Chapters of Bible Study: A Popular Introduction to the Study of the Sacred Scriptures — John Shaqi
Chapters of Bible Study: A Popular Introduction to the Study of the Sacred ScripturesHeuser, Herman J. (Herman Joseph)
Religion
Chapters of Bible Study: A Popular Introduction to the Study of the Sacred Scriptures
Heuser, Herman J. (Herman Joseph)
Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Bible -- Study and teaching -- Catholic Church
Now the testimony of Christ, who proved Himself to be the Son of God,
and therefore unerring truth, is explicit in so far as it appeals with
a supreme and infallible authority to the Jewish Scriptures as to a
testimony _not human, but divine_. "Have you not read that which was
spoken _by God_?" He says, referring to the Mosaic Law in Exodus iii. 6
(St. Matt. xxii. 31). Many times He speaks of the Scriptures "that
they may be fulfilled," thus indicating that they contain that which
lay in the future, and whose foreknowledge must have come from God.
This testimony of Our Lord is strengthened by the interpretation of His
Apostles in the same sense.
Yet although the testimony of Christ and the Apostles regarding the
fact that the Books of the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms are
divinely inspired, is very explicit, we have nowhere a clear statement
or a catalogue which might assure us what books and parts of books are
actually comprised in this collection of the Sacred Scriptures of which
our Lord speaks. Christ approves as the word of God those writings
which were accepted as such among the Jews of His day, but He does not
give us any definite security by this general endorsement that every
chapter, every verse, much less every word of the Bible, as we have
received it, is actually inspired. We are not therefore quite sure
from the evidence thus far given that the Old Testament, as we have it,
has in every part of it the sanction of Christ's testimony to its being
truly the word of God. As to the New Testament, we know that, however
accurate and trustworthy as a history of the times in which it was
composed it may be, yet it could not have had the explicit approval of
our Lord, simply because it had not been written and was not completed
for about a hundred years after His death and glorious resurrection.
Yet we accept the New Testament as also inspired in just the same
authoritative way as we receive the Hebrew writings of the Old Law.
And nothing but a divine testimony, such as that of Christ, could
assure us sufficiently that in the Sacred Scriptures we have the word
of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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