Some Essentials of Religion

by Unknown

I.—FOUNDATIONS

1.—If the fear should ever come upon you, my reader, of the possibility of the Scriptures being discredited by present-day controversies after having been accepted as God-given for three thousand years, first pause for a moment, and let the full weight of these thoughts press upon you of all that is implied in the fact (1) that any set of old documents, always open to scrutiny and question, should for thousands of years have been accepted as of Divine origin; (2) that they should have been yielded to by men as an authority to guide their conduct by commands often disagreeable to themselves; (3) that this acceptance and obedience has been chiefly amongst the most thoughtful and highly-cultured nations of the world; (4) that it has gone on age after age, steadily increasing, and never in any age has made more progress than in this cultured, enlightened, all-questioning century in which we live.

2.—What has given these Scriptures such authority? Remember they were only separate documents, often with hundreds of years intervening between them, written by different writers of different characters to different people, and under different circumstances. Remember that in many cases we do not know their origin, or how they assumed their present form. And yet somehow we never can reach back in their history to a time when they were not treasured and reverenced among men as in some way at least above human productions. There they stand, a long chain of records with one end reaching away into the far back past, and the other gathering around the feet of Christ.

And remember especially this, that they were selected out by no miracle, that they rest on no formal decision or sentence of Church or Council, or pope or saint, nay, not even of the Blessed Lord Himself; for long before He came, for centuries and centuries there they stood, testifying of Him, cherished and reverenced as a message that had come from above "at sundry times and in divers manners". All study of their history shows that their acceptance rested on no decision of any external authority. They were accepted as of Divine origin for many generations before they were gathered into any fixed collection. "The Church", said Luther, "cannot give more force or authority to a book than it has in itself. A Council cannot make that to be Scripture which in its own nature is not Scripture".

It is true that the great Synagogue, or their official descendants, collected the Old Testament Canon of Scripture. Yes, but when? Somewhere about the time of our Lord, when the books had been for ages recognised as of God. It is true that the Christian Church collected the New Testament writings into a Bible, and arrived at a decision concerning certain books the authority of which had been in debate. Yes, but when? After they had been for 300 years accepted as the God-given guide of the Church. Evidently it was not their being collected into a Bible that made them of authority, but rather the fact of their possessing authority made them be collected into a Bible.

3.—Again, I repeat the question, what gave them that authority? And there seems no possible answer but this, that they possessed it of themselves. They commanded the position they held by their own power. Men's moral sense and reason combined to establish them. They appealed by their own instrinsic worth to the God-given moral faculty, and the response to that appeal through all the ages since is in reality the main foundation of the Bible's position.

Look at the Old Testament. If we at the present day are asked why we receive it as inspired, we usually reply that we receive it on the authority of our Lord and His apostles. They accepted it as the Word of God, and handed it on to us with their official approval of it. Well, but why was it accepted before their day without any such formal sanction? How did men come to believe and obey as Divinely inspired the words of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the rest? Except in the case of Moses, there were no miracles or portents; no external voice from heaven to command men's allegiance. They were not established on their Divine supremacy by any single authority. Why then were their utterances accepted?

It seems evident there can be but one answer. They asserted that supremacy by their own intrinsic power. Men were compelled to acknowledge that their declaration that "the word of the Lord had come to them" was true. There was that in the messages of the prophets and in the evidence by which they were accompanied, which compelled this belief.

The books of the New Testament became recognised among Christians just as the books of the Old Testament had been recognised among the Jews, by virtue of their own inherent evidence. Certain witnesses came forward and recorded in writing the teaching of our Lord, or announced certain messages for which they had His authority, or the guidance of His Spirit in communicating them to their fellows. Men had to decide for themselves whether they believed those claims. The Apostles were supported, indeed, in many cases by miracles, but not always; and though those miracles afforded momentous evidence, they were not recognisable in themselves, when standing alone, as decisive of the whole question. No apparent miracle, it was felt, could of itself authenticate a message from God which did not bear internal evidence also of having proceeded from Him. The appeal in the early Church was directed, as in the time of our Lord Himself, to the hearts and consciences of men. He Himself could but appeal to those hearts and consciences, and men accepted and rejected Him, not by reference to any external authority, but in proportion to their capacity for recognising His Divine character.

"Thus from the first to the last, the authority of the Scriptures has been equivalent to the authority with which they themselves convinced men that they had come from God."