Hebrews 1:1–3
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at
many times and in various ways,
but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he
appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact
representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After
he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the
Majesty in heaven.
Let us
suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a
newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, ‘This is the missing part of the
work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned.
This is the main theme of the symphony’. Our business would be to see whether
the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed
for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and ‘pull
them together’. Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage,
if spurious, however attractive it looked at the first glance, would become
harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we
considered the matter. But if it were genuine then at every fresh hearing of
the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down,
making itself more at home and eliciting significance from all sorts of details
in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central
chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still
think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere.
Something like this we must do with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Here,
instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The
credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can
illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the
doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in
the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we
cannot) but because we can see everything else.
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