The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

3. A third type of procedure, in defense of refusal to be bound by the doctrine of the New Testament writers as to inspiration, proceeds by drawing a distinction between the belief and the teaching of these writers; and affirming that, although it is true that they did believe and hold a high doctrine of inspiration, yet they do not explicitly teach it, and that we are bound, not by their opinions, but only by their explicit teaching.

This appears to be the conception which underlies the treatment of the matter by Archdeacon (then Canon) Farrar, in his “ Life and Work of St. Paul.” Speaking of Paul’s attitude towards Scripture, Dr. Farrar says: *

“He shared, doubtless, in the views of the later Jewish schools —the Tanaim and Amoraim — on the nature of inspiration. These views, which we find also in Philo, made the words of Scripture coextensive and identical with the words of God, and in the clumsy and feeble hands of the more fanatical Talmudists often attached to the dead letter an importance which stifled or destroyed the living sense. But as this extreme and mechanical literalism — this claim to absolute infallibility even in accidental details and passing allusions — this superstitious adoration of the letters and vocables of Scripture, as though they were the articulate vocables and immedi-

ate autograph of God —finds no encouragement in any part of Scripture, and very distinct discouragement in more than one of the utterances of Christ, so there is not a single passage in which any approach to it is dogmatically stated in the writings of St. Paul.”

This passage lacks somewhat more in point of clearness than it does in point of rhetorical fire. But three things seem to be sufficiently plain: (1) That Dr. Farrar thinks that Paul shared the views of the Tanaim, the Amoraim and Philo as to the nature of inspiration. (2) That he admits that these views claimed for Scripture “ absolute infallibility even in accidental details and passing allusions.” (8) That nevertheless he does not feel bound to accept this doctrine at Paul’s hands, because, though Paul held it, he is thought not to have “ dogmatically stated ” it.)

Now, the distinction which is here drawn seems, in general, a reasonable one. No one is likely to assert infallibility for the apostles in aught else than in their official teaching. And whatever they may be shown to have held apart from their official teaching, may readily be looked upon with only that respect which we certainly must accord to the opinions of men of such exceptional intellectual and spiritual insight. But it is more difficult to follow Dr. Farrar when it is asked whether this distinction can be established in the present matter. It does not seem to be true that there are no didactic statements as to inspiration in Paul’s letters, or in the rest of the New Testament, such as implicate and carry into the sphere of matters taught, the whole doctrine that underlies their treatment of Scripture. The assertion in the term “ theopneustic ” in such a passage as II Tim. i. 16, for example, cannot be voided by any construction of the passage; and the doctrine taught in the assertion must be understood to be the doctrine which that term connoted to Paul who uses it, not some other doctrine read into it by us.

It is further necessary to inquire what sources we have in a case like that of Paul, to inform us as to what his opinions were, apart from and outside of his teachings. It might conceivably have happened that some of his contemporaries

_ should have recorded for us some account of opinions held by him to which he has given no expression in his epistles; or some account of actions performed by him involving the manifestation of judgment — somewhat similar, say, to Paul’s own account of Peter’s conduct in Antioch (Gal. 11. 11 seqg.). A presumption may be held to lie also that he shared the ordinary opinions of his day in certain matters lying outside the scope - of his teachings, as, for example, with reference to the form of the earth, or its relation to the sun; and it is not inconceivable that the form of his language, when incidentally adverting to such matters, might occasionally play into the hands of such a presumption. But it is neither on the ground of such a presumption, nor on the ground of such external testimony, that Dr. Farrar ascribes to him views as to inspiration similar to those of his Jewish contemporaries. It is distinctly on the. ground of what he finds on a study of the body of official teaching which Paul has left to us. Dr. Farrar discovers that these views as to the nature of Scripture so underlie, are so assumed in, are so implied by, are so interwoven with Paul’s official teaching that he is unwillingly driven to perceive that they were Paul’s opinions. With what color of reason then can they be separated from his teaching?

