6

HEARING THE VOICE
OF GOD IN SCRIPTURE

(Or, The Tacit Trinitarianism of Evangelical Bible Reading)

We cannot speak, think, and feel too highly of Scripture in its vital connection with Christ and the Spirit.

ADOLPH SAPHIR

And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

1 THESSALONIANS 2:13

The Bible has always been the focus of evangelical spirituality, and evangelicals have always been Bible people. They may not be famous as Trinitarians, but they are famous for biblicism. In this chapter, we will examine evangelical commitment to the Bible and see that here, too, a powerful but understated Trinitarianism has always been at work. Because evangelicalism’s image is so resolutely biblicist, it is more important here than ever that we not only see that evangelical approaches to Scripture have a Trinitarian dynamic under them but that we also meet historical evangelicals who have known this to be true.

COMMUNION AND AUTHORITY

Evangelicals know to expect the voice of God to reach them in the words of Scripture and have long approached the Bible as a real means of grace, as a channel through which God himself will meet us here and now. The expectation of a personal encounter with God through devotional reading of the Bible is sometimes considered to be at odds with the high view of Scripture—its authority, verbal inspiration, and inerrancy—which is also characteristic of evangelical doctrines of Scripture. The pious personal encounter can be viewed as being in tension with the propositionally centered and authority-focused accounts of Scripture. There is a kind of “hot vs. cold” contrast according to which evangelicalism is depicted as divided between warm, pietistic biblicism on one side and icy, rationalistic, propositionalist orthodoxy on the other.

The two approaches to Scripture belong together, and what binds them together is a tacit Trinitarianism that has exerted formative influence on evangelical doctrines of Scripture. Evangelicals developed their high view of Scripture’s authority out of the conviction that in these writings the voice of God is heard and that contemporary readers can hear that voice precisely because the mode of original inspiration was likewise a divine speech act with a Trinitarian cadence. In chronological order, then, Trinitarian inspiration of the text underwrites Trinitarian encounter through the text, which is finally recognized in a confession of verbal inspiration. Rendering explicit the tacit Trinitarianism of evangelical approaches to the Bible provides an alternative account of why evangelical bibliology came to be committed to verbal inspiration—not for sub-Trinitarian reasons of bare formless authority but for reasons of corresponding to the form of Scripture as the words of the Father articulated in the Son and carried by the Holy Spirit. Evangelical doctrines of Scripture have attempted to confess that where the voice of God is heard, particular words are not a matter of indifference.

As the nineteenth-century theologian Benjamin Morgan Palmer argued, in this book “the words of the Father are delivered by the Son, through the power of the Spirit; if this be not enough to clothe the written Word with all the dogmatic authority we ascribe to it, it is hard to see how the claim to any prerogative can ever be established.”¹ Evangelicals do in fact ascribe complete dogmatic authority to the written Word, and that is because this book is the one in which “the words of the Father are delivered by the Son, through the power of the Spirit.” They read the Bible as if it is the word of God, because it is. It is not merely a written authority in the bare, authoritarian way that a sub-Trinitarian doctrine of revelation and Scripture could underwrite. Scripture is a field of divine action, and the agents are the Father, Son, and Spirit.

To make this case, we will call on three witnesses from evangelical history. First, we will look at a popular Bible expositor from the nineteenth century, Adolph Saphir. Second, from the series of books called The Fundamentals, I have selected the longest of the ninety chapters, entitled “Life in the Word,” by Philip Mauro. Third, we will catch evangelicals singing their doctrine of Scripture by examining a hymnal compiled in 1911 by the celebrated preacher G. Campbell Morgan, which contains fifty hymns on Scripture for use in Bible schools. Saphir, Mauro, and Morgan testify to a tacitly Trinitarian approach to Scripture that undergirds the high doctrine of Scripture characteristic of evangelicalism. I have tried to pick representative evangelicals, though I admit to finding representatives in whose work the Trinitarianism emerges to become more explicit than tacit. I also chose evangelicals from one hundred years ago, because, while they had their own problems, they did not have our problems. They exhibit an approach to Scripture that had not yet been tested by the onslaught of high modernism or muddled with existentialist neo-orthodoxy and the evangelical reaction against it.

