The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

A GREAT deal is being said of late of ‘‘ the present problem of inspiration,” with a general implication that the Christian doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures has been brought into straits by modern investigation, and needs now to adapt itself to certain assured but damaging results of the scientific study of the Bible. Thus, because of an assumed “ present distress,’ Canon Cheyne, in a paper read at the English Church Congress of 1888, commended a most revolutionary book of Mr. R. F. Horton’s, called ‘Inspiration and the Bible,” * which explains away inspiration properly so called altogether, as the best book he could think of on the subject. And Mr. Charles Gore defends the concessive method of treating ‘the subject of inspiration adopted in “ Lux Mundi,” by the plea that the purpose of the writers of that volume “ was ‘ to succour a distressed faith,’ by endeavoring to bring the Christian creed into its right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historical, critical.” * On our side of the water, Dr. Washington Gladden has published a volume which begins by presenting certain “ new ” views of the structure of the books of the Bible as established facts, and proceeds to the conclusion that: ‘“ Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration nor the theory of plenary inspiration can be made to fit the facts which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before us. These writings are not inspired in the sense which we have commonly given to that word.” Accordingly he recommends that under the pressure of these new views we admit not only that the Bible is not “ infallible,” but that its laws are “inadequate” and “ morally defective,” and its untrustworthiness as a religious teacher is so great that it gives us in places “blurred and distorted ideas about God and His truth.” * And Prof. Joseph H. Thayer has published a lecture which represents as necessitated by the facts as now known, such a change of attitude towards the Bible as will reject the whole Reformed doctrine of the Scriptures in favor of a more “ Catholic ” view which will look upon some of the history recorded in the Bible as only “ fairly trustworthy,” and will expect no intelligent reader to consider the exegesis of the New Testament writers satisfactory.° A radical change in our conception of the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God is thus - pressed upon us as now necessary by a considerable number of writers, representing quite a variety of schools of Christian thought.

Nevertheless the situation is not one which can be fairly described as putting the old doctrine of inspiration in jeopardy. The exact state of the case is rather this: that a special school of Old Testament criticism, which has, for some years, been gaining somewhat widespread acceptance of its results, has begun to proclaim that these results having been accepted, a “changed view of the Bible ” follows which implies a reconstructed doctrine of inspiration, and, indeed, also a whole new theology. That this changed view of the Bible involves losses is frankly admitted. The nature of these losses is stated by Dr. Sanday in a very interesting little book * with an evident effort to avoid as far as possible “ making sad the heart of the righteous whom the Lord hath not made sad,” as consisting chiefly in making “the intellectual side of the connection between Christian belief and Christian practice a matter of greater difficulty than it has hitherto seemed to be,” in rendering it “ less easy to find proof texts for this or that,” and in making the use of the Bible so much less simple and less definite in its details that “less educated Christians will perhaps pay more deference to the opinion of the more educated, and to the advancing consciousness of the Church at large.” If this means all that it seems to mean, its proclamation of an indefinite Gospel eked out by an appeal to the Church and a scholastic hierarchy, involves a much greater loss than Dr. Sanday appears to think — a loss not merely of the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of the Scriptures, but with it of all that that doctrine is meant to express and safeguard — the loss of the Bible itself to the plain Christian man for all practical uses, and the delivery of his conscience over to the tender mercies of his human instructors, whether ecclesiastical or scholastic. Dr. Briggs 1s more blunt and more explicit in his description of the changes which he thinks have been wrought. “I will tell you what criticism has destroyed,” he says in an article published a couple of years ago. “It has destroyed many false theories about the Bible; it has destroyed the doctrine of verbal inspiration; it has destroyed the theory of inerrancy; it has destroyed the false doctrine that makes the inspiration depend upon its attachment to a holy man.”* And he goes on to remark further “that Biblical criticism is at the bottom ” of the “ reconstruction that is going on throughout the Church ” — “ the demand. for revision of creeds and change in methods of worship and Christian work.” It is clear enough, then, that a problem has been raised with reference to inspiration by this type of criticism. But this is not equivalent to saying that the established doctrine of inspiration has been put in jeopardy. For there is criticism and criticism. And though it may not be unnatural for these scholars themselves to confound the claims of criticism with the validity of their own critical methods and the soundness of their own critical conclusions, the Christian world can scarcely be expected to acquiesce in the identification. It has all along been pointing out that they were traveling on the