There is raised here, moreover, a very important and farreaching question, which few will be able to decide in Dr. Farrar’s sense. What is taught in the New Testament? And what is the mode of its teaching? If we are to fall in with Dr. Farrar and say that nothing is taught except what is “ dogmatically stated ” in formal didactic form, the occasional character of the New Testament epistles would become a source of grave loss to us, instead of, as it otherwise is, a source of immense gain; the parabolic clothing of much of Christ’s teaching would become a device to withhold from us all instruction on the matters of which the parables treat; and all that is most fundamental in religious truth, which, as a rule, is rather assumed everywhere in Scripture as a basis for particular applications than formally stated, would be removed out of the sphere of Biblical doctrine. Such a rule, in a word, would op- erate to turn the whole of Biblical teaching on its head, and to reduce it from a body of principles inculeated by means of examples into a mere congeries of instances hung in the air. The whole advance in the attitude of Dogmatics towards the Scriptures which has been made by modern scholarship is, moreover, endangered by this position. It was the fault of the older dogmatists to depend too much on isolated proof-texts for the framing and defense of doctrine. Dr. Farrar would have us return to this method. The alternative, commended justly to us by the whole body of modern scholarship, is, as Schleiermacher puts it, to seek “ a form of Scripture proof on a larger scale than can be got from single texts,” to build our systematic theology, in a word, on the basis, not of the occasional dogmatic statements of Scripture alone, taken separately and, as it were, in shreds, but on the basis of the theologies of the Scripture — to reproduce first the theological thought of each writer or group of writers and then to combine these several theologies (each according to its due historical place) into the one consistent system, consentaneous parts of which they are found to be.** In rejecting this method, Dr. Farrar discredits the whole science of Biblical Theology. From its standpoint it is incredible that one should attribute less importance and authoritativeness to the fundamental conceptions that underlie, color and give form to all of Paul’s teaching than to the chance didactic statements he may have been led to make by this or that circumstance at the call of which his letters happened to be written. This certainly would be tithing mint and anise and cummin and omitting the weightier matters of the law.

That this mode of presenting the matter must lead, no less than the others which have already come under review, to undermining the authority of the New Testament writers as deliverers of doctrine, must already be obvious. It begins by discrediting them as leaders in doctrinal thought and substituting for this a sporadic authority in explicit dogmatic statements.

43 The present writer has tried to state the true relations of Systematic and Biblical theology in a discussion of ‘“‘ The Idea of Systematic Theology Considered as a Science” (Inaugural Address), pp. 22-28. A. D. F. Randolph & Co., 1888. He ventures to refer the reader to it.

In Dr. Farrar’s own hands it proceeds by quite undermining our confidence in the apostles as teachers, through an accusation lodged against them, not only of holding wrong views in doctrine, but even of cherishing as fundamental conceptions theological fancies which are in their very essence superstitious and idolatrous, and in their inevitable outcome ruinous to faith and honor. For Dr. Farrar does not mince matters when he expresses his opinion of that doctrine of inspiration — in its nature and its proper effects — which Philo held and the Jewish Rabbis and in which Paul, according to his expressed convic-. tion, shared. “To say that every word and sentence and letter of Scripture is divine and supernatural, is a mechanical and useless shibboleth, nay, more, a human idol, and (constructively, at least) a dreadful blasphemy.” It is a superstitious — he tells us that he had almost said fetish-worshiping — dogma, and “not only unintelligible, but profoundly dangerous.” It “has in many ages filled the world with misery and ruin,” and “has done more than any other dogma to corrupt the whole of exegesis with dishonest casuistry, and to shake to its centre the religious faith of thousands, alike of the most ignorant and of the most cultivated, in many centuries, and most of all in our own.” *# Yet these are the views which Dr. Farrar is forced to allow that Paul shared! For Philo “ held the most rigid views of inspiration”; than him indeed “ Aqiba himself used no stronger language on the subject ” *° — Aqiba, “ the greatest of the Tanaites’’; “© and it was the views of the Tanaim, Amoraim and Philo, which Dr. Farrar tells us the apostle shared. How after this Dr. Farrar continues to look upon even the “ dogmatic statements” of Paul as authoritative, it is hard to see. By construction he was a fetish worshiper and placed Scripture upon an idol’s pedestal. The doctrines which he held and which underlie his teaching were unintelligible, useless, idolatrous, blasphemous and profoundly dangerous, and actu- ally have shaken to its centre the religious faith of thousands. On such a tree what other than evil fruits could grow?

No doubt something of this may be attributed to the exaggeration characteristic of Dr. Farrar’s language and thought. Obviously Paul’s view of inspiration was not altogether identical with that of contemporary Judaism; it differed from it ‘somewhat in the same way that his use of Scripture differed from that of the Rabbis of his day. But it is one with Philo’s and Aqiba’s on the point which with Dr. Farrar is decisive: alike with them he looked upon Scripture as “ absolutely infallible, even in accidental details and passing allusions,” as the very Word of God, His “ Oracles,” to use his own high phrase, and therefore Dr. Farrar treats the two views as essentially one. But the situation is only modified, not relieved, by the recognition of this fact.

