Scriptures selfattesting authority question doctrine truthfulness Scriptures

17
The Place of
Historical Reasoning
The question we ask in this chapter is, How do human reasoning and
historical scholarship (or any mental effort in Bible study) relate to the
spiritual sight of the glory of God in the Scriptures? Another way to ask
it would be, How does knowledge gained by “beholding the glory of the
Lord” in the word (2 Cor. 3:18) relate to knowledge gained by logical
inference from historical data (such as biblical texts)? Or another way
to ask it would be, How does the knowledge of honey gained by tasting
relate to the knowledge of honey gained by observation (golden-brown,
highly viscous, coming from beehives)? Or how does the knowledge
of daylight gained by sight relate to the knowledge of daylight gained
by inferences from other senses (warmth on the skin, the clock strikes
noon, other people say the sun is shining)?
The reason this question matters is that someone might infer from
what I have said so far that the observation of the world with our physical
senses and the use of reason to draw valid inferences are of little importance,
since God reveals the truth of his word directly to our hearts
by a sight of his glory. This would be a fatal mistake. Fatal is the right
word—not a minor mistake, but fatal. The reason it would be fatal, as
we are going to see, is that the glory of God is mediated to our souls
through biblical texts, which exist for us today and are understood by