7 The article appeared in The Christian Umon, but we quote it from Public Opinion, vol. x. No. 24 (March 25, 1891), p. 576.

wrong road; and now when their conclusions clash with wellestablished facts, we simply note that the wrong road has not unnaturally led them to the wrong goal. In a word, it is not the established doctrine of inspiration that is brought into distress by the conflict, but the school of Old Testament criticism which is at present fashionable. It is now admitted that the inevitable issue of this type of criticism comes into collision with the established fact of the plenary inspiration of the Bible and the well-grounded Reformed doctrine of Holy Scripture based on this fact.* The cry is therefore, and somewhat impatiently, raised that this fact and this doctrine must “ get out of the way,” and permit criticism to rush on to its bitter goal. But facts are somewhat stubborn things, and are sometimes found to prove rather the test of theories which seek to make them their sport.

Nevertheless, though the strain of the present problem should thus be thrown upon the shoulders to which it belongs, it is important to keep ourselves reminded that the doctrine of inspiration which has become established in the Church, is open to all legitimate criticism, and is to continue to be held only as, and so far as, it is ever anew critically tested and approved. And in view of the large bodies of real knowledge concerning the Bible which the labors of a generation of diligent critical study have accumulated, and of the difficulty which is always experienced in the assimilation of new knowledge and

8 This remark, of course, does not imply that there are none who assert that the results of this type of criticism leave “ inspiration ”’ untouched. Dr. Driver does not stand alone when he says, in the Preface to his “ Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament ”: “ Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does not banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament; it presupposes it” (p. xix). But Prof. Driver would be the last to maintain that the “inspiration ” which criticism leaves to the Old Testament is what the Church has understood by the plenary inspiration of the Bible. Accordingly, Prof. Robertson speaks directly to the point when he remarks in the Preface to his “ Early Religion of Israel ” (p. xi), that “ such scholars would do an invaluable service to the Church, at the present time, if they would explain what they mean by inspiration in this connection.” The efforts to do this, on our side of the water, are not reassuring. On the relation of the new views to inspiration see the lucid statement by Dr. E. C. Bissell in The Hartford Seminary Record, ii. 1.

its correlation with previously ascertained truth, it is becoming to take this occasion to remind ourselves of the foundations on which this doctrine rests, with a view to inquiring whether it is really endangered by any assured results of recent Biblical study. For such an investigation we must start, of course, from a clear conception of what the Church doctrine of inspiration is, and of the basis on which it is held to be the truth of God. Only thus can we be in a position to judge how it can be affected on critical grounds, and whether modern Biblical criticism has reached any assured results which must or may “destroy ”’ it.

The Church, then, has held from the beginning that the Bible is the Word of God in such a sense that its words, though written by men and bearing indelibly impressed upon them the marks of their human origin, were written, nevertheless, under such an influence of the Holy Ghost as to be also the words of God, the adequate expression of His mind and will. It has always recognized that this conception of co-authorship implies that the Spirit’s superintendence extends to the choice of the words by the human authors (verbal inspiration °), and preserves its product from everything inconsistent with a divine authorship — thus securing, among other things, that entire truthfulness which is everywhere presupposed in. and asserted for Scripture by the Biblical writers (inerrancy). Whatever minor variations may now and again have entered into the mode of statement, this has always been the core of the Church doctrine of inspiration. And along with many other modes of commending and defending it, the primary ground - on which it has been held by the Church as the true doctrine is that it is the doctrine of the Biblical writers themselves, and has therefore the whole mass of evidence for it which goes to show that the Biblical writers are trustworthy as doctrinal guides. It is the testimony of the Bible itself to its own origin

9 It ought to be unnecessary to protest again against the habit of representing the advocates of “ verbal inspiration ” as teaching that the mode of inspiration was by dictation. The matter is fully explained in the paper: “ Inspiration.”

and character as the Oracles of the Most High, that has led the Church to her acceptance of it as such, and to her dependence on it not only for her doctrine of Scripture, but for the whole body of her doctrinal teaching, which is looked upon by her as divine because drawn from this divinely given fountain of truth.

