas of a Jehovah or Yahveh, who was originally the storm-god of
Sinai, and how they manufactured out of this the great universal God of the
prophets — but a supernatural revelation of what God revealed Himself in word
and deed to men in history. And if that claim to a supernatural revelation from
God falls, the
Bible falls, because it
is bound up with it from beginning to end. Now, it is just here that a great
deal of our modern thought parts company with the Bible. I am quite well aware
that many of our friends who accept these newer critical theories, claim to be
just as firm believers in Divine revelation as I am myself, and in Jesus Christ
and all that concerns Him. I rejoice in the fact, and I believe that they are
warranted in saying that there is that in the religion of Israel which you
cannot expunge, or explain on any other hypothesis but Divine revelation.
But what I maintain is
that this theory of the religion of the Bible which has been evolved, which has
peculiarly come to be known as the critical view, had a very different origin
in men who did not believe in the supernatural revelation of God in the Bible.
This school as a whole, as a wide-spread school, holds the fundamental position
— the position which its adherents call that of the modern mind that miracles
did not happen and cannot happen. It takes the ground that they are impossible;
therefore its followers have to rule everything of that kind out of the Bible
record. I have never been able to see how that position is tenable to a
believer in a living personal God who really loves His creatures and has a
sincere desire to bless them. Who dare to venture to assert that the power and
will of such a Being as we must believe God to be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ — is exhausted in the natural creation? That there are no
higher things to be attained in God’s providence than can be attained through
the medium of natural law? That there is in such a Being no capability of
revealing Himself in words and deeds beyond nature? If there is a dogmatism in
the world, it is that of the man who claims to limit the Author of the universe
by this finite bound. We are told sometimes that it is a far higher thing to see
God in the natural than to see Him in something that transcends the natural; a
far higher thing to see God in the orderly regular working of nature than to
suppose that there has ever been anything transcending that ordinary natural
working. I think we all do see God, and try to see Him more and more, in the
ordinary and regular working of nature. I hope all try every day to see God
there. But the question is, Has this natural working not its limits? Is there
not something that nature and natural workings cannot reach, cannot do for men,
that we need to have done for us? And are we so to bind God that He cannot
enter into communion with man in a supernatural economy of grace, an economy of
revelation, an economy of salvation? Are we to deny that He has done
so? That is really the
dividing line both in Old Testament and New between the different theories.
Revelation, surely, all must admit if man is to attain the clear knowledge of
God that is needed; and the question is one of fact, Has God so revealed Himself?
And I believe that it is an essential part of the answer, the true doctrine of
Scripture, to say, “Yes, God has so revealed Himself, and the Bible is the
record of that revelation, and that revelation shines in its light from the
beginning to the end of it.” And unless there is a whole-hearted acceptance of
the fact that God has entered, in word and deed, into human history for man’s
salvation, for man’s renovation, for the deliverance of this world, a
revelation culminating in the great Revealer Himself — unless we accept that,
we do not get the
foundation for the true
doctrine of Holy Scripture.
THE INSPIRED BOOK
Now, just a word in
closing, on Inspiration. I do not think that anyone will weigh the evidence of
the Bible itself very carefully without saying that at least it claims to be in
a peculiar and especial manner an inspired book. There is hardly anyone, I
think, who will doubt that Jesus Christ treats the Old Testament in that way.
Christ treats it as an imperfect stage of revelation, no doubt. Christ, as the
Son of Man, takes up a lordly, discretionary attitude towards that revelation,
and He supersedes very much what is in, it by something higher, but Christ
recognizes that there was true Divine revelation there, that He was the goal of
it all; He came to fulfill the law and the prophets. The Scriptures are the
last word with Him — “Have ye not read? “Ye do err, not knowing the
Scriptures.” And it is just as certain that the Apostles treated the Old
Testament in that way, and that they claimed in a peculiar sense the Spirit of
God themselves. They claimed that in them and in their word was laid “the
foundation on which the Church was built,” Jesus Christ Himself, as the
substance of their testimony, being the chief corner-stone; “built upon the
foundation of the Apostles and Prophets.” And if you say, “Well, are these New
Testament Apostles and Prophets?” That is in Ephesians, 2nd chapter. You go to
the fifth verse of the third chapter and you find this mystery of Christ which
God had revealed to His holy Apostles and Prophets by His Spirit; and it is on
that the Church was built. And when you come to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:14-17) to
that classical passage, you find the marks there by which inspired Scripture is
distinguished.
Take the book of Scripture
and ask just this question: Does it answer to the claim of this inspired
volume? How are we to test this? I do not enter here into the question that has
divided good men as to theories of inspiration — questions about inerrancy in
detail, and other matters. I want to get away from these things at the
circumference to the center. But take the broader test.
THE BIBLE’S OWN TEST OF
INSPIRATION
What does the Bible
itself give us as the test of its inspiration? What does the Bible itself name
as the qualities that inspiration imparts to it? Paul speaks in Timothy of the
Sacred Writings that were able to make wise unto salvation through faith which
is in Christ Jesus. He goes on to tell us that ALL Scripture is given by
inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness, in order that the man of God may be perfect,
thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
When you go back to the
Old Testament and its praise of the Word of God you will find the qualities of
inspiration are just the same. “The law of the Lord is perfect”, etc. Those are
the qualifies which the inspired Book is alleged to sustain — qualities which
only a true inspiration of God’s Spirit could give; qualities beyond which we
surely do not need anything more.
Does anyone doubt that
the Bible possesses these qualities? Look at its structure; look at its
completeness; look at it in the clearness and fullness and holiness of its
teachings; look at it in its sufficiency to guide every soul that truly seeks
light unto the saving knowledge of God. Take the Book as a whole, in its whole
purpose, its whole spirit, its whole aim and tendency, and the whole setting of
it, and ask, Is there not manifest the power which you can only trace back, as it
traces back itself, to God’s Holy Spirit really in the men who wrote it?
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