“THAT HE HIMSELF MAY THROUGH HIS WORD SPEAK”

Our first witness is Adolph Saphir (1831–1891). He is now mostly forgotten, so his name does not carry much authority. But his words are the weightiest of all our witnesses. Saphir was a highly regarded nineteenth-century preacher and Bible expositor. His entire family converted from Judaism to Christianity when the Scottish Free Church sent missionaries to Hungary in 1843. Saphir studied in Berlin, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. He entered the ministry in 1854, and after time as a missionary to Jews in Hamburg he was pastor of churches in Glasgow and in London from 1861 to 1888. From these parishes he carried out an influential writing ministry.

Saphir’s approach to Scripture could be drawn from any of his writings, but I will focus on his masterpiece, The Hidden Life: Thoughts on Communion with God.² R. A. Torrey said of this book, “It is one of the most helpful books in English literature on the subject of prayer and the deeper Christian life. By many it is regarded as unequalled.” It is a series of meditations on James 4:8, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” Saphir wants to invite Christians to a direct encounter with God through Scripture. Notice the tension built into that phrase: the encounter with God is direct, but it is through Scripture.

Saphir teaches and rejoices in sound doctrine, but he constantly warns his readers not to confuse sound doctrine with the experienced reality of God drawing near. He says, “The most subtle idolatry and image-worship is when the soul rests in doctrine, however true. When delighted with the profound and comprehensive scheme of Scripture truth, it forgets that this is but the abstraction, the theory, the shadow of great and living realities.”³ To the contrary, Saphir says:

Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you—He Himself, although He may use various channels and instruments; it may be Paul,or Cephas,orApollos;it may be affliction or prosperity;it may be through the voice of Nature or of Providence; it may be through the word or the example of a Christian; yet it is God Himself.⁴

You may be disconcerted by this list of instruments used by God for drawing nigh. Fear not. Saphir has no intention of using “direct encounter with God” to level all instruments to the same plane, demoting Scripture to the same status as nature or providence. He goes on:

But of all instruments and channels the written Word is of the utmost importance; it stands supreme. It is through Scripture, eminently,that God draws nigh to the soul.But let us never mistake the reading of the Scripture for that real drawing nigh of the living God, towards which it is the great help, and of which it is the great witness. Scripture is not the substitute for God’s drawing nigh to us, it is only the channel;the writtenWord of the past must become the living Word of the present.⁵

What is the relation between “the written Word of the past” and “the living Word of the present”? It is a dangerous dichotomy, but Saphir’s whole point is not to dichotomize but to distinguish in order to unite:

God speaks in andthrough theWord.Itis notthat God spake long ago, and that the record of His acts and words, His revelation, was embodied in a perfect manner, and preserved for us in Scripture. This is true. But God gave us the Bible, not to be silent now and let the Bible speak instead of Him, and be a guarantee for Him, but that He Himself may through His word speak, comfort, and confirm the soul, filling it with His light and love.⁶

To bring home his point about the direct communication that God speaks in Scripture, Saphir uses the metaphor of translation:

God draws nigh in the Word. Do we know what it is to read the Bible in the original? It does not mean in Hebrew or Greek. God speaks neither Hebrew nor Greek. This is the original language of Scripture—the love of God to the soul: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee.”And all God’s vocabulary is summed up in Jesus—Alpha and Omega, He is the Word. When God takes the written Word back from the paper into His own mouth,then we read the original;then it is again God-breathed, and the word which cometh out of His mouth shall not return void.⁷