Now if this doctrine is to be assailed on critical grounds, it is very clear that, first of all, criticism must be required to proceed against the evidence on which it is based. This evidence, it is obvious, is twofold. First, there is the exegetical evidence that the doctrine held and taught by the Church is the doctrine held and taught by the Biblical writers themselves. And secondly, there is the whole mass of evidence — internal and external, objective and subjective, historical and philosophical, human and divine — which goes to show that the Biblical writers are trustworthy as doctrinal guides. If they are trustworthy teachers of doctrine and if they held and taught this doctrine, then this doctrine is true, and is to be accepted and acted upon as true by us all. In that case, any objections brought against the doctrine from other spheres of inquiry are inoperative; it being a settled logical principle that so long as the proper evidence by which a proposition is established remains unrefuted, all so-called objections brought against it pass out of the category of objections to its truth into the category of difficulties to be adjusted to it. If criticism is to assail this doctrine, therefore, it must proceed against and fairly overcome one or the other element of its proper proof. It must either show that this doctrine is not the doctrine of the Biblical writers, or else it must show that the Biblical writers are not trustworthy as doctrinal guides. If a fair criticism evinces that this is not the doctrine of the Biblical writers, then of course it has “destroyed” the doctrine which is confessedly based on that supposition. Failing in this, however, it can “ destroy ” the doctrine, strictly speaking, only by undermining its foundation in our confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture as a witness to doctrine. The possibility of this latter alternative must, no doubt, be firmly faced in our investigation of the phenomena of the Bible; but the weight of the evidence, be it small or great, for the general trustworthiness of the Bible as a source of doctrine, throws itself, in the form of a presumption, against the reality of any phenomena alleged to be discovered which make against its testimony. No doubt this presumption may be overcome by clear demonstration. But clear demonstration is requisite. For, certainly, if it is critically established that what is sometimes called, not without a touch of scorn, “ the traditional doctrine,” is just the Bible’s own doctrine of inspiration, the real conflict is no longer with “ the traditional theory of inspiration,” but with the credibility of the Bible. The - really decisive question among Christian scholars (among whom alone, it would seem, could a question of inspiration be profitably discussed), is thus seen to be, ‘‘ What does an exact and scientific exegesis determine to be the Biblical doctrine of inspiration? ”

The reply to this question is, however, scarcely open to doubt. The stricter and the more scientific the examination is made, the more certain does it become that the authors of the New Testament held a doctrine of inspiration quite as high as the Church doctrine. This may be said, indeed, to be generally admitted by untrammeled critics, whether of positive or of negative tendencies. Thus, for instance — to confine our examples to a few of those who are not able personally to accept the doctrine of the New Testament writers — Archdeacon Farrar is able to admit that Paul “shared, doubtless, in the views of the later Jewish schools — the Tanaim and Amoraim —on the nature of inspiration. These views... made the words of Scripture coextensive and identical with the words of God.” *° So also Otto Pfleiderer allows that Paul “ fully shared the assumption of his opponents, the irrefragable authority of the letter as the immediately revealed Word of God.” * Similarly, Tholuck recognizes that the application of the Old Testament made by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘rests on the strictest view of inspiration, since passages where God is not the speaker are cited as words of God or of the Holy Ghost. (1:6,°7)°8,) 1ve' 4.5 Avalte 2 tee 7 a oe worked out also with convincing clearness by the writer of an odd and sufficiently free Scotch book published a few years ago,'® who formulates his conclusion in the words: “ There is no doubt that the author of Hebrews, in common with the other New Testament writers, regards the whole Old Testament as having been dictated by the Holy Ghost, or, as we should say, plenarily, and, as it were, mechanically inspired.” And more recently still Prof. Stapfer, of Paris,"* though himself denying the reality not only of an infallibility for the Bible, but also of any inspiration for it at all, declaring that “the doctrine of an Inspiration distinct from Revelation and legitimating it, is an error’ — yet cannot deny that Paul held a different doctrine — a doctrine which made the Old Testament to him the divine Word and the term, “It is written,” equivalent to “ God says.” *

