III. Theories of Inspiration.

III. Theories of Inspiration.1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

III. Theories of Inspiration.1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

III. Theories of Inspiration.1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

III. Theories of Inspiration.1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

III. Theories of Inspiration.1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

1. The Intuition-theory.This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.With regard to this theory we remark:(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.

This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.

This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.

This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.”See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister:“God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that“the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”

W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.”Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many[pg 203]persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.

With regard to this theory we remark:

(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.

In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.

In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himselftoman, unless he first revealed himselfinman. If it should be written in letters on the sky:‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.”Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration:“In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.”Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as“most sacred”(ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.

(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.

1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”

1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”;10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.”If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it.Num. 12:6-8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”

(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.

The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.

The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was[pg 204]praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is“the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.

(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.

On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”

On this system truth is what men“trow”; things are what men“think”—words representing only the subjective.“Better the Greek ἀλήθεια =‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's“search for truth”is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings:“Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”;“One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.”See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter:“It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”

(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.

Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.

Theanimusof this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying:“Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!”But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend,i. e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73sq.and 283sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.

2. The Illumination Theory.This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.[pg 206]With regard to this theory we remark:(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.[pg 207](c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”

This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.

This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.

This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures, putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre (Rev. 19:10). But while it grants that the Scripture[pg 205]writers were“moved by the Holy Spirit”(φερόμενοι—2 Pet. 1:21), it ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is“inspired of God”(θεόπνευστος—2 Tim. 3:16). Luther's view resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237. Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie, and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T., θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks:“Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.

In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whateverfinds mebears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is more thatfinds methan I have experienced in all other books put together.”[Shall we then call Baxter's“Saints' Rest”inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W. Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270; 2:143-150—“Theotherway, some twenty or thirty men in the world's history have had special communication, miraculous and from God; inthisway, all may have it, and by devout and earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably increased.”Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are, in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The leading thought is that ofaccommodation; the record of revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall:“If that Spirit by which every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal's“colossal man”is the race; the first men represented only infancy;weare“the ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies in Christianity:“One Gospel in Many Dialects.”

Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate of the word of God, isspecificallythe same illumining, quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing community.”Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regardsIsaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology, 35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability, stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not different in kind from the common influence of God upon his people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence, but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the Scriptures to help Christ's work, but not to take his place. Scripture says with Paul:‘Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’(2 Cor. 1:24).”

E. G. Robinson:“The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not different from that which he performed for Christians at the time the gospels were written.... When the prophets say:‘Thus saith the Lord,’they mean simply that they have divine authority for what they utter.”Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible, 19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who wrote the Bible who were inspired.”Thayer, Changed Attitude toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of every sort.”Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892, admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not. Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 291sq.

With regard to this theory we remark:

(a) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted only to illumination.

Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.

Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist's application to Jesus of Isaiah's prophecy (John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world”), and Peter's interpretation of David's words (Acts 2:27—“thou wilt not leave my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired. The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N. T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required revelation. Edison says that“inspiration is simply perspiration.”Genius has been defined as“unlimited power to take pains.”But it is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to“subliminal uprush,”see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1:70-120.

(b) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit different, not in degree, but in kind.

The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.

The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more than to bring into clear view what is already within its range. Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond. Revelation, on the other hand, is an“unveiling”—the raising of a curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden before. Such a special operation of God is described in2 Sam. 23:2, 3—“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to me”;Mat. 10:20—“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”;1 Cor. 2:9-13—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.”

Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation sometimesexcludedillumination as to the meaning of that which was communicated, for the prophets are represented in1 Pet. 1:11as“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.”Since no degree of illumination can account for the prediction of“things that are to come”(John 16:13), this theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate revelation of doctrine.

(c) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as a whole.

While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.

While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct. Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired (Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52). The promise of Christ assured at least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (Mat. 10:7, 19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8). This theory that inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold (Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg's rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse), connected with the claim of divine authority for his new revelation.“His interlocutors all Swedenborgize”(R. W. Emerson). On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler, Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review, 1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, 1-129.

(d) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.

The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”

The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition, something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation. It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.

Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life, which life is derived neither from external communication nor from invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer himself would give the name“revelation”to“every original experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by, supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is received as an impartation from God through the medium of the soul's human activity.”Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51sq.—“We must put the conception of revelation in place of inspiration.[pg 208]Scripture is the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and, here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”

Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children, while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother of Christ (Luke 11:27, 28). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times, 1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of moral judgment, if there were no‘spirit to be tried’(1 John 4:1), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his real education. The blessing of life's schooling is not in knowing the right answer in advance, but in developing power through struggle.”

Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the only logical terminus.“Dogma was,”he says,“the fundamental principle of my religion.”Modern ritualism is a return to this mediæval notion.“Dogmatic Christianity,”says Harnack,“is Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.”Lyman Abbott:“The new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church. There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life.... The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”

Leighton Williams:“There is no inspiration apart from experience. Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an inner light.“Life, as it develops, awakens into self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be perfected in those who read their writings.”Christ is the only ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit within the world, as the immediate source of revelation.... Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical work of God, as in the human eye.”

3. The Dictation-theory.This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”Of this view we may remark:(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).[pg 210](b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.

This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.

This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”

This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.”Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”;[pg 209]Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.”This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.

Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying:“A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; inGen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also:“Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as‘the decrees of God,’which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.”The Rabbis said that“Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”

The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.”Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.”The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures“the very word of God,”but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”

Of this view we may remark:

(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.

For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).

For examples, seeEx. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”;20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”;cf.Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”;Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”;8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,”etc.;Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”;Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”;Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”;21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”;cf.1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.”So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).

(b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.

Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”

Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says:“There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly:“Dictation to an amanuensis is notteaching.”Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse,1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”

(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.

Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”

Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12sq.,2 Cor. 11:1sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30;cf.Luke 18:35);“about five and twenty or thirty furlongs”(John 6:19);“shed for many”(Mat. 26:28has περί,Mark 14:24andLuke 22:20have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”

(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.

Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.

Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.”Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,”may apply to man as well as beast.

(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.

Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.

Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus:‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect[pg 211]inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.”Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.

4. The Dynamical Theory.The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.

It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.

It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted to ordinary human intelligence.

In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.

If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man's natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within man's soul, rather than a communication to him from without. Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil. But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the wisdom of God.

Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration. There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording; might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching. Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is to have no theory.

Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and historical truths must be established before we come to the question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures, and the validity and authority of the revelation of God's will which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental[pg 212]to the truth of the Christian religion.”Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.”So argue also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

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