The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

damental contention of the prophets that the revelations given through them are not their own but wholly God’s. The significant language we have just quoted from Ezk. xii. 3: “ Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing,” is a typical utterance of their sense of the complete objectivity of their messages. What distinguishes the false prophets is precisely that they “ prophesy out of their own heart ” (Ezk. xiii. 2-17), or, to draw the antithesis sharply, that “ they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of Jehovah ” (Jer. xxiii. 16.26; xiv. 14). But these extreme views fail to do justice, the one to the equally important fact that the word of God, given through the prophets, comes as the pure and unmixed word of God not merely to, but from, the prophets; and the other to the equally obvious © fact that the intelligence of the prophets is alert throughout the whole process of the reception and delivery of the revelation made through them.:

That which gives to prophecy as a mode of revelation its place in the category of visions, strictly so called, and dreams, is that it shares with them the distinguishing characteristic which determines the class. In them all alike the movements of the mind are determined by something extraneous to the subject’s will, or rather, since we are speaking of supernaturally given dreams and visions, extraneous to the totality of the subject’s own psychoses. A power not himself takes possession of his consciousness and determines it according to its will. That power, in the case of the prophets, was fully recognized and energetically asserted to be Jehovah Himself or, to be more specific, the Spirit of Jehovah (1S. x. 6.10; Neh. ix. 30; Zec. vil. 12; Joel ii. 28.29). The prophets were therefore ‘men of the Spirit’ (Hos. ix. 7). What constituted them prophets was that the Spirit was put upon them (Isa. xlii. 1) or poured out on them (Joel ii. 28.29), and they were consequently filled with the Spirit (Mice. ii. 8), or, in another but equivalent locution, that “ the hand ” of the Lord, or “ the power of the hand ” of the Lord, was upon them (2 K. iii. 15; Ezk. i. 3; iii. 14.22: XXXlll. 22; xxxvii. 1; xl. 1), that is to say, they were under the divine control. This control is represented as complete and compelling, so that, under it, the prophet becomes not the “mover,” but the “ moved ” in the formation of his message. The apostle Peter very purely reflects the prophetic consciousness in his well-known declaration: ‘ No prophecy of seripture comes..of. private interpretation; for prophecy was never brought by the will of man; but it was as borne by the Holy Spirit that-men spoke from God’ (2 Pet. i. 20.21).

What this language of Peter emphasizes — and what is emphasized in the whole account which the prophets give of their own consciousness — is, to speak plainly, the passivity of the prophets with respect to the revelation given through them. This is the significance of the phrase: ‘it was as borne by the Holy Spirit that men spoke from God.’ To be “ borne ” ( g€peur, phérein) is not the same as to be led (ayew, dgein), much less to be guided or directed (odnyetv, hodégein): he that is “borne ” contributes nothing to the movement induced, but is the object to be moved. The term “ passivity ” 1s, perhaps, however, liable to some misapprehension, and should not be overstrained. It is not intended to deny that the intelligence of the prophets was active in the reception of their message; it was by means of their active intelligence that their message was received: their intelligence was the instrument of revelation. It is intended to deny only that their intelligence was _active in the production of their message: that it was creatively ‘as distinguished from receptively active. For reception itself is a kind of activity. What the prophets are solicitous that their readers shall understand is that they are in no sense co-authors with God of their messages. Their messages are given them, given them entire, and given them precisely as they are given out by them. God speaks through them: they are not merely His messengers, but “‘ His mouth.” But at the same time their intelligence is active in the reception, retention and announcing of their messages, contributing nothing to them but presenting fit instruments for the communication of them — instruments capable of understanding, responding profoundly to and zealously proclaiming them.