The doctrinal content of Scripture is real and unaltered, but Saphir highlights its effect in reaching its hearers and bringing them into an encounter with God himself. As in its origin, Scripture is in its effect Trinitarian: “And thus it becomes to us an engrafted, implanted Word, inseparably connected with the Father, with the living Savior, and with the indwelling Spirit. God reveals Himself continually to us in the Word—God in Christ and by the Holy Ghost.”⁸

In the nineteenth century, evangelicals with a high view of Scripture were increasingly criticized as being book worshipers, or bibliolaters. Saphir knew better than to take this charge seriously on the lips of liberal theologians:

The charge of Bibliolatry (worship of the Bible) has been of late frequently preferred against those who maintain the supremacy of Scripture. As far as this objection is urged by those who do not fully and clearly acknowledge the Divine authority and inspiration of Scripture, it is easily refuted. But as far as we ourselves are concerned, we may do well to consider whether our opponents are not giving utterance to a truth which they themselves do not fully see, and warn us against a danger the existence of which we are apt to overlook. In other words, never mind whence and for what purpose the charge of Bibliolatry is made—consider the thing itself; is there such a tendency, such an evil, such a danger? I know that many Christians will reply at once, “We cannot value, and reverence, and cherish the Bible sufficiently.”And this is quite true.The danger is not of a reverence too deep,but of a reverence untrue and unreal.⁹

Saphir then put forth a rule for esteeming Scripture rightly, and it is a rule that appeals to the tacit Trinitarianism of hearing God’s voice in Scripture:

We cannot speak, think, and feel too highly of Scripture in its vital connection with Christ and the Spirit; but there may be a way of viewing Scripture by itself apart from Christ and the Holy Ghost, and transferring to this dead book our faith, reverence, and affection; and this surely would come under the category of idolatry— substituting something, however good and great in itself, or rather in its relation to God, in the place of the living God.¹⁰

Again, Saphir draws out his christological and pneumatological presuppositions:

By Bibliolatry I understand the tendency of separating, in the first place, the Book from the Person of Jesus Christ, and in the second, from the Holy Ghost, and of thus substituting the Book for Him who alone is the light and guide of the Church.¹¹

Saphir warns that it is entirely possible to devolve from being pious to being “God-estranged text-worshippers,” and as an illustration of this result of bibliolatry he cites a Rabbinic saying from his own Jewish background: “Now that God has given the Law, He has no more need and right to interfere by further revelations.” Saphir warns that “under the pretence of honouring the Bible, they virtually treated God as one who had ceased to live and rule among them.”¹² He identifies the inevitable result of this declension as the accelerated hardening of religion into dead rationalism:

And now the rule of man began. For if instead of God we have the Bible, the task of commentators, interpreters, casuists, commences. For the text is obscure, the commentary distinct; the text is severe, the casuist accommodating; the text is deep and manysided, the interpreter shallow and one-sided; the text desires inward truth and radical cure, the tradition heals the hurt of the daughter of my people superficially and falsely. In course of time the tradition came to be regarded as more valuable, more necessary,more practical,than the Bible.Naturally so.Without a living God, viewing the Bible as God’s substitute, a clear and detailed interpretation of the code is in reality of greater importance than the code itself.¹³

For Saphir, it was all or nothing: either Scripture is the word of God in the full and direct meaning of that packed theological phrase, or it plummets to the level of sponsoring a book religion with commentators and legal argumentation as the functional authority. Christianity, on the other hand, is communion with God. And the only way to draw near to God is in the confidence that God draws near to us in the inspired Word of Scripture, where we truly meet him.

LIFE IN THE WORD

If we expected to find a severe and wooden doctrine of Scripture, one that emphasized sheer authority and overlooked the life-giving power of Scripture as a means of grace, we certainly did not find it in the romantic Saphir. But perhaps he is a bad representative of the evangelical tradition. Surely we would find a stricter, less communion-based approach to Scripture elsewhere among the evangelicals. For example, the turn to fundamentalism must have narrowed this approach, right?

