By James D. Smart

Notes from the review in The Expository Times, June 1962, pp. 257-8.

The mystery and unique character of the Scriptures: their ‘ability to hide their meaning, sometimes for long periods, from even the most intelligent and earnest [interpreters], and then suddenly to disclose their meaning with revolutionary consequences… The Church has over and over again had to rediscover the Scriptures’, as it did, for instance, at the time of the Reformation at whose heart lay ‘the reopening of the Bible… The individual scholar or preacher feels he knows his subject… until one day the familiar texts open themselves to him in such a way that it is as though he had never seen what they meant before, and he has to start all over again to spell out the meaning of all the texts…’

There is this ‘strange and mysterious quality in Scripture’ [which is] the embodiment of a revelation of God to man, in which God, when he truly reveals himself, actually comes to man as the living God that he is, actually claims his right to sovereignty over things in human life, and actually discloses himself in love to those who receive him as their God.’