Earlier text: The Alleged Discrepancies of Scripture

As the man sees truths that are hidden from the child, so great doctrines concerning the nature of God and of man, and their mutual relations, of which the race in its childhood had but a shadowy apprehension, are revealed to the mature man. Yet these great truths are outlined in the earliest revelations. The finished picture of the gospel but completes the sketch of the patriarchal age. Those wandering shepherds of Syria, those Egyptian slaves of the age of the Pharaohs, who believed that their ancestor Enoch “walked with God, and was not, because God took him,” had views of immortality far more clear to the intellect and comforting to the heart than Plato taught, a thousand years later, in the groves of the Academy. Yet the splendor that Christ has shed upon immortal life makes the patriarchal faith appear as a twilight gleam. Creation by the divine word, as revealed on the first page of the Scripture, corresponds mysteriously with the profound utterance on the first page of John’s gospel: “The word was God;” “all things were made by him.” The Jehovah angel who hears and answers the prayers of the patriarchs, identifying himself with the one only God in whom they so firmly believed, was the Morning Star before the Sun of Righteousness, or rather that Sun himself shining through the mists of the morning. In the blood-besprinkled altars of patriarch and Levite were given the preparatory instructions for the profoundly mysterious lessons of Calvary, which concentrate in one dazzling focus all the manifold rays of revelation.

When will our advancing race, in its spiritual development, outgrow the Hebrew psalms? The most advanced Christian of to-day finds these ancient songs and prayers, which burst from the hearts of Hebrew minstrels, prophets, priests, and kings, twenty centuries ago, voicing more perfectly than any other language his profoundest meditations, his sternest struggles, his sublimest joys and aspirations. It is not mere traditional reverence that has bound the Hebrew psalter on the heart of the Christian church. The eternal glow of the wondrous book draws humanity of all ages to its quenchless warmth. Some of these strains drop like angels down to the darkest depths of human agony; and there are others that blow the hurricanes from their trumpets, and clash the thunders from their cymbals, to pour forth the grandest joys a mortal heart can know. It is significant and instructive that the fierce conflicts and triumphant victories of New Testament saints find adequate utterance only in Old Testament songs. Even the Saviour, at the midnight moment of his mysterious agony, gave vent to his soul in a line of an ancient psalm. Paul, as he finished his survey of the resurrection, the distinctive doctrine of the New Testament, which lay at the core of every apostolic sermon, can close only in the triumphant strain of Isaiah: “Death shall be swallowed up in victory.” John who had leaned on Jesus’ breast, and whose very soul was steeped in the essence of the New Testament revelations, yet as he paints the final visions of the prophetic gospel, this John of Tabor, and Gethsemane, and Calvary, used the brush, and canvas, and colors, of Daniel and Ezekiel, leads us back to the very spot whence we started with Moses on this wondrous circuit of revelation, and leaves us at last under the branches of that same tree of life where stood Adam and Eve to hear the first whispers of revelation. Is this discrepancy between the New Testament and the Old? Is it not rather a profound, worldwide and age-long harmony?

Recapitulating now these six causes of apparent discrepancy, and analyzing more closely, they fall naturally into two general classes, resulting (1.) from difference in form, while yet there is identity in matter; and (2.) from difference in the point of sight. Under the second class, we include five kinds of apparent discrepancy:

1. That arising from difference in the author’s point of sight.
2. Difference in the hearer’s or reader’s points of sight.
3. Difference between the whole and the part.
4. Difference between subjective and objective.
5. Difference arising from progress.

These classes are not rigidly distinct, but blend into each other; yet by one or more of these formulas we are confident that any problem of Scripture discrepancy can be solved.

Theology, like physical science, changes; but the Bible, like nature, endures. Our scientific classifications of natural facts, and the hypotheses drawn from them, satisfy for a year or a generation, and then vanish, after giving birth to new classifications and hypotheses; but the facts themselves abide forever. Pythagoras vanishes before Copernicus, and Copernicus before Newton; but the stars shine on the same.

So the facts of revelation, with all their contrasts and irregularities, give rise to theological systems which oppose, supplement, and succeed each other, age after age, while the facts themselves abide forever. The great theologians, the Augustines and Chrysostoms, vanish; but the great gospel facts are constellated in eternal beauty. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but these words shall not pass away. When human science shall all be forgotten, as it will be when that which is perfect is come, when the stars shall fall, and the heavens vanish, these truths will still shine on glorious and mighty as the eternal Sun from which they beam.—The Methodist.