The Fundamentals was a very important set of books. As mentioned earlier, they were published serially, ninety chapters in twelve volumes over the course of several years. The longest chapter in the series is by Philip Mauro and is entitled “Life in the Word.”¹⁴ Mauro (1859–1952) was a successful lawyer who converted to Christianity under the preaching of A. B. Simpson. He had a knack for grabbing headlines: he was on the Carpathia when it came to the rescue of the Titanic’s survivors; he prepared legal briefs for the Scopes trial and wrote a 1922 book called Evolution at the Bar; and he witnessed to Thomas Edison.

Among the other eighty-nine chapters of The Fundamentals are presentations on inspiration and inerrancy and numerous chapters on specific historical-critical issues. But the doctrine of Scripture is most elaborately spelled out in Mauro’s chapter. What, therefore, is the doctrine of Scripture in The Fundamentals? It is summed up and organized around the word life. Mauro says: “It is clear, then, that when we read, ‘The Word of God is living,’ we are to understand thereby that it lives with a spiritual, an inexhaustible, an inextinguishable, in a word a divine, life. If the Word of God be indeed living in this sense, then we have here a fact of the most tremendous significance.”¹⁵ Mauro unpacks that significance by working through a list of characteristics of being alive. “We look then at the Written Word of God to see if it manifests characteristics which are found only in living things, and to see if it exhibits, not merely the possession of life of the perishable and corruptible sort with which we are so familiar by observation, and which is in each of us, but life of a different order, imperishable and incorruptible.”¹⁶ Indeed, Mauro says, Scripture has the following characteristics of life:

• It has perennial freshness.
• It is non-obsolete and always contemporary.
• It is indestructible.
• It is a discerner, a “critic,” of hearts and minds (Heb. 4:2).
• It is remarkably translatable.
• It lodges in hearts and grows.
• It transforms other life.

But Mauro dwells especially on how the Bible gives life: “Indeed, the great purpose of the Written Word is to impart life—even eternal (that is to say divine) life—to those who are dead through trespasses and sins.”¹⁷ Mauro distinguishes between living, life-giving truth, that is, the truth which makes the Bible the word of God, and every other kind of truth:

Never yet has any man been heard to testify that he had been the wretched and hopeless slave of sin, and had continued in spiritual darkness, fast bound in misery and vice until his eyes were opened by the great truth that two and two make four, or that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; and that thereby his life had been transformed, his soul delivered from bondage, and his heart filled with joy and peace in believing.¹⁸

What, finally, are the implications of the life of the Bible? “Thus the Word of truth becomes, in some inscrutable way, the vehicle for imparting that life of which the risen Christ, the Incarnate Word, is the only Source.”

Let me specify how Mauro’s doctrine of Scripture is Trinitarian. I would like to avoid using the word Trinitarian in too expansive a way. Mauro’s example of evangelical Bible reading is Trinitarian in that, through the category of “life,” he accounts for the divinity of Scripture by appeal to the Son and Spirit in salvation. Mauro was no Saphir and did not manage to bring the christological and pneumatological threads so closely together in his argument. Exegesis did drive him into this territory, but it is oblique:

Other Scriptures testify with equal clearness to the great and glorious truth that those who are begotten of the Spirit, through the incorruptible seed of the Word, receive a nature of the same sort as that of the Divine Source of their life. In the eighth chapter of Romans there is a section devoted to the sons of God in whom the Spirit dwells (verses 9–16); and of these it is declared that God predestinated them “to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren” (verse 30).¹⁹

If Saphir verged on the mystical, Mauro was more directly conversionist. Certainly Saphir’s Trinitarianism is more elaborate and more profound than Mauro’s. But while the particular Trinitarian contours are less prominent in Mauro, what is just as obvious is that the Scriptures take their high place of authority precisely because of their power in giving life.

