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154 How Can We Know the Christian Scriptures Are True?
see to what we believe about persons. The awareness of personhood is
immediate, because the union between personhood (soul) and body is
so profound.
Then Edwards draws the analogy to the Scriptures and the God
whose being they express. In the analogy, the Scriptures correspond to
the human body, and God corresponds to the soul. When we construe
the meaning of Scripture, we see in the meaning a “wondrous universal
harmony and consent and concurrence in the aim and drift.” We see the
pervasive presence of “a wonderful glorious design.” We see abundant
“stamps of exalted and divine wisdom, majesty and holiness in matter,
manner, contexture, and aim.” And in this meaning of Scripture, we
discern the “word and work of a divine mind.”
Just as we seldom pause and consciously think of the fact that we
infer a soul behind the actions and words of our human friend, so we
seldom pause and recognize that we infer a divine mind behind the
Scriptures. The reason is that, in a sense, “behind” is the wrong word.
The soul is not merely behind the body, and the word of God is not
merely behind the human Scriptures. The union in both cases is so
profound that when we see the acting human body as we ought, and
we see the meaning of the Scriptures as we ought, there is no conscious
inferring. There is immediate sight. This is a rational person, not just a
body. This is the word of God, not just of man.
The Painter and the God Who Speaks
In the next illustration, consider the analogy between knowing that
God is the author of Scripture and knowing that Rembrandt painted
“The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.” The question I am raising here is
this: How much of the painting must you see to know that it is Rembrandt’s?
And how much of the Scripture must you read to know it is
God’s word? The reason this question matters is that it helps us clarify
in what sense the self-authenticating glory of God is visible through the
Scriptures.
Most would agree that if you covered Rembrandt’s painting with
black paper, and then made a pinhole in the paper that revealed a tiny
speck of the painting, we would not be able to have a well-grounded
knowledge that the painting is by Rembrandt. We would not even know