018. THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

"I Am a man under authority," said the Roman centurion. Yet the centurion himself had authority. He had soldiers under him. When he said "Go," they went; when he said "Come," they came. His authority was a subordinate authority. There were limits to it. It was sometimes imperfectly understood and imperfectly exercised. Yet it had behind it the whole power of the Roman Empire. Nay, it had behind it the power of God. Rome was an earthly representative of the divine sovereignty—the powers that be are ordained of God. Since the centurion’s soldiers obeyed him, he could justly argue that all the powers of nature and all the wills of men must render obedience to the Christ of God. In this world we need authority, for the reason that there are so many things we do not know, but need to know, while we cannot by ourselves get the knowledge of them. Etymology helps us here. The word "authority" is derived from augco, augere, to add. The "author" is one who adds to the facts his own testimony about them. "Authority" is the personal element of witness added to the truth communicated. Let the truth come by itself, do you say? Let it stand in its own light and win its own way? But suppose, on account of immaturity or perversity, my judgment is untrustworthy. Then I must either have the truth attested to me by others, or I must remain in ignorance.

We see this in the child. He is very ignorant. He cannot find out everything for himself. Some one must teach him. There are things which he needs to know, but which he has a natural reluctance to learn. The rights of others, for example, he is slow to appreciate. He needs an authority over him that will add to the facts the influence of personal testimony, and sometimes of physical force besides. And so, parental authority is ordained of God, to secure the proper education of the child. We see the same thing in the foreign immigrant to our shores. He is ignorant of America and fancies it a land of license. He must learn that our liberty is a liberty regulated by law. Government must instruct and restrain him. Civil authority is ordained of God to educate the members of the State.

God is the original source of all just authority, and no authority is just which cannot be referred to God’s ordination. The human reason is bound to submit to God’s authority, for human reason is finite. The human conscience is bound to submit to God’s authority, for the human conscience is warped and perverted by sin. It is not only rational for us in our present intellectual and moral state to recognize an authority above that of individual reason and conscience, but this is the only reasonable and conscientious thing for us to do. Reason itself bids me follow a guide where I do not know the way myself. It is not enough to say, I must follow conscience. I am bound also to have a right conscience to follow, and I must permit my conscience to be set right by Him who made the conscience. The most unreasonable and most unconscientious of all people are those who depend solely upon their own reason and conscience, without recognizing the limitations of reason and conscience and their need of divine instruction and correction.

It is a very absurd thing, then, for a man to say that he will follow reason rather than authority. What he wants to follow, or ought to want to follow, is truth. And authority is as much God’s appointed way to truth as reason is. For nine-tenths of the facts of geology we are dependent upon the testimony of observers whom we never saw. These data do not fetter our reason, but only give the proper basis for reason to work upon. To say that we will take nothing on authority, but that we will build up our system of belief solely upon the results of our own observation and judgment, is to condemn ourselves to the narrowest sort of induction and utterly to preclude a coming to the knowledge of the truth. So one whole half of human life consists in following authority, taking facts from others, acting upon testimony. Physical science is largely based upon the witness of our fellow-men, and its conclusions have in them a great element of faith. Religion demands of us only an application to spiritual things of the same principle of dependence, submission, trust, which we are obliged to exercise in all the affairs of this world. But here comes in the moral test. In my ignorance I must follow some authority; whose authority shall it be? I have the solemn power of choice: I choose my authority, and in that choice I reveal my character. If I feel my sin, my weakness, my need, I see also the glory of God’s saving revelation and I choose to follow it. If I am proud, self-righteous, self-willed, I choose to follow my own perverse judgment; but I have not rid myself of authority, I have simply substituted the authority of self for the authority of God.

