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Jesus stated: “The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit, and they are life.”[1] Scripture is therefore a living word; and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the divine process by which man can tap the life of the Holy Spirit, through the word of God, either written or spoken, and mature therein. Jesus therefore said: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”[2] He therefore added: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[3]
These living transforming factors were made the main causes for the birth of modern freedom, right reason, open union, justice and progress. "Scripture generates its own light for believers," William Whitaker declared in 1588; the Word possessed "inherent power" to "convince one of its truth, make itself plain, and act upon the heart."[4] He thus concluded: "The sum of our conviction is that the Scripture is autopistos” – it possesses self-moving living power. “It has all its authority and credit from itself; is to be acknowledged, is to be received,... because it comes from God. And we certainly know that it comes from God, not by the Church, but by the Holy Spirit."[5]
[1] John 6:63.
[2] John 8:12.
[3] John 10:10.
[4] John R. Knott, Jr., The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Chicago: University Press, 1980), 34-5, citing Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture.
[5] William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, ed., William Fitzgerald (Cambridge, 1849), 279-80.