In any event the pathway on which we enter when we begin to distinguish between the didactic statements and the fundamental conceptions of a body of incidental teaching, with a view to accepting the former and rejecting the latter, cannot but lead to a general undermining of the authority of the whole. Only if we could believe in a quite mechanical and magical process of inspiration (from believing in which Dr. Farrar is no doubt very far) by which the subject’s “ dogmatical statements” were kept entirely separate from and unaffected by his fundamental conceptions, could such an attitude be logically possible. In that case we should have to view these “ dogmatical statements ” as not Paul’s at all, standing, as they do ex hypothesi, wholly disconnected with his own fundamental thought, but as spoken through him by an overmastering spiritual influence; as a phenomenon, in a word, similar to the oracles of heathen shrines, and without analogy in Scripture except perhaps in such cases as that of Balaam. In proportion as we draw back from so magical a conception of the mode of inspiration, in that proportion our refusal of authority to the fundamental conceptions of the New Testament writers must invade also their “ dogmatical statements.” We must logically, in a word, ascribe like authority to the whole body of their teaching, in its foundation and superstructure alike, or we must withhold it in equal measure from all; or, if we withhold it from one and not the other, the discrimination would most naturally be made against the superstructure rather than against the foundation.

4, Finally, an effort may be made to justify our holding a lower doctrine of inspiration than that held by the writers of the New Testament, by appealing to the so-called phenomena of the Scriptures and opposing these to the doctrine of the Scriptures, with the expectation, apparently, of justifying a modification of the doctrine taught by the Scriptures by the facts embedded in the Scriptures,

The essential principle of this method of procedure is shared by very many who could scarcely be said to belong to the class who are here more specifically in mind, inasmuch as they do not begin by explicitly recognizing the doctrine of inspiration held by the New Testament writers to be that high doctrine which the Church and the best scientific exegesis agree in understanding them to teach.*? Every attempt to determine or

47 On the contrary these writers usually minimize the Biblical definition of inspiration. Thus Dr. Marvin R. Vincent, who is immediately to be quoted (op. c. p. 15), tells us “ Scripture does not define the nature and extent of its own inspiration. The oft-quoted passage of II Tim. ii. 16 really gives us no light on that point.... The passage does indeed point out certain effects which attend the use of inspired writings.... But after all, we are no nearer than ever to an answer to the question, What zs inspiration?... So that we must fall back on the facts, on the phenomena of the Bible as we have it.” But the deck is not cleared by such remarks; after all, Paul does assert something by calling the Scriptures Theopneustic, and what the thing is that he asserts in the use of this predicate, is not discoverable from an examination into what the Scriptures are, but only by an examination into what Paul means; but what Paul understands by theopneustic, Dr. Vincent makes no effort to investigate. This whole procedure is typical. Thus, for example, the Rev. J. Paterson Smyth, in his recent book, “ How God Inspired the Bible” (p. 64), proceeds

in an exactly similar manner. “ Our theory of inspiration must be learned from the facts presented in the Bible, and in order to be correct it must be consistent with all these facts.... I want to find out what I can about inspiration. God has nowhere revealed to me exactly what it is. He has told me it is a divine

. modify the Biblical doctrine of inspiration by an appeal -to the actual characteristics of the Bible must indeed proceed on an identical principle. It finds, perhaps, as plausible a form of assértion possible to it in the declaration of Dr. Marvin R. Vincent ** that “our only safe principle is that inspiration is consistent with the phenomena of Scripture ’’ — to which one of skeptical turn might respond that whether the inspiration claimed by Scripture is consistent with the phenomena of Scripture after all requires some proof, while one of a more believing frame might respond that it is a safer principle that the phenomena of Scripture are consistent with its inspiration. Its crudest expression may be seen in such a book as Mr. Horton’s ‘ Inspiration and the Bible,” which we have already had

influence, an in-breathing of the Holy Ghost on the spirit of the ancient writers. But I cannot tell how much that means or what effects I should expect from it. I have, therefore, no way of finding out except by examining the phenomena presented by the Bible itself.” This method amounts simply to discarding the

guidance of the doctrine of Scripture in favor of our own doctrine founded on our examination of the nature of Scripture. Mr. Smyth cannot close his eyes to certain outstanding facts on the surface of Scripture, indicatory of the doctrine as to Scripture held by the Biblical writers (pp. 36 and 106), though he makes no effort to collect and estimate all such phenomena. And when he realizes that some may be affected even by his meagre statement of them so far as to say that “the strong expressions just here quoted from some of the Bible writers, and even from our Lord Himself, convince me that the theory of verbal inspiration 1s most probably true,” he has only such an answer as the following:

