019. CHRIST THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY

CHRIST THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY

Since Christ, then, is God revealed, it is not enough for a Christian to say that God is the source of authority in religion—he must also say, in order to give completer expression to the truth, that Christ is the ultimate source of authority. If I can ascertain what Christ says in nature, that will be authority for me. If I can learn what he says in the constitution of the human mind, that will be authority for me also. Christ speaks in providence to the individual and he speaks in history to the race. But it is in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments that I find his works and his words most perfectly set forth.

What is the relation which the Bible sustains to him? I give a two-fold answer to this question. I say, on the one hand, that the Bible, like the earthly father and the civil ruler, like conscience and the church, has an authority which is divine. I say, on the other hand, that this authority, like theirs, is delegated and subordinate, limited to the sphere in which it was meant to move and to the purposes for which it was designed. It was not meant to teach us mathematics, but it was meant to teach us of Christ. It was not meant to teach us how the heavens go, but to teach us how to go to heaven. Through it the Holy Spirit leads us into all’ religious truth, the truth as it is in Jesus.

It is quite conceivable that the whole revelation of God in Christ might have been given without any written record of it. The memory of past works and words of God might have been handed down by word of mouth. Such was doubtless the method by which the knowledge of God’s earliest communications to mankind was transmitted in the days of the patriarchs. So it is generally agreed that the gospel narrative was orally preserved for twenty or thirty years before it was permanently committed to writing. Was there no religious authority in the days of the patriarchs? Was there no religious authority in the thirty years which followed Christ’s resurrection? Ah, yes! The truth was in the world; the church was founded upon that truth; that truth was mighty to convince mankind; there was authority in the truth. But there was then no New Testament Scripture, for no one had then been commissioned to write it. Neither the safety of the church nor the authority of the truth depended at that time upon the existence of Scripture. And it is conceivable that it might be so to-day; that tradition might still be authoritative, though the facts of Christianity had never been recorded.

We claim, moreover, that the record of these facts which we actually possess might be authoritative even if that record had never been inspired. There have been men like Priestley, who believed in all the miracles upon the testimony of the evangelists, while at the same time he denied to their accounts any inspiration, and regarded them simply as genuine and authentic historical documents. But if Christianity could conceivably be authenticated to the world without inspiration, and even without a written record, it is much more true that Christianity does not stand or fall with any particular theory of inspiration.

Let us make sure that we use the terms "revelation," "illumination," "inspiration," with a perfectly definite meaning. Half the perplexity and alarm which agitates many excellent Christians would disappear if they would once consider that, while "revelation " is the communication of new truth from God, and "illumination" is the quickening of man’s powers to understand truth already revealed, " inspiration " is simply the qualifying of men to put that truth into permanent and written form.