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158 How Can We Know the Christian Scriptures Are True?
glory of Jesus by looking at his bare feet or at a single moment of his
body sleeping. You had to see him acting, and hear his word, and watch
his demeanor. So it is with the Scripture. You can’t see the divine glory
of Christ in the Scripture by merely looking at a letter of the alphabet
in one of its sentences, or by a random glance at a “sleeping sentence”
with no connection with other sentences to make the meaning plain. As
with a Rembrandt, the marks of the master’s distinguishing greatness
are in the composition—the meaning of the God-breathed writing.
The Light of God Brings All Truth to Light
In the third illustration, we pursue some thoughts triggered by Psalm
36:9: “In your light do we see light.” And these thoughts are provoked
further by the catalyst of a famous quote from C. S. Lewis: “I believe
in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see
it, but because by it I see everything else.” 5
Ordinarily when we seek to have a well-grounded conviction about
some claim to truth in this world, we bring all our experience to bear on
the claim and try to make sense out of it. What we know from experience
before we hear the claim, we apply to the claim to see if it measures
up. Does it cohere with what we know to be true? Does it make sense
in the light of what we already know? What we know from experience
is the standard, the arbiter, the measure of truth.
But what happens when we encounter a claim that says, “I am the
Standard, the Arbiter, the Truth”? This claim is unique. It is not like
other claims to truth in this world. When the ultimate Measure of all
reality speaks, you don’t subject this Measure to the measure of your
mind or your experience of the world. He created all that. When the
ultimate Standard of all truth and beauty appears, he is not put in the
dock to be judged by the prior perceptions of truth and beauty that we
bring to the courtroom.
The eternal, absolute original is seen as true and beautiful not because
he coheres with what we know but because all the truth and
beauty we know coheres in him. It is measured by him, and it is seen
flowing from him. He does not make sense, and thus have plausibility,
5
C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London:
HarperCollins, 2000), 21.