Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Witness of the Holy Spirit to the Bible, then, is not something standing apart and isolated from the life of faith; it is a part of the inward enlightening work of the Spirit which we have briefly set forth, and of precisely the same nature. It is of importance to understand the nature and value of this truth, because it has fallen into neglect, or else has been misunderstood, and so laid open to criticism. This particular application of the doctrine of the Spirit's work was first adequately developed by Calvin, and by him handed on to the theologians of the succeeding century of both the Reformed and Lutheran branches of Protestantism, though in the Lutheran theology it found full treatment only in the seventeenth century. When rightly conceived it will be seen to be a truth of fundamental importance in relation to such great questions as the origin and certitude of faith. It is necessary, however, to guard it from misconceptions. It was no less acute a thinker than Strauss3 who affirmed that in this doctrine the Protestant system found a standpoint for faith independent of the fallible judgment of the Church and of the unstable judgment of the individual subject of faith. But because Strauss conceived of the Spirit's witness in a mystical way as being the communication to man of a new truth separate from the Bible, i. e. the proposition that the Bible is God's word, he thought the doctrine open to criticism and held that in adhering to it the Protestant theology unavoidably abandons its position in regard to the authority of Scripture, and turns aside into Mysticism or Rationalism. If, he says, this Witness of the Spirit to the divine origin of the Bible is the communication The Holy Spirit, pp. 88-m; Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit. p. 152; Beversluis, De heili...