A detailed statement of the evidence is scarcely needed to support a position allowed by such general consent. But it will not be improper to adjoin a brief outline of the grounds on which the general consent rests. In the circumstances, however, we may venture to dispense with an argument drawn up from our own point of view,’® and content ourselves with an extract from the brief statement of the grounds of his decision

16 Those who wish to see a very conclusive and thorough statement of Paul’s doctrine of inspiration should consult Dr. Purves’s paper on “St. Paul and Inspiration,” published in The Presbyterian and Reformed Rev., January, 1893. For our Lord’s doctrine, see Dr. Caven’s paper on “ Our Lord’s Testimony to the Old Testament,” in the number of the Review for July, 1892.

given by another of those critical scholars who do not believe the doctrine of plenary inspiration, but yet find themselves constrained to allow that it is the doctrine of the New Testament writers. Richard Rothe*’ seeks, wrongly, to separate Christ’s doctrine of the Old Testament from that of the apostles; our Lord obviously spoke of the Scriptures of His people out of the same fundamental conception of their nature and divinity as His apostles. But he more satisfactorily outlines the doctrine of the apostles as follows:

“We find in the New Testament authors the same theoretical view of the Old Testament and the same practice as to its use, as among the Jews of the time in general, although at the same time in the handling of the same conceptions and principles on both sides, the whole difference between the new Christian spirit and that of contemporary Judaism appears in sharp distinctness. Our authors look upon the words of the Old Testament as zmmediate words of God, and adduce them expressly as such, even those of them which are not at all related as direct sayings of God. They see nothing at all in the sacred volume which is simply the word of its human author and not at the same time the very Word of God Himself. In all that stands ‘ written ’ God Himself speaks to them, and so entirely are they habituated to think only of this that they receive the sacred Word written itself, as such, as God’s Word, and hear God speaking in it wmmediately, without any thought of the human persons who appear in it as speaking and acting. The historical conception of their Bible is altogether foreign to them. Therefore they cite the abstract h ypadh or al ypadat or ypadai ayiot (Rom. i. 2), or again 7d tepa ypaupara (2 Tim. ii. 15), without naming any special author, as self-evidently God’s Word, e.g., John vii. 38, x. 35, xix. 36, 37, xx. 9; Acts 1. 16; James il. 8; Rom. ix. 17; Gal. ili. 8, 22, iv. 30; 1 Pet. 11. 6; 2 Pet. 1. 20, etc.; and introduce Old Testament citations with the formulas, now that God (Matt. i. 22, 11. 15; Acts iv. 25, xii. 34; Rom. 1, 2), now that the Holy Spirit (Acts i. 16, xxviii. 25; Heb. ii. 7, ix. 8, x. 15; cf. also Acts iv. 25; 1 Pet. 1. 11; 2 Pet. i. 20) so speaks or has spoken. The Epistle to the Hebrews unhesitatingly adduces with a 6 Beds Neyer and the like, even passages in which God jis spoken of expressly in the third person (i. 6, 7, 8 seq., iv. 4, 7, vu. 21, x. 30), and even (i. 10) cites a passage in which in the Old Testament text God