There is, no doubt, a not unnatural hesitancy abroad in thinking of the prophets as exhibiting only such merely receptive activities. In the interests of their personalities, we are asked not to represent God_as dealing mechanically with them, pouring His revelations into their souls to be simply received as in so many buckets, or violently wresting their minds from their own proper action that He may do His own thinking with them. Must we not rather suppose, we are asked, that all revelations must be “ psychologically mediated,’ must be given “after the mode of moral mediation,” and must be made first of all their recipients’ “ own spiritual possession”’? And is not, in point of fact, the personality of each prophet clearly traceable in his message, and that to such an extent as to compel us to recognize him as in a true sense its real author? The plausibility of such questionings should not be permitted to obscure the fact that the mode of the communication of the prophetic messages which is suggested by them is directly contradicted by the prophets’ own representations of their relations to the revealing Spirit. In the prophets’ own view they were just instruments through whom God gave revelations which came from them, not as their own product, but as the pure word of Jehovah. Neither should the plausibility of such questionings blind us to their speciousness. They exploit subordinate considerations, which are not without their validity in their own place and under their own limiting conditions, as if they were the determining or even the sole considerations in the case, and in neglect of the really determining considerations, God is Himself the author of the instruments He employs for the communication of His messages to men and has framed them into precisely the instruments He desired for the exact communication of His message. There is just ground for the expectation that He will use all the instruments He employs according to their natures; intelligent beings therefore as intelligent beings, moral agents as moral agents. But there is no just ground for asserting that God is incapable of employing the intelligent beings He has Himself created and formed to His will, to proclaim His messages purely as He gives them to them; or of making truly the possession of rational minds conceptions which they have themselves had no part in creating. And there is no ground for imagining that God is unable to frame His own message in the language of the organs of His revelation without its thereby ceasing to be, because expressed in a fashion natural to these organs, therefore purely His message. One would suppose it to lie in the very nature of the case that if the Lord makes any revelation to men, He would do it in the language of men; or, to individualize more explicitly, in the language of the man He employs as the organ of His revelation; and that naturally means, not the language of his nation or circle merely, but his own particular language, inclusive of all that gives individuality to his self-expression. We may speak of this, if we will, as “ the accommodation of the revealing God to the several prophetic individualities.” But we should avoid thinking of it externally and therefore mechanically, as if the revealing Spirit artificially phrased the message which He gives through each prophet in the particular forms of speech proper to the individuality of each, so as to create the illusion that the message comes out of the heart of the prophet himself. Precisely what the prophets affirm is that their messages do not come out of their own hearts and do not represent the workings of their own spirits. Nor is there any illusion in the phenomenon we are contemplating; and it 1s a much more inti- nate, and, we may add, a much more interesting phenomenon \than an external ‘‘ accommodation” of speech to individual habitudes. It includes, on the one hand, the “ accommodation. ”’~ of the prophet, through his total preparation, to the speech in which the revelation to be given through him is to be clothed; and on the other involves little more than the consistent carry-” ing into detail of the broad principle that God uses the instruments He employs in accordance with their natures.

No doubt, on adequate occasion, the very stones might cry out by the power of God, and dumb beasts speak, and mysterious voices sound forth from the void; and there have not been lacking instances in which men have been compelled by the same power to speak what they would not, and in languages whose very sounds were strange to their ears. But ordinarily when God the Lord would speak to men He avails Himself of the services of a human tongue with which to speak, and He employs this tongue according to its nature as a tongue and according to the particular nature of the tongue which He employs. It is vain to say that the message delivered through the instrumentality of this tongue is conditioned at least in its form by the tongue by which it is spoken, if not, indeed, limited, curtailed, in some degree determined even in its matter, by it. Not only was it God the Lord who made the tongue, and who made this particular tongue with all its peculiarities, not without regard to the message He would deliver through it; but His control of it is perfect and complete, and it is as absurd to say that He cannot speak His message by it purely without that message suffering change from the peculiarities of its tone and modes of enunciation, as it would be to say that no new truth can be announced in any language because the elements of speech by the combination of which the truth in question is announced are already in existence with their fixed range of connotation. The marks of the several individualities imprinted on the messages of the prophets, in other words, are only a part of the general fact that these messages are couched in human language, and in no way beyond that general fact affect their purity as direct communications from God.

