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The Place of Historical Reasoning 269
except he knows who Christ is, that he is mediator, and how he is
mediator, and that he is God. And many other things are necessary
to be known of Christ in order to see his excellency. There must be
a knowledge what the things of the gospel are, before we can be
sensible of the truth and reality and excellency of the things of the
gospel. 3
That last sentence is the crucial observation: “There must be a knowledge
what the things of the gospel are, before we can be sensible of the
truth and reality and excellency of the things of the gospel.” Or, as he
says earlier, “saving knowledge depends [on] doctrinal knowledge.”
That is, we must know what the Bible teaches before we can see the
glory of God in that teaching.
The Mental Work of Preserving and Interpreting Texts
This means that the Bible must be preserved from generation to generation
so that its truth can be known in our own day. And that preservation
involves the mental work of reading and transmitting the text.
Then there must also be faithful translations so that those who don’t
know Greek and Hebrew may have access to the true meaning of Scripture.
And such translations depend on a rigorous mental effort to know
at least two languages—the original one and the one into which we are
translating. And then there are mental skills involved in reading, some
of which we learned as children, but others of which we have learned
later in order to read with greater care.
All the processes of preserving the original text, transmitting it,
translating it, and learning to construe its true meaning involve the natural
uses of our senses in observation and mental capacities of reason
and inference. These processes are essential for any of us to have access
to the meaning of biblical texts where God’s glory is seen. Therefore,
as Edwards says, spiritual, saving knowledge—the sight of “the light
of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4)—is dependent on the
natural knowledge of what the Scripture teaches.
3
Jonathan Edwards, “A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate,” in Sermons
and Discourses, 1723–1729, vol. 14, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Harry S. Stout and Kenneth
P. Minkema (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 92.