Himself (according to the view of the author it is, however, the Son of God) is addressed, as a word spoken by God. In 2 Tim. iii. 16 the tepd ypdupata (verse 15) are expressly called Sedrvevora, however the sentence may be construed or expounded; and however little a special theory of the inspiration of the Bible can be drawn from an expression of such breadth of meaning, nevertheless this datum avails to prove that the author shared in general the view of his Jewish contemporaries as to the peculiar character of the Old Testament books, and it is of especial importance inasmuch as it attributes the inspiration, without the least ambiguity, directly to the writings themselves, and not merely to their authors, the prophets. No doubt, in the teaching of the apostles the conception of prophetic inspiration to which it causally attributes the Old Testament, has not yet the sharp exactness of our ecclesiastical dogmatic conception; but it stands, nevertheless, in a very express analogy with it.... Moreover, it must be allowed that the apostolical writers, although they nowhere say it expressly, refer the prophetic inspiration also to the actus scribendi of the Biblical authors. The whole style and method of their treatment of the Old Testament text manifestly presupposes in them this view of this matter, which was at the time the usual one in the Jewish schools. With Paul particularly this is wholly incontrovertibly the case. For only on that view could he, in such passages as Rom. iv. 23, 24, xv. 4; 1 Cor. ix. 10, x. 11 — in which he distinguishes between the occurrence of the Old Testament facts and the recording of them — maintain of the latter that it was done with express teleological reference to the needs of the New Testament believers, at least so far as the selection of the matter to be described is concerned; and only on that view could he argue on the details of the letter of the Old Testament Scriptures, as he does in Gal. i. 15, i6. We can, moreover, trace the continuance of this view in the oldest post-apostolical Church.... So far as the Old Testament is concerned, our ecclesiastical-dogmatic doctrine of inspiration can, therefore, in very fact, appeal to the authority, not indeed of the Redeemer Himself —for He stands in an entirely neutral attitude towards it — but no doubt of the apostles.”

A keen controversialist like Rothe does not fail, of course — as the reader has no doubt observed — to accompany his exposition of the apostolic doctrine with many turns of expression designed to lessen its authority in the eyes of the reader, and to prepare the way for his own refusal to be bound by it; but neither does he fail to make it clear that this doctrine, although it is unacceptable to him, is the apostles’ doctrine. The apostles’ doctrine, let it be observed that we say. For even so bald a statement as Rothe’s will suffice to uncover the fallacy of the assertion, which is so often made, that the doctrine of verbal inspiration is based on a few isolated statements of: Scripture to the neglect, if not to the outrage, of its phenomena — a form of remark into which even so sober a writer as Dr. W. G. Blaikie has lately permitted himself to fall.** Nothing, obviously, could be more opposite to the fact. The doctrine of verbal inspiration is based on the broad foundation of the carefully ascertained doctrine of the Scripture writers on the subject. It is a product of Biblical Theology. And if men will really ask, not, ‘‘ What do the creeds teach? What do the theologians say? What is the authority of the Church? but, What does the Bible itself teach us?” and “ fencing off from the Scriptures all the speculations, all the dogmatic elaborations, all the doctrinal adaptations that have been made in the history of doctrine in the Church,” “limit themselves strictly to the theology of the Bible itself ”’ — according to the excellent programme outlined by Dr. Briggs *® —it is to the doctrine of verbal inspiration, as we have seen, that they must come. It is not Biblical criticism that has “ destroyed ” verbal inspiration, but Dr. Briggs’ scholastic theories that have drawn him away in this matter from the pure deliverances of Biblical Theology.°°

Much more, of course, does such a statement as even Rothe’s uncover the even deeper error of the assertion latterly becoming much too common, that, the doctrine of verbal inspiration, as a recent writer puts it,”* “is based wholly upon an a@ priori assumption of what inspiration must be, and not upon

20 The substance of some of the preceding paragraphs was printed in The Homiletical Review for May, 1891, under the title of “ The Present Problem of Inspiration.”