LOVE SONGS TO THE BIBLE

From Saphir in the 1870s to Mauro circa 1915, there may have been some loss of the thickness of conservative evangelical Trinitarianism. There was in fact some narrowing and hardening of evangelicalism as it entered the fundamentalist/modernist rapids, though nothing so severe or total as is usually depicted. For our third witness, we turn to the great tradition more directly, through evangelical hymnody. George Campbell Morgan (1863–1945) used to be more famous than he is now. Best known as the pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, he also worked in the United States with Dwight L. Moody’s many projects and taught widely in Bible institutes such as Moody and Biola. One contemporary called him “the hardest working preacher in Christendom.”

Morgan could make himself at home in many denominational settings: his father was a Baptist pastor, while Morgan sought (but was refused) ordination from the Methodists and eventually was ordained as a Congregationalist, though he later pastored in a Presbyterian church. I am invoking G. Campbell Morgan not so much as an author as for his editorial judgment. In 1911 he edited a hymnal, The Song Companion to the Scriptures, which he described this way in the preface:

This Hymn-book has been prepared to meet the demand created by the growth of the Bible-school movement. While many excellent Hymnals are extant, suitable for the regular services of the Church, for special Conventions and Meetings for the deepening of the spiritual life, and for Evangelistic Services,no book has been provided specially suited to the needs of assemblies gathered specifically for the study of the Divine Library.
     The plan, as indicated by the Contents Pages, is purely Biblical. A very special feature is that of the large number of hymns on the Word of God, which have been gathered with extreme care.²⁰

Morgan scoured all available sources and managed to come up with a “large number of hymns on the Word of God.” He found, in fact, fifty hymns on the Word of God. Fifty love songs to the Bible! If this is not bibliolatry, what is? If this is not replacing the living God with a stable text, what would be? Let me alarm you before I soothe you. Hymn 100 is John Newton’s “Precious Bible,” while in Hymn 114, John Fawcett sings:

How precious is the Book Divine,
By inspiration given!
Bright as a lamp its doctrines shine
To guide our souls to heaven.

Fawcett goes on to attribute all sorts of saving actions directly to the book:

Its light, descending from above,
Our gloomy world to cheer,
Displays a Saviour’s boundless love
And brings His glories near.

“It shows to man his wandering ways,” he says, and, “When once it penetrates the mind / It conquers every sin. . . . Life, light and joy it still imparts.”

Hymn 106, by Thomas Kelly (1769–1855), sings directly to the personified book:

Precious volume! What thou doest
other books attempt in vain:
Plainest, fullest, sweetest, truest,
All our good from thee we gain.

And “Precious volume! All revealing, / All that we have need to know.” Kelly is also the author of Hymn 134, which begins by testifying:

I love the sacred Book of God,
No other can its place supply—
It points me to the saints’ abode;
It gives me wings, and bids me fly.

The second stanza is again speaking to the personification of the book itself:

Blest Book, in thee my eyes discern
The image of my absent Lord:
From thine instructive page I learn
The joys His presence will afford.

A critic who approaches the evangelical tradition with suspicion could surely find in these lines all the evidence necessary to declare that this hymnal is primary evidence of the evangelical displacement of the living God by a book: the “Blest Book” shows the believer “the image of my absent Lord.” What can this mean but that Jesus is gone and he left behind a document? On the other hand, Kelly’s hymn goes on to reflect on what will happen when “my absent Lord” returns with “the joys” of “His presence”:

Then shall I need thy light no more,
For nothing then shall be concealed;
When I have reached the heavenly shore
The Lord Himself will stand revealed.

When ’midst the throng celestial placed
The bright original I see,
From which thy sacred page was traced,
Blest Book! I’ve no more need of thee.

The whole hymn is an exploration of the relationship between the book and the Lord. Kelly speaks to the personified “Blest Book” only about how it brings Christ before his attention, and after saying that there will come a day when he’ll have no more need of the Bible because Christ will be directly present, Kelly concludes:

But while I’m here thou shalt supply
His place, and tell me of His love;
I’ll read with faith’s deserving eye,
and thus partake of joys above.

