Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine, closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But this is to despise God's works. J. H. Barrows: “The Himalayas are the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to spell out the name of God.”To despise the works of God is to despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now speaking. Ps. 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not so much a book, as a voice. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge of God's ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.” Books of science are the record of man's past interpretations of God's works.
(b) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts 17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is presented in the Scriptures.
Acts 17:23—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the erection of an altar to an unknown God, “acknowledged a divine existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just conception of his nature and perfections” (Hackett, in loco). Eph. 3:9—“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery is in the gospel made known for man's salvation. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man's progressive interpretation of God's revelation in the realm of spirit. The phrase “word of God” does not primarily denote a record—it is the spoken word, the doctrine, the vitalizing truth, disclosed by Christ; see Mat. 13:19—“heareth the word of the kingdom”; Luke 5:1—“heard the word of God”; Acts 8:25—“spoken the word of the Lord”; 13:48, 49—“glorified the word of God: … the word of the Lord was spread abroad”; 19:10, 20—“heard the word of the Lord, … mightily grew the word of the Lord”; 1 Cor. 1:18—“the word of the cross”—all designating not a document, but an unwritten word; cf.Jer. 1:4—“the word of Jehovah came unto me”; Ez. 1:3—“the word of Jehovah came expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”
(c) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth. Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God's past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief source of material and its final standard of appeal.
There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested to the heart. Scripture represents this work of the Spirit, not as a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth already revealed. Christ is “the truth” (John 14:6); “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden” (Col. 2:3); the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, “shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you” (John 16:14). The incarnation and the Cross express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be guided “into all the truth” (John 16:13), we may confidently expect the progress of Christian doctrine.
Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and proving of the truth objectively contained in God's revelation. The word “experience” is derived from experior, to test, to try. Christian consciousness is not “norma normans,” but “norma normata.” Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of which without hesitation we say: “God made me,” though we have human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a mediate in the Scriptures.” “Man's nature,” said Spurgeon, “is not an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty, sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is not in man's consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we must know that it is not God's voice within us, but the devil's.” Dr. George A. Gordon says that “Christian history is a revelation of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”Should we not say “illustrative,” instead of “additional”? On the relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 286–309: Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:344–348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.
H. H. Bawden: “God is the ultimate authority, but there are delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts, feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race, traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures. What the truth concerning Christ is, is determined by: (1) the human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature, including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity; (4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion. This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration, the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles, rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and language.”
(d) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things. Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing