Unity of the Scriptures in Christ
By Arthur T. Pierson
The unity of the Bible itself evidences the divine origin of the Book—a collection of sixty-six books, written by about forty different men, during about fifteen centuries. Here are prophetic, poetic, historic, and didactic works in prose and parallelisms, bearing every mark of diversity of period and authorship; yet there are both unity and continuity; instead of discord, perfect concord, and a progress of doctrinal development concerning God and the Messiah. It is the unity of a structure that grows into completeness, and is the manifest development of an archetypal idea that must have been prior to, and exterior to, the authors themselves. It is an organic unity, like that of a body in which all parts bear one inseparable relation. For one thing, no rationalistic theory ever can account: the traditional belief of the Jews that One should come who should be at once a prophet greater than Moses, a priest higher than Aaron, a king wiser than Solomon. Back beyond 1,500 years of written revelations, we can trace this hope and faith through 2,500 years of oral revelations. This traditional belief holds steadily on its way, branching out into new particulars, till it reaches the minutest prophetic predictions; is never once lost sight of, even in days of apostasy and exile. The prophecies actually involve paradoxes and enigmas which only history could unlock. And yet, after 400 years of prophetic silence, and the closing of the Old Testament canon, all this marvelous unity of prediction and expectation finds, after 4,000 years of persistent growth, one marvelous Person in whom all is faithfully fulfilled.—Arthur T. Pierson.