The fact is that far from bibliolatry, when we catch evangelicals in the act of singing about their Bible, we catch them singing to and about God, and increasingly we hear them singing about the Son and the Spirit. In Hymn 125, Horatius Bonar sings:

Thy thoughts are here, O God,
Expressed in words Divine,
The utterance of heavenly lips
In every sacred line.

And he goes on:

Each word of Thine a gem
From the celestial mines;
A sunbeam from that holy heaven
Where holy sunlight shines.
Thine,Thine this Book, though given
In man’s poor human speech,
Telling of things unseen, unheard,
Beyond all human reach.

Bonar knows that one need not make an idol of the Bible to be able to say, “What Scripture says, God says.”

Morgan includes Mary A. Lathbury’s “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” which includes the lines:

Break Thou the Bread of life,
Dear Lord, to me,
As thou didst break the loaves beside the Sea;
Beyond the sacred page
I seek Thee, Lord:
My spirit pants for Thee, O living Word.

The personalism of Lathbury’s “Beyond the sacred page” echoes the eschatological tones we heard in Kelly’s “Blest book, I’ve no more need of thee.” And in Hymn 103, T. T. Lynch sounds like Adolph Saphir when he writes, “Christ in his Word draws near; hush, moaning voice of fear, he bids thee cease.”

Many of these hymn writers are willing to play on the similarity between the incarnate Word and the written Word, which raises the question of whether they are aware of what they are doing when they make this move. It seems increasingly likely that they are doing this in full cognizance of the difference when we note the way other authors in the collection handle the difference between Word and Word. Listen to the way W. W. How (Hymn 105) traces the connection between the incarnate Word and the written Word: “O Word of God incarnate, O wisdom from on high, O truth unchanged, unchanging, O light of our dark sky; We praise Thee for the radiance that from the hallowed page, A lantern to our footsteps, shines on from age to age.” The author praises Jesus for providing the guidance of the Scriptures for his people:

The church from thee, her master,
Received the gift divine,
And still that light she lifteth,
O’er all the earth to shine.
It is the golden casket
Where gems of truth are stored;
It is the heaven-drawn picture
Of Thee, the living Word.

Here, How pictures Scripture as the “golden casket” in which are stored gems of truth, given radiantly by the Word incarnate.

The believer’s dependence on God’s Trinitarian action to make himself directly known in Scripture is a recurring theme in several hymns, including the anonymous Hymn 112: “A glory in the Word we find, when grace restores our sight; but sin has darkened all the mind, and veiled the heavenly light. When God’s own spirit clears our view, how bright the doctrines shine! Their holy fruits and sweetness show the author is divine. How blest are we, with open face, to view thy glory, Lord, and all thy image here to trace, reflected in thy word.”

With increasingly explicit Trinitarianism, William Cowper’s hymn “The Spirit and the Word” (113) says:

The Spirit breathes upon the Word,
And brings the truth to sight,
Precepts and promises afford
A sanctifying light.
A glory gilds the sacred page,
Majestic, like the sun,
It gives a light to every age,
It gives, but borrows none.
The hand that gave it still supplies
The gracious light and heat,
Its truths upon the nations rise
—They rise, but never set.

Charles Wesley’s presence is strong in this miniature hymnal-within-a-hymnal about the Bible, and his hymns are, as always, marked by pronounced theological literacy. In Hymn 101 he sings to the Holy Spirit, “Come, Divine Interpreter, Bring us eyes Thy Book to read, Ears the mystic words to hear, words which did from thee proceed.” He cannot decide whether the decisive action of revelation is properly Christological or pneumatological, so he writes entire hymns alternately to Christ the Prophet and the Holy Spirit of truth. Hymn 123 runs:

Come, o thou prophet of the Lord,
Thou great interpreter divine
Explain thine own transmitted word,
To teach and to inspire is thine,
Thou only canst thyself reveal—
Open the book and loose the seal.