“ Well, reader, you will find a good many thoughtful people disagreeing with you. Why? Because, while fully receiving these arguments as a proof of God’s inspiration of the Bible, they have looked a little further than the surface to judge how much God’s inspiration implies, and they cannot believe from their examination of Scripture that it implies what is known as verbal inspiration ”

(p. 109). Mr. Smyth means by “ verbal inspiration ” the theory of mechanical dictation. But putting that aside as a man of straw, what it is difficult for us to understand is how “ thoughtful people ” can frame a theory of inspiration after only such shallow investigation of the Scriptural doctrine of inspiration, and how “thoughtful people” can assign their inability to believe a doctrine, an inability based on their own conception of what Scripture is, as any proof that that doctrine is not taught by the “strong expressions” of the Bible writers and the Lord Himself. Is it any more rationalistic to correct the Scriptural doctrine of the origin of the universe from our investigations of the nature of things, than it is to correct the Scriptural doctrine of inspiration from our investigations of the nature of Scripture? 48 Mag. of Christian Lit., April, 1892.

occasion to mention. Mr. Horton chooses to retain the term, “inspiration,’ as representing ‘‘ the common sense of Christians of all ages and in all places” as to the nature of their.

Scriptures,*® but asserts that this term is to be understood to mean just what the Bible 1s — that is to say, whatever any — given writer chooses to think the Bible to be. When Paul affirms in II Tim. ui. 16 that every Scripture is “inspired by God,” therefore, we are not to enter into a philological and exegetical investigation to discover what Paul meant to affirm by the use of this word, but simply to say that Paul must have meant to affirm the Bible to be what we find it to be. Surely no way could be invented which would more easily enable us to substitute our thought for the apostles’ thought, and to proclaim our crudities under the sanction of their great names. Operating by it, Mr. Horton is enabled to assert that the Bible is “ inspired,” and yet to teach that God’s hand has entered it only in a providential way, by His dealings through long ages with a people who gradually wrought out a history, conceived hopes, and brought all through natural means to an expression in a faulty and often self-contradictory record, which we call inspired only “ because by reading it and studying it we can find our way to God, we can find what is His will for us and how we can carry out that will.” °° The most naive expression of the principle in question may be found in such a statement as the following, from the pen of Dr. W. G. Blaikie: “In our mode of dealing with this question the main difference between us is, that you lay your stress on certain general considerations, and on certain specific statements of Scripture. We, on the other hand, while accepting the specific statements, lay great stress also on the structure of Scripture as we find it, on certain phenomena which lie on the surface, and on the inextricable difficulties which are involved in carrying out your view in detail.” °* This statement justly called out the rebuke of Dr.

Robert Watts,” that “ while the principle of your theory is a mere inference from apparent discrepancies not as yet explained, the principle of the theory you oppose is the formally expressed utterances of prophets and apostles, and of Christ Himself.”

Under whatever safeguards, indeed, it may be attempted, and with whatever caution it may be prosecuted, the effort to modify the teaching of Scripture as to its own inspiration by an appeal to the observed characteristics of Scripture, is an attempt not to obtain a clearer knowledge of what the Scriptures teach, but to correct that teaching. And to correct the teaching of Scripture is to proclaim Scripture untrustworthy as a witness to doctrine. The procedure in question is precisely similar to saying that the Bible’s doctrine of creation is to be derived not alone from the teachings of the Bible as to creation, but from the facts obtained through a scientific study of creation; that the Bible’s doctrine as to man is to be found not in the Bible’s deliverances on the subject, but “ while accepting these, we lay great stress also on the structure of man as we find him, and on the inextricable difficulties which are involved in carrying out the Bible’s teaching in detail”; that the Bible’s doctrine of justification is to be obtained by retaining the term as commended by the common sense of the Christian world and understanding by it just what we find justification to be in actual life. It is precisely similar to saying that Mr. Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection is to be determined not solely by what Mr. Darwin says concerning it, but equally by what we, in our own independent study of nature, find to be true as to natural selection. A historian of thought who proceeded on such a principle would scarcely receive the commendation of students of history, however much his writings might serve certain party ends. Who does not see that underlying this whole method of procedure — in its best and in its worst estate alike — there is apparent an unwillingness to commit ourselves without reserve to the teaching of the Bible, either because that teaching is distrusted or already disbelieved; and that it is a grave logical error to suppose that the teaching of the Bible as to inspiration can be corrected in this way any otherwise than by