A new set of problems is raised by the mode of revelation which we have called “ concursive operation.” This mode of revelation differs from prophecy, properly so called, precisely by the employment in it, as is not done in prophecy, of the total personality of the organ of revelation, as a factor. It has been common to speak of the mode of the Spirit’s action in this form of revelation, therefore, as an assistance, a superintendence, a direction, a control, the meaning being that the effect aimed at — the discovery and enunciation of Divine truth — is attained through the action of the human powers — historical research, logical reasoning, ethical thought, religious aspiration — acting not by themselves, however, but under the prevailing assistance, superintendence, direction, control of the Divine Spirit. This manner of speaking has the advantage of setting this mode of revelation sharply in contrast with prophetic revelation, as involving merely a determining, and not, as in prophetic revelation, a supercessive action of the revealing Spirit. We are warned, however, against pressing this discrimination too far by the inclusion of the whole body of Scripture in such passages as 2 Pet. i. 20 f. in the category of prophecy, and the assignment of their origin not to a mere “leading ” but to the “bearing” of the Holy Spirit. In any event such terms as assistance, superintendence, direction, control, inadequately express the nature of the Spirit’s action in revelation by ‘‘ concursive operation.” The Spirit is not to be conceived as standing outside of the human powers employed for the effect in view, ready to supplement any inadequacies they may show and to supply any defects they may manifest, but as working confluently in, with and by them, elevating them, directing them, controlling them, energizing them, so that, as His instruments, they rise above themselves and under His inspiration do His work and reach His aim. The product, therefore, which is attained by their means is His product through them. It is this fact which gives to the process the right to be called actively, and to the product the right to be called passively, a revelation. Although the circumstance that what is done is done by and through the action of human powers keeps the product in form and quality in a true sense human, yet the confluent operation of the Holy Spirit throughout the whole process raises the result above what could by any possibility be achieved by mere human powers and constitutes it expressly a supernatural product. The human traits are traceable throughout its whole extent, but at bottom it is a Divine gift, and the language of Paul is the most proper mode of speech that could be applied to it: “ Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth ” (1 Cor. 11. 18); “ The things which I write unto you.... are the commandment of the Lord ” (1 Cor. xiv. 37).

It is supposed that all the forms of special or redemptive revelation which underlie and give its content to the religion of the Bible may without violence be subsumed under one or another of these three modes — external manifestation, internal suggestion, and concursive operation. All, that is, except the culminating revelation, not through, but in, Jesus Christ. As in His person, in which dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, He rises above all classification and is sui generis; so the revelation accumulated in Him stands outside all the divers portions and divers manners in which otherwise revelation has been given and sums up in itself all that has been or can be made known of God and of His redemption. He does not so much make a revelation of God as Himself is the revelation of God; He does not merely disclose God’s purpose of redemption, He is unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. The theophanies are but faint shadows in comparison with His manifestation of God in the flesh. The prophets could prophesy only as the Spirit of Christ which was in them testified, revealing to them as to servants one or another of the secrets of the Lord Jehovah; from Him as His Son, Jehovah has no secrets, but whatsoever the Father knows that the Son knows also. Whatever truth men have been made partakers of by the Spirit of truth is His (for all things whatsoever the Father hath are His) and is taken by the Spirit of truth and declared to men that He may be glorified. Nevertheless, though all revelation is thus summed up in Him, we should not fail to note very carefully that it would also be all sealed up in Him —so little is revelation conveyed by fact alone, without the word — had it not been thus taken by the Spirit of truth and declared unto men. The entirety of the New Testament is but the explanatory word accompanying and giving its effect to the fact of Christ. And when this fact was in ali its meaning made the possession of men, revelation was completed and in that sense ceased. Jesus Christ is no less the end of revelation than He is the end of the law.