How long must authority last? How long will it be before I shall cease to need data for my intellect? You reply: Until I cease to be ignorant and become omniscient. How plain it is that the apostle said well, "Now abideth faith." Since my largest intellectual progress will never compass all things, there will always be an infinite outlying region with regard to which I shall have to take testimony—and that testimony of God will be authority. Much more dependent upon his authority am I here in this nebulous and unformed state of my moral nature, where so many things are seen in a glass darkly and so many other things are never seen at all. And, therefore, my probation consists more than anything else in my decision of the question whether I will add to the sources of my knowledge and the springs of my moral action the information which God communicates, or whether I will go on my lonely way without light and without God. Alas! the light reveals so much of evil in me that I am likely to take this latter course, unless the Spirit of God convert my heart.

God is the original source of all authority. But he is not the only source. He has delegated his authority. He has given authority to parents. The commandment, "Honour thy father and thy mother," was probably a part of the first table of the law, and belongs among our duties to God. He has given authority to magistrates. The words of the psalm, "I said, Ye are gods," were uttered with reference to earthly rulers, because they stood in the place of God, executed judgment for him, and were clothed with his authority. Both family government and civil government derive all their dignity from the fact that they are constituted by God and that they are his appointed representatives. No earthly father and no earthly judge appreciates his responsibility until he recognizes that God has delegated to him a portion of his own divine sovereignty, and that the family on the one hand and the community on the other will judge of God by his equitable or inequitable administration. The father is often unwise, yet within the bounds of the family, God clothes him with authority over his children; to the child in his earliest years the father almost takes the place of God. The civil ruler enacts imperfect laws and passes imperfect judgments; that does not prevent his authority from being supreme within its sphere. "He that resisteth the power, withstandeth the ordinance of God, and they that withstand shall receive to themselves judgment."

I think it is also plain that any delegated authority that forgets its derivation from God and sets itself up for original, to the ignoring and exclusion of its divine source, does very much to nullify its own work and to harm mankind. The aim of the parent and of the judge should be so to exercise authority that the mind of the family and the mind of the community shall be led up to the God by whom that authority has been conferred. In this way external and formal obedience will come to be replaced by intelligent and willing obedience,—the law will be written on the heart, duty will be performed as unto God and not unto men. The father who rules only by physical force, who never reasons with his child, who never points the child to God, will find sooner or later that the child regards his rule as tyranny, and runs riot so soon as he has escaped from the father’s eye and control. The aim of paternal government is so to educate the child that he becomes a law to himself, no longer needing paternal control, but able to manage a family of his own. And so civil government takes the raw recruit, from Poland or from Italy, brings to bear upon him the influence of schools and of statutes, until he becomes a law-abiding citizen, appreciating the blessings of liberty and willing to bear his portion of the burdens of the State. The citizen is educated just in proportion as he recognizes that government is not an arbitrary thing but an embodiment of a higher justice; or, to say the same thing in other words, just in proportion as external law is inwrought into his intellectual and moral nature.

Let us now take a further step and consider how conscience and the church, God’s witnesses in the individual soul and in the world at large, are invested in a similar way with an authority that is delegated, subordinate, limited, yet sufficient and binding in the sphere and for the purposes for which it was given. Conscience has been called "the voice of God in the soul." But this definition is inaccurate and inadequate. Doctor Faunce has well said, in reply to this method of representation: "Conscience is not God; it is only a part of one’s self." To build up a religion about one’s own conscience, as if it were God, is only a refined selfishness, a worship of one part of one’s self by another part of one’s self.

