By the late Arthur T. Pierson.
The argument for the inspiration of the Bible which I am to present is that drawn from its unity. This unity may be seen in several conspicuous particulars, upon some of which it will be well to dilate.
- The unity is structural. In the Book itself appears a certain archetypal, architectural plan. The two Testaments are built on the same general scheme. Each is in three parts: historic, didactic, prophetic; looking to the past, the present, and the future.
Here is a collection of books; in their style and character there is great variety and diversity; some are historical, others poetical; some contain laws, others lyrics; some are prophetic, some symbolic; in the Old Testament we have historical, poetical, and prophetical divisions; and in the New Testament we have historic narratives, then twenty-one epistles, then a symbolic apocalyptic poem in oriental imagery. And yet this is no artificial arrangement of fragments. We find “the Old Testament patent in the New; the New latent in the Old.”
In such a Book, then, it is not likely that there would be unity; for all the conditions were unfavorable to a harmonious moral testimony and teaching. Here are some sixty or more separate documents, written by some forty different persons, scattered over wide intervals of space and time, strangers to each other; these documents are written in three different languages, in different lands, among different and sometimes hostile peoples, with marked diversities of literary style, and by men of all grades of culture and mental capacity, from Moses to Malachi; and when we look into these productions, there is even in them great unlikeness, both in matter and manner of statement; and yet they all constitute one volume.
All are entirely at agreement. There is diversity in unity, and unity in diversity. It is “e pluribus unum.” The more we study it, the more do its unity and harmony appear. Even the Law and the Gospel are not in conflict. They stand, like the cherubim, facing different ways, but their faces are toward each other. And the four Gospels, like the cherubic creatures in Ezekiel’s vision, facing in four different directions, move in one. All the criticism of more than three thousand years has failed to point out one important or irreconcilable contradiction in the testimony and teachings of those who are farthest separated - there is no collision, yet there could be no collusion!
How can this be accounted for? There is no answer which can be given unless you admit the supernatural element. If God actually superintended the production of this Book, then its unity is the unity of a Divine plan and its harmony the harmony of a Supreme Intelligence.
As the baton rises and falls in the hand of the conductor of some grand orchestra, from violin and bass-viol, cornet and flute, trombone and trumpet, flageolet and clarinet, bugle and French horn, cymbals and drum, there comes one grand harmony! There is no doubt, though the conductor were screened from view, that one master mind controls all the instrumental performers. But God makes His oratorio to play for more than a thousand years; the key is never lost and never changes except by those exquisite modulations that show the master composer; and when the last strain dies away it is seen that all these glorious movements and melodies have been variations on one grand theme! Did each musician compose as he played, or was there one composer back of all the players? - “one supreme and regulating mind” in this Oratorio of the Ages? If God was the master musician planning the whole and arranging the parts, then we can understand how Moses’ grand anthem of creation glided into Isaiah’s oratorio of the Messiah; by and by sinks into Jeremiah’s plaintive wail, swells into Ezekiel’s awful chorus, changes into Daniel’s rapturous lyric; and, after the quartette of the evangelists, closes with John’s full choir of saints and angels!
The temple, first built upon Mount Moriah, was built of stone, made ready before it was brought thither; there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building. What insured symmetry in the temple when constructed, and harmony between the workmen in the quarries and the shops, and the builders on the hill? One presiding mind planned the whole; one intelligence built that whole structure in ideal before it was in fact. The builders built more wisely than they knew, putting together the ideas of the architect and not their own. Only so can we account for the structural unity of the Word of God. The structure was planned and wrought out in the mind of a Divine Architect, who superintended His own workmen and work. Moses laid its foundations, not knowing who should build after him, or what form the structure should assume. Workman after workman followed; he might see that there was agreement with what went before, but he could not foresee that what should come after would be only the sublime carrying out of the grand plan. During all those sixteen centuries through which the building rose toward completion, there was no sound of axe or hammer, no chipping or hacking to make one part fit its fellow. Everything is in agreement with everything else, because the whole Bible was built in the thought of God before one book was laid in order. The building rose steadily from corner-stone to cap-stone, foundations first, then story after story, pillars on pedestals, and capitals on pillars, and arches on capitals, till, like a dome flashing back the splendors of the noonday, the Apocalypse spans and crowns and completes the whole, glorious with celestial visions.