21 “ Hixegesis.” An Address delivered at the Opening of the Autumn Term the Bible as it actually exists.” It is based wholly upon an exegetical fact. It is based on the exegetical fact that our Lord and His apostles held this doctrine of Scripture, and everywhere deal with the Scriptures of the Old Testament in accordance with it, as the very Word of God, even in their narrative parts. This is a commonplace of exegetical science, the common possession of the critical schools of the left and of the right, a prominent and unmistakable deliverance of Biblical Theology. And on the establishment of it as such, the real issue is brought out plainly and stringently. If criticism has made such discoveries as to necessitate the abandonment of the doctrine of plenary inspiration, it is not enough to say that we are com- -pelled to abandon only a “ particular theory of inspiration,” though that is true enough. We must go on to say that that “particular theory of inspiration ”’ is the theory of the apostles and of the Lord, and that in abandoning it we are abandoning them as our doctrinal teachers and guides, as our “exegetes,”’ in the deep and rich sense of that word which Dr. Vincent vindicates for it.” This real issue is to be kept clearly before us, and faced courageously. Nothing is gained by closing our eyes to the seriousness of the problem which we are confronting. Stated plainly it is just this: Are the New Testament writers trustworthy guides in doctrine? Or are we at liberty to reject their authority, and frame contrary doctrines for ourselves? If the latter pathway be taken, certainly the doctrine of plenary inspiration is not the only doctrine that is “ destroyed,” and the labor of revising our creeds may as well be saved and the shorter process adopted of simply throwing them away. No wonder we are told that the same advance in knowledge which requires a changed view of the Bible necessitates also a whole new theology. If the New Testament writers are not trustworthy as teachers of doctrine and we have to go elsewhere for the source and norm of truth as to God and duty and immortality, it will not be strange if a very different system of doctrine from that delivered by the Scriptures and docilely received from them by the Church, results. 22 Op. cit., p. 5 seq.

And how, having uncovered the precise issue which is involved in the real problem of inspiration, let us look at it at various angles and thus emphasize in turn two or three of the more important results that spring from it.

First, we emphasize the fact that, this being the real state of the case, we cannot modify the doctrine of plenary inspiration in any of its essential elements without undermining our confidence in the authority of the apostles as teachers of doctrine.

Logically, this is an immediate corollary of the proposition.. already made good. Historically, it is attested by the driftage » of every school of thought which has sought to find a ground of. faith in any lower than the Church’s doctrine of a plenarily inspired Bible. The authority which cannot assure of a hard fact is soon not trusted for a hard doctrine. Sooner or later, in > greater or less degree, the authority of the Bible in doctrine and life is replaced by or subordinated to that of reason, or of the feelings, or of the ‘‘ Christian consciousness ” — the “ conscious experience by the individual of the Christian faith ”’ — or of that corporate Christian consciousness which so easily hardens into simple ecclesiastical domination. What we are to accept as the truth of God is a comparatively easy question, if we can open our Bibles with the confident belief that what we read there is commended to us by a fully credible “ Thus saith the Lord.” But in proportion as we allow this or that element in it not to be safeguarded to us by this divine guarantee, do we begin to doubt the trustworthiness of more and more of the message delivered, and to seek other grounds of confidence than the simple “ It is written ” which sufficed for the needs of our Lord and His apostles. We have seen Dr. Sanday pointing to “the advancing consciousness of the Church at large,” along with the consensus of scholars, as the ground of acceptance of doctrines as true, which will be more and more turned to when men can no longer approach the Bible so simply as heretofore. This is the natural direction in which to look, for men trained to lay that great stress on institutional Christianity which leads Mr. Gore to describe the present situation as one in which “it is becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church.” ** Accordingly Dr. Sterrett also harmonizes his Hegelianism and Churchliness in finding the ground of Christian certitude in the “ communal Christian consciousness,” which is defined as the Church, as “ objective, authoritative reason for every Christian,” to which he must subordinate his individual reason.** Men of more individualistic training fall back rather on personal reason or the individual “Christian consciousness’; but all alike retire the Bible as a source of doctrine behind some other safeguard of truth.

It may not be without interest or value to subject the various pathways which men tread in seeking to justify a lower view of Scripture than that held and taught by the New Testament writers, to a somewhat close scrutiny, with a view to observing how necessarily they logically involve a gradual undermining of the trustworthiness of those writers as teachers of doctrine. From the purely formal point of view proper to our present purpose, four types of procedure may be recognized.