Let us amend the definition then, and while we still preserve the pictorial element in it add the truth which the definition lacks. Conscience, let us say, is the echo of God’s voice. Its original source is in God; but it is a reflection of that original. The reflecting surface modifies the original voice. If the surface that reflects is perfectly even and true, the echo fairly represents the original, though its intensity is somewhat diminished. If that reflecting surface is jagged and broken, the echo will give but a scattering and feeble impression of the original sound. My moral reason is the reflecting surface, and that moral reason is greatly perverted from its early integrity. It furnishes the standard by which I judge; and in every judgment of conscience accordingly there is an element of imperfection. Shall I say, because conscience has its limitations, that it has no authority? Ah, no! Delegated, subordinate, limited, as it is, it is yet the finite echo of an infinite righteousness, and in the sphere and for the purposes for which it was given it is sufficient to guide our moral action. As the watch I carry may regulate my going out and coming in, even though it needs itself to be regulated by comparison with the great town clock which represents more directly the astronomic standards, so conscience may be indispensable authority even though its aberrations need to be corrected by comparison with the more sure standard of divine revelation. The church represents the collective consciousness of redeemed humanity. It is the Christian consciousness embodied. Can it have authority? Is "the analogy of faith " of any value in determining what is truth? Yes, so long as it is kept to its proper place as a delegated, subordinate, and limited authority. I am not the only man to whom the Holy Spirit ever made known the truth. He has illuminated thousands of other men before he began to teach me. I owe respect, therefore, to the conclusions of the past. There is a presumption in favor of their correctness. Until I have fairly investigated for myself, and have found that these conclusions are based upon false premises and false interpretations, the dogmas of the church have a certain authority for me. But its authority is not ultimate. I am not to stop with the church. I am not to bow to the church as the final and only source of light. This is what Roman Catholicism would have me do. It would keep me in perpetual tutelage, instead of encouraging me to exercise my own reason and judgment in interpreting God’s revelation. It would make my relation to Christ depend upon my relation to the church, instead of making my relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express my relation to Christ. It forgets that Christ, and not the church, is "the door," and that the interposition of any other door is the separation of the sinner from his Saviour. So far, we have considered the general matter of authority, and have seen that all authority is derived from God, and is intended to lead to God. All other authority is dependent, subordinate, provisional, limited; valid so long as it confines itself to the sphere and the purposes for which it was ordained, but invalid when it goes beyond its proper bounds, usurps functions which do not belong to it, or assumes to take the place of God himself. What has been said, however, has been intended only as preliminary to the real subject of discussion, which is the authority of Scripture. And, in order that I may set forth more clearly what I conceive to be the truth, let me show what relation the Scripture holds to Christ. The word "Christ" sums up all that we mean by God and by revelation. For Christ is nothing less than Deity revealed, God brought down to our human comprehension and engaged in the work of our salvation. Christ is the Word of God, the divine reason in expression. All outgoing, communication, manifestation of the Godhead, is the work of Christ. God never thought anything, said anything, did anything, except through Christ. Christ is the creator of all and the sustainer of all. He upholds all things by the word of his power. In him all things consist or hold together. Nature, with all its powers and laws, exists and moves, only because Christ’s energy throbs through it all. The sunset clouds are painted by his hand and the tides of life that ebb and flow on the far shores of the universe are only manifestations of him in whom is "the power of an endless life." As this Logos, or Word of God, is the originating and animating principle of nature, so man lives and moves and has his being in him. Human nature, physical as well as mental, is created in Christ before it is recreated in him. It is intellectually united to him before it is spiritually united to him. It is Christ who conducts the march of human history. He is "the Light that lighteth every man." All the lights of conscience, as well as of science, all the truths hid amid the chaff of paganism, as well as all the discoveries made to the chosen people, were communications of Christ, the reason, the wisdom, and the power of God. There is no truth beyond his province, for he is himself "the Truth."

Christ and revelation, then, are one and the same thing from different points of view. The first term, "Christ," brings before us the personal author, the divine Word, God revealing himself, and, since we can never know an unrevealed God, the only God with whom we have to do or with whom we shall ever have to do. "No man hath seen God at any time." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." The second term, "revelation," brings before us this same Christ as made known, as the truth of God communicated and made an objective possession of mankind. So "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy"; he is the author, the subject, the end of Old Testament revelation; and the new dispensation is simply his emerging from behind the scenes where he has been invisibly managing the drama of history, to take visible part in the play, to become the leading actor in it, and to bring it to its denouement. The curtain has not fallen and will not fall to the end of the world. But that appearance of the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascending God has given us the key to human history. It is he who conducts its course and who makes the forces of nature and the gifts of the Spirit tributary to his everlasting kingdom.