There is not much additional to be learned concerning the nature and processes of revelation, from the terms currently employed in Scripture to express the idea. These terms are ordinarily the common words for disclosing, making known, making manifest, applied with more or less heightened significance to supernatural acts or effects in kind. In the English Bible (AV) the verb “ reveal ” occurs about fifty-one times, of which twenty-two are in the Old Testament and twenty-nine in the New Testament. In the Old Testament the word is always the rendering of a Hebrew term m3, galah, or its Aramaic equivalent ma, g‘lah, the root meaning of which appears to be “nakedness.” When applied to revelation, it seems to hint at the removal of obstacles to perception or the uncovering of objects to perception. In the New Testament the word “ reveal ” is always (with the single exception of Lk. ii. 35) the rendering of a Greek term azoxadtrrw, apokaliptd (but in 2 Thess. i. 7; 1 Pet. iv. 18 the corresponding noun 470Kxadvp1s, apokdlupsis), which has a very similar basal significance with its Hebrew parallel. As this Hebrew word formed no substantive in this sense, the noun “ revelation ”’ does not occur in the English Old Testament, the idea being expressed, however, by other Hebrew terms variously rendered. It occurs in the English New Testament, on the other hand, about a dozen times, and always as the rendering of the substantive corresponding to the verb rendered “ reveal ” (apokdlupsis). On the face of the English Bible, the terms “ reveal,” “ revelation ” bear therefore uniformly the general sense of “ disclose,” ‘ disclosure.” The idea is found in the Bible, however, much more frequently than the terms “reveal,” “ revelation ” in English versions. Indeed, the Hebrew and Greek terms exclusively so rendered occur more frequently in this sense than in this rendering in the English Bible. And by their side there stand various other terms which express in one way or another the general conception.

In the New Testament the verb davepow, phanerdd, with the general sense of making manifest, manifesting, is the most

In the Old Testament, the common Hebrew verb for “ seeing” (M89, raah) is used in its appropriate stems, with God as the subject, for “ appearing,” “showing”: “the Lord appeared unto...”; “the word which the Lord showed me.” And from this verb not only is an active substantive formed which supplied the more ancient designation of the official organ or revelation: M8", rd’eh, “seer ’’; but also objective substantives, M82, mar’ah, and A8V3, mar’eh which were used to designate the thing seen in a revelation — the “ vision.” By the side of these terms there were others in use, derived from a root which supplies to the Aramaic its common word for “seeing,” but in Hebrew has a somewhat more pregnant meaning, NM, hazah. Its active derivative, Min, hézeh, was a designation of a prophet which remained in occasional use, alternating with the more customary S33, nabhi, long after M8", ro’eh, had become practically obsolete; and its passive derivatives hazon, hizzayon, hazuth, mahazeh provided the ordinary terms for the substance of the revelation or “ vision.” The distinction between the two sets of terms, derived respectively from ra@’ah and hazah, while not to be unduly pressed, seems to lie in the direction that the former suggests external manifestations and the latter internal revelations. The ro’eh is he to whom Divine manifestations, the hozeh he to whom Divine communications, have been vouchsafed; the mar’eh is an appearance, the hazon and its companions a vision. It may be of interest to observe that mar’ah is the term employed in Num. xii. 6, while it is hazon which commonly occurs in the headings of the written prophecies to indicate their revelatory character. From this it may possibly be inferred that in the former passage it is the mode, in the latter the contents of the revelation that is emphasized. Perhaps a like distinction may be traced between the hazon of Dan. viii. 15 and the mar’eh ot the next verse. The ordinary verb for “ knowing,” 97, yadha’, expressing in its causative stems the idea of making known, informing, is also very naturally employed, with God as its subject, in the sense of revealing, and that, in accordance with the natural sense of the word, with a tendency to pregnancy of implication, of revealing effectively, of not merely uncovering to observation, but making to know. Accordingly, it is paralleled not merely with 33, ga@lah (Ps. xeviii. 2: ‘ The Lord hath made known his salvation; his righteousness hath he displayed in the sight of the nation’), but also with such terms as 129, lamadh (Ps. xxv. 4: ‘Make known to me thy ways, O Lord: teach me thy paths’). This verb yadha‘ forms no substantive in the sense of “revelation” (cf. 2", da‘ath, Num. Monel PS) XIX, 3).