Whate’er the ancient prophets spoke
Concerning thee, O Christ, make known,
Chief subject of the sacred book,
Thou fillest all, and thou alone
Yet there our Lord we cannot see
Unless thy spirit lend the key.

Now, Jesus, now the veil remove
The folly of our darkened heart,
Unfold the wonders of thy love,
The knowledge of thyself impart
Our ear, our inmost soul we bow,
Speak lord.Thy servants hearken now.

Wesley’s Hymn 127 is also a powerful invocation of the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures to be their interpreter:

Spirit of truth, essential God,
who didst thy ancient saints inspire,
shed in their hearts thy love abroad,
and touch their hallowed lips with fire;
our God from all eternity, world without end, we worship thee.

Still we believe, almighty Lord,
whose presence fills both earth and heaven,
the meaning of the written word
is by thy inspiration given.

Thou only dost thyself explain
the secret mind of God to man.
Come then, divine interpreter,
the scriptures to our hearts apply,
and taught by thee, we God revere,
him in three persons magnify;
in each the Triune God adore,
who was and is forevermore.

Morgan frequently places Christ and Spirit hymns side by side, because it is just good tacit Trinitarian theology to recognize that the Spirit makes Jesus Christ present to us as the Word of the Father and that hearing the voice of God in Scripture is a single, concerted, Trinitarian event. Morgan’s editorial hand also shows up in the architecture of the hymnal. Having found these fifty hymns on the Word of God, he arranges them very thoughtfully within an overall Trinitarian structure. First, he signals his intention by opening the hymnal with Section 1: “The Holy Trinity,” which contains five songs on the Trinity. The next three sections are:

2:“The Revelation:The Father” (twelve hymns);

3:“The Revealer:The Son”(seventy hymns from advent to second advent);

4:“The Interpreter:The Holy Spirit.”

This long section of hymns on the Holy Spirit, the Interpreter, is divided into two sections: fifty on the Interpreter “In the Scriptures,” followed by twenty-one on the Interpreter “In the Heart.” Morgan not only had a keen editorial eye for the Trinitarianism implicit in evangelical Bible reading but also understood how it fit into the overall pattern of Christian truth.

THE VOICE OF THE TRINITY IN SOLA SCRIPTURA

Time would fail us to trace the way evangelicals have been driven to a high view of Scripture by their conviction that the Trinity is at work in these texts. Glen Scorgie once described A. W. Tozer’s approach to Scripture as one that “eloquently describes the evangelical soul’s desire to hear God speak in the present tense and personally.” For Tozer, “it is this present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would be locked in slumber within the covers of a book. . . . That God is here and that He is speaking—these truths are back of all other Bible truths.” Scorgie adds: “In my opinion, Tozer’s vision embodies all that neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth dreamed of, and more, and manages to do this while keeping the orthodox doctrine of Scripture intact.”²¹

It is certainly true that evangelicals know to expect the voice of God to be heard in the words of Scripture and that the Bible is a real means of grace. Evangelicals may have some dysfunctional, subjectivistic ways of expressing this truth, and we may cultivate the experience in shortsighted ways, even using it as a prop for our anti-intellectualism. But we are fundamentally right. This book is a channel through which God himself will meet us again and again in personal encounter. The voice of God in Scripture is the breath of the Spirit carrying the word of the Father. Scorgie goes on:

Evangelical Christians have always recognized that the inspired Scriptures are the chief “instrumental means” by which God communicates with us in a direct and intensely personal fashion. It is the main vehicle for the voice of God, as it penetrates from eternity like a shaft of laser light. As an eternal voice, it retains the quality of eternity itself. It is always living and in the present tense.²²

A strong stance on the inspiration and authority of Scripture has been made possible by a strong stance on the illumination and power of Scripture. J. I. Packer once wrote, “The givenness of Jesus Christ is bound up with the givenness of New Testament theology, which is (so I urge, following its own claim as mainstream Christian tradition has always done) nothing less than the Father’s own witness through the Spirit to the Son.”²³