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| THE RESURRECTION |
WHAT THE SCRIPTURES SAY ABOUT INSPIRATION
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Inspiration.
“And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write, These things saith He that hath the
seven Spirits of God.”— Rev. iii. 1.
We do not speak here of the New Testament. Nothing has contributed more to falsify
and undermine faith in the Scripture and the orthodox view concerning it than the unhistoric
and unnatural practise of considering the Scripture of the Old and the New Testament
at the same time.
The Old Testament appears first; then came the Word in the flesh; and only after that
the Scripture of the New Testament. In the study of the work of the Holy Spirit the same
order ought to be observed. Before we speak of His work in the Incarnation, the inspiration
of the New Testament may not even be mentioned. And until the Incarnation, there existed
no other Scripture than the Old Testament.
The question is now: How is the work of the Holy Spirit to be traced in the construction
of that Scripture?
We have considered the question how it was prepared. By wonderful works God created
a new life in this world; and, in order to make men believe in these works, He spoke to man
either directly or indirectly, i.e., by the prophets. But this did not create a Sacred Scripture.
If nothing more had been done there would never have been such a Scripture; for events
take place and belong to the past; the word once spoken passes away with the emotion in
the consciousness.
Human writing is the wonderful gift which God bestowed on man to perpetuate what
otherwise would have been forgotten and utterly lost. Tradition falsifies the report. Among
holy men this would not be so. But we are sinful men. By sin a lie can be told. Sin is also the
cause of our lack of earnestness, and the root of all forgetfulness, carelessness, and
thoughtlessness. These are the two factors, lying and carelessness, that rob tradition of its
value. For this reason God gave our race the gift of writing. Whether on wax, on metal, on
the face of the rock, on parchment, on papyrus, or on paper, is of no importance; but that
God enabled man to find the art of committing to posterity a thought, a promise, an event,
independent from his person, attaching it to something material, so that it could endure
and be read by others even after his death—this is of greatest importance.
For us, men, reading and writing are means of fellowship. It begins with speaking, which
is essential to fellowship. But mere speaking confines it to narrow limits, while reading and
writing give it wider scope, extending it to persons far away and to generations yet unborn.
Through writing past generations actually live together. Even now we can meet with Moses
and David, Isaiah and John, Plato and Cicero; we can hear them speak and receive their
mental utterances. Writing is therefore no contemptible thing as some, who are overspiritual
and sneer at the written Word, consider it. On the contrary, it is great and glorious—one
of the mighty factors whereby God keeps men and generations in living communication
and exercise of love. Its discovery was a wonderful grace, God’s gift to man, more than
doubling his treasures.
The gift has often been abused; yet even in its rightful use there is ascending glory. How
much more glorious appears the art of writing when Dante, Shakespeare, and Schiller write
their poetry, than when the pedagogue compiles his spelling-books or the notary public
scribbles the lease of a house!
Since writing may be used or abused, may serve low or high purposes, the question
arises: “What is its highest end?” And without the least hesitation we answer: “The writing
of the Holy Scripture.” As human speech and language are of the Holy Spirit, so is writing
also taught us of Him. But while man uses the art to record human thoughts, the Holy
Spirit employs it to give fixed and lasting form to the thoughts of God. Hence there is a
human employment of it and a divine. The highest and wholly unique is that in the Holy
Scripture.
Actually there is no other book which sustains communication among men and generations
as does the Sacred Scripture. To honor His own work the Holy Spirit has caused the
universal distribution of this book alone, thereby putting men of all stations and classes into
communication with the oldest generations of the race.
From this standpoint the Holy Scripture must be considered, being in fact “the Scripture
par excellence.” Hence the divine and oft-repeated command: “Write.” God did not only
speak and act, leaving it to man whether His deeds and the tenor of His words were to be
forgotten or remembered; but He also commanded that they should be recorded in writing.
And when just before the announcement and close of the divine revelation to John on Patmos,
the Lord commanded him, “Write to the church” of Ephesus, Pergamos, etc., He repeated
in a summary what was the design of all preceding revelations, viz., that they should be
written and in the form of a Scripture, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and be deposited in the
Church, which for that reason is called the “pillar and ground of the truth.” Not, according
to a later interpretation, as tho the truth were concealed in the Church; but, according to
the ancient rendering, that Holy Scripture was entrusted to the Church for preservation.