The most common vehicles of the idea of “revelation ” in the Old Testament are, however, two expressions which are yet to be mentioned. These are the phrase, ‘“ word of Jehovah,” and the term commonly but inadequately rendered in the English versions by “law.” The former (d’bhar Yahweh, varied to d’bhar ’Elohim or d*bhar ha-’Elohim; cf. n’um Yahweh, massa, Yahweh) occurs scores of times and is at once the simplest and the most colorless designation of a Divine communication. By the latter (torah), the proper meaning of which is “instruction,” a strong implication of authoritativeness is conveyed; and, in this sense, it becomes what may be called the technical designation of a specifically Divine communication. The two are not infrequently brought together, as in Isa. 1. 10: “ Hear the word of Jehovah, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law [margin “ teaching ”] of our God, ye people of Gomor- Manse sory isa. io Viceiv. 2; “For outvot*Zion shall go forth the law [margin “ instruction ”’], and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem.” Both terms are used for any Divine communication of whatever extent; and both came to be employed to express the entire body of Divine revelation, conceived as a unitary whole. In this comprehensive usage, the emphasis of the one came to fall more on the graciousness, and of the other more on the authoritativeness of this body of Divine revelation; and both passed into the New Testament with these implications. “ The word of God,” or simply “ the word,” comes thus to mean in the New Testament just the gospel, “ the word of the proclamation of redemption, that is, all that which God has to say to man, and causes to be said ” looking to his salvation. It expresses, in a word, precisely what we technically speak of as God’s redemptive revelation. “ The law,” on the other hand, means in this New Testament use, just the whole body of the authoritative instruction which God has given men. It expresses, in other words, what we commonly speak of as God’s supernatural revelation. The two things, of course, are the same: God’s authoritative revelation is His gracious revelation; God’s redemptive revelation is His supernatural revelation. The two terms merely look at the one aggregate of revelation from two aspects, and each emphasizes its own aspect of this one aggregated revelation.

Now, this aggregated revelation lay before the men of the New Testament in a written form, and it was impossible to speak freely of it without consciousness of and at least occasional reference to its written form. Accordingly we hear of a Word of God that is written (Jn. xv. 25; 1 Cor. xv. 54), and the Divine Word is naturally contrasted with mere tradition, as if its written form were of its very idea (Mk. vii. 10); indeed, the written body of revelation — with an emphasis on its written form — is designated expressly ‘ the prophetic word’ (2 Pet. i. 19). More distinetly still, “ the Law ” comes to be thought of as a written, not exactly, code, but body of Divinely authoritative instructions. The phrase, “ It is written in your law ” (Jn. x. 34; xv. 25; Rom. 11. 19; 1 Cor. xiv. 21), acquires the precise sense of, “It is set forth in your authoritative Scriptures, all the content of which is ‘ law,’ that is, Divine instruction.” Thus “the Word of God,” “ the Law,” came to mean just the written body of revelation, what we call, and what the New Testament writers called, in the same high sense which we give the term, “the Scriptures.” These “ Scriptures ” are thus identified with the revelation of God, conceived as a well-defined corpus, and two conceptions rise before us which have had a determining part to play in the history of Christianity — the conception of an authoritative Canon of Scripture, and the conception of this Canon of Scripture as just the Word of God written. The former conception was thrown into prominence in opposition to the gnostic heresies in the earliest age of the church, and gave rise to a richly varied mode of speech concerning the Scriptures, emphasizing their authority in legal language, which goes back to and rests on the Biblical usage of “ Law.” The latter it was left to the Reformation to do justice to in its struggle against, on the one side, the Romish depression of the Scriptures in favor of the traditions of the church, and on the other side the Enthusiasts’ supercession of them in the interests of the “inner Word.” When Tertullian, on the one hand, speaks of the Scriptures as an “ Instrument,” a legal document, his terminology has an express warrant in the Scriptures’ own usage of torah, “ law,’ to designate their entire content. And when John Gerhard argues that “ between the Word of God and Sacred Scripture, taken in a material sense, there is no real difference,” he is only declaring plainly what is definitely implied in the New Testament use of “the Word of God” with the written revelation in mind. What is important > to recognize is that the Scriptures themselves represent the Scriptures as not merely containing here and there the record of revelations — “ words of God,” toroth — given by God, but as themselves, in all their extent, a revelation, an authoritative body of gracious instructions from God; or, since they alone, of all the revelations which God may have given, are extant —rather as the Revelation, the only “ Word of God” accessible to men, in all their parts “ law,” that is, authoritative instruction from God.