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272 How Are the Christian Scriptures Confirmed by the Peculiar Glory of God?
see the glory of a painting, keep looking at the painting. Study it. If you
want to see the glory of the sunrise, get up before dawn and face east.
The glory of God is not contained in the Scriptures the way a jewel
is contained in a box. It is contained in the Scriptures the way light is
contained in fire, the way sweetness is contained in honey, the way redness
and fragrance are contained in the rose. When the spiritual nerve
endings and spiritual taste buds and spiritual retina are made alive by
the Spirit, these glories are tasted and seen. But not without a natural
contact with the fire and the honey and the rose.
How Do We Depend on Scholarship and Other Human Agency?
Does this mean that we are back to depending on the scholars for our
faith? The answer is mixed. We are not dependent on historians and
apologists and scholars to prove to us that the Scriptures are true and
that God is real. But we are dependent on human agents to give us access
to the Bible. And we are dependent on human agency—our own
and others’—to give us the ability to construe the meaning of the Bible
through reading or hearing what it says. There is no access to the peculiar
glory of God in his word without human agency. And there is no
access to the true meaning of biblical texts without human agency. Seeing
the truth and beauty of God in Scripture will always require more
than human agency. But never less.
Reading well is a mediator of glory. When Paul observed that a
veil lay over the hearts of the Jewish people (2 Cor. 3:15) when the
Scriptures were read in the synagogue every week (Acts 13:27; 15:21),
the solution was not to stop reading the Scriptures. The solution was
to turn to the Lord Jesus. “When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed”
(2 Cor. 3:16). The veil is lifted to see what is there. If we turn
away from reading, there is little reason to think the Lord will lift the
veil. What would we see?
The Path of Apologetics Is the Path to Light
What does all this imply for the work of apologetics—the effort to give
rational and historical arguments for the truth of the Christian faith?
One way to describe the implication is to say that the actual path to
rational persuasion from historical facts and valid inferences is the same