The Instrumentality of Holy Scripture for Hugh Binning: The Intersection of Ink and Paper/Flesh and Blood

Hugh Binning (1627–1653) a Scottish theologian who died at the tender age of 26 produced such an output of theological work you’d think he’d lived well into his senior years. I am currently (and slowly) reading through his Works (which by the way are public domain and therefore available for free electronically via kindle), and I’m just upon his doctrine of Scripture. His Works are lectures which have a sermonic feel which come with a depth of spiritual learnedness that only a mind and heart infatuated with the love of Christ could generate.

What I want to highlight is the way he connects the res or reality of Scripture to its writtenness and symbols (signum). If you read Binning you will see that he holds to a traditional Reformed understanding on a doctrine of inspiration, but that like Calvin he places an emphasis upon Scripture’s instrumentality (think of Calvin’s metaphor ‘spectacles’). Here he writes with a piety of language that we are wont to find in the modern tongue; with an economy of language that drips with the didacticism of Paul’s letters; and a heart clearly enflamed with a love of Christ and the Triune life.

I wish that souls would read the scriptures as profitable scriptures with the intention to profit. If you do not read with such a purpose, you read not the scriptures of God, the become another book unto you. But what are they profitable for? For doctrine, and a divine doctrine, a doctrine of life and happiness. It is the great promise of the new covenant, “You shall be all taught of God.” The scriptures can make a man learned and wise, learned to salvation, it is foolishness to the world, “but the world through wisdom know not God.” Alas! what then do they know? Is there any besides God? And is there any knowledge besides the knowledge of God? You have a poor petty wisdom among you to gather riches and manage your business. Others have a poor imaginary wisdom that they call learning, and generally people think, to pray to God is but a paper-skill, a little book-craft, they think the knowledge of God is nothing else but to learn to read the Bible. Alas! mistake not, it is another thing to know God. The doctrine of Jesus Christ written on the heart is a deep profound learning and the poor, simple, rudest people, may by the Spirit’s teaching become wiser than their ancients, than their ministers. O, it is excellent point of learning, to know how to be saved. What is it, I pray you to know the course of the heavens,—to number the orbs, and the stars in them—to measure their circumference,—to reckon their motions,—and yet not to know him that sits on the circle of them, and not know how to inhabit and dwell there? If you would seek unto God, and seek eyes opened to behold the mystery of the word, you would become wiser than your pastors, you would learn from the Spirit to pray better, you would find the way to heaven better than they can teach you, or walk in it.[1]

For Binning there is a greater point to Holy Scripture, it points beyond itself to its reality in God in Jesus Christ. That said he does not want people to move beyond focus on the written Word, instead he wants them to read it as if the viva vox Dei (living voice of God) is present, winsomely inviting them into a knowledge of and encounter with the living Christ that befuddles them where they stand.

This intention of Binning’s is no different than what we find in Luther, Calvin, or Barth. The goal of Scripture for all of them is to mediate us to the Mediator, as the Mediator mediates himself to us in the mediate by the Spirit’s blissful breath of fire and call for constant mortification and recantation before a Holy God of Triune love and white-hot holiness. Ultimately, for Binning, Scripture is the place where the wisdom of God becomes translucent for us in the face of Jesus Christ; a place outwith the Christian is as good as dead afloat in a world breaming with human witting that likes to masquerade as genuine light.

[1] Hugh Binning, The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning (A Public Domain Book), Loc 1519, 1526, 1533 Kindle Version [emphasis mine].