A Tour of the Missions: Observations and ConclusionsStrong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
A Tour of the Missions: Observations and Conclusions
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
East Asia -- Description and travel; Missions
in the subject they investigate, namely, that the preincarnate Christ
was the author and inspirer of the Scripture which he afterward
interpreted. He used human agents, with their natural language and
surroundings, as his instruments, but he could, on the way to Emmaus,
"beginning from Moses and all the prophets," interpret to those humble
believers "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself."
Scripture can have, and it does have, two authors, man and God, the
writer and Christ; and to ignore Christ in the evolution of the Bible is
to miss its chief meaning, to teach falsehood instead of truth, and,
consciously or unconsciously, to deny Christ's deity.
Cannot a document have more than one author? What are the facts in other
realms of art? In painting, did not Landseer get Millais to paint the
human figure into the picture of his dogs? In literature, is there any
more acknowledged fact than that Erckmann-Chatrian's battle-stories were
the work of two writers, and not of one? The work of a single author may
have two separate meanings, for Dante declares that his Divine Comedy
has one meaning that is personal, and another meaning that is universal.
Our extreme critics are as poor students of literature as they are of
life. Their narrowness of interpretation is due to a narrowness of
experience. If they knew Christ better, they would find in the
Twenty-third Psalm alone enough proof to upset their theory. "The Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want," is an utterance inexplicable by
merely human authorship. To suppose that even a king of Israel who had
been a shepherd-boy could have written this psalm without divine
inspiration, in a day when all lands but little Palestine were wrapt in
a pall of heathen darkness, is to suppose that religion can exist and
flourish without a God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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