Theology of the Westminster Symbols; A Commentary Historical, Doctrinal, Practical, on the Confession of Faith and Catechisms and the Related Formular

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the Scriptures. The Bible is not indeed a book of doctrine exclusively: it is biographic, historic, prophetic, poetical, preceptive and legislative as well as doctrinal. These various constituents are for the most part the divinely arranged vehicles by which its dogmatic teachings are conveyed to the mind?the widely diversified, often picturesque and impressive modes, whereby the truth essential to salvation is transmitted through the intellect to the conscience and the heart. Beneath all varieties of form and aim, the Bible contains a series of instructive disclosures concerning God and man and salvation, which are properly described as its doctrines, and on which its entire structure as a supernatural communication is founded. This doctrinal element is not indeed formulated in the written Word, but is rather held in solution and distributed throughout that Word in boundless variety, and with primal reference to spiritual rather than intellectual effect. The doctrines of the Bible at no point are articulated, or presented to view in one systematic construction, for the reason that the moral and practical ends sought in their disclosure forbid such system- atization, and require rather that the divine truth should be given to man in the free, flowing, diffused form in which the Holy Spirit has in fact chosen to present it. Yet we are not to regard these doctrines as any less valuable or vital because of this peculiarity in their form. Doctrine is still the primordial basis on which the entire scheme of grace reposes; it is still the explaining, substantiating, comprehending element in the great scheme of salvation revealed in the inspired Word. In a secondary sense of the term, doctrine may be defined in general as any human statement or expression of the dogmatic element thu...