However, we do not mean to say that with reference to every verse and chapter the Holy
Spirit commanded, “Write,” as tho the Scripture as we possess it had come into existence
page after page. Assuredly the Scripture is divinely inspired: a statement distorted and perverted
beyond recognition by our Ethical theologians, if they understand by it that “prophets
and apostles were personally animated by the Holy Spirit.” This confounds illumination
with revelation, and revelation with inspiration. “Illumination” is the clearing up of the
spiritual consciousness which in His own time the Holy Spirit gives more or less to every
child of God. “Revelation “Is a communication of the thoughts of God given in extraordinary
manner, by a miracle, to prophets and apostles. But “inspiration,” wholly distinct from these,
is that special and unique operation of the Holy Spirit whereby He directed the minds of
the writers of the Scripture in the act of writing. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of
God” (2 Tim. iii. 16); and this has no reference to ordinary illumination, nor extraordinary
revelation, but to an operation that stands entirely alone and which the Church has always
confessed under the name of Inspiration. Hence inspiration is the name of that all-comprehensive
operation of the Holy Spirit whereby He has bestowed on the Church a complete
and infallible Scripture. We call this operation all-comprehensive, for it was organic, not
mechanical.
The practise of writing dates back to remote antiquity; preceded, however, by the preservation
of the verbal tradition by the Holy Spirit. This is evident from the narrative of the
Creation. Noted physicists like Agassiz, Dana, Guyot, and others have openly declared that
the narrative of the Creation recorded many centuries ago what so far no man could know
of himself, and what at the present time is only partly revealed by the study of geology.
Hence the narrative of the Creation is not myth, but history. The events took place as recorded
in the opening chapters of Genesis. The Creator Himself must have communicated them
to man. From Adam to the time when writing was invented the remembrance of this communication
must have been preserved correctly. That there are two narratives of the Creation
proves nothing to the contrary. Creation is considered from the natural and from the spiritual
points of view; hence it is perfectly proper that the image of Creation should be completed
in a twofold sketch.
If Adam did not receive the special charge, yet from the revelation itself he obtained the
powerful impression that such information was not designed for himself alone, but for all
men. Realizing its importance and the obligation it imposed, succeeding generations have
perpetuated the remembrance of God’s wonderful words and deeds, first orally, afterward
by writing. In this way there gradually arose a collection of documents which through
Egyptian influence were put in book form by the great men of Israel. These documents being
collected, sifted, compiled, and expanded by Moses, formed in his day the beginning of a
Holy Scripture properly so called.
Whether Moses and those earlier writers were conscious of their inspiration is immaterial;
the Holy Spirit directed them, brought to their knowledge what they were to know,
sharpened their judgment in the choice of documents and records, so that they should decide
aright, and gave them a superior maturity of mind that enabled them always to choose the
right word.
Altho the Holy Spirit spoke directly to men, human speech and language being no human
inventions, yet in writing He employed human agencies. But whether He dictates directly,
as in the Revelation of St. John, or governs the writing indirectly, as with historians and
evangelists, the result is the same: the product is such in form and content as the Holy
Spirit designed, an infallible document for the Church of God.
Hence the confession of inspiration does not exclude ordinary numbering, collecting
of documents, sifting, recording, etc. It recognizes all these matters which are plainly discernible
in Scripture. Style, diction, repetitions, all retain their value. But it must be insisted
that the Scripture as a whole, as finally presented to the Church, as to content, selection,
and arrangement of documents, structure, and even words, owes its existence to the Holy
Spirit, i.e., that the men employed in this work were consciously or unconsciously so controlled
and directed by the Spirit, in all their thinking, selecting, sifting, choice of words,
and writing, that their final product, delivered to posterity, possessed a perfect warrant of
divine and absolute authority.
That the Scriptures themselves present a number of objections and in many aspects do
not make the impression of absolute inspiration does not militate against the other fact that
all this spiritual labor was controlled and directed by the Holy Spirit. For the Scripture had
to be constructed so as to leave room for the exercise of faith. It was not intended to be approved
by the critical judgment and accepted on this ground. This would eliminate faith.
Faith takes hold directly with the fulness of our personality. To have faith in the Word,
Scripture must not grasp us in our critical thought, but in the life of the soul. To believe in
the Scripture is an act of life of which thou, O lifeless man! art not capable, except the
Quickener, the Holy Ghost, enable thee. He that caused Holy Scripture to be written is the
same that must teach thee to read it. Without Him this product of divine art can not affect
thee. Hence we believe:
First, that the Holy Spirit chose this human construction of the Scripture purposely,
that we as men might more readily live in it.
Secondly, that these stumbling-blocks were introduced that it might be impossible for
us to lay hold of its content with mere intellectual grasp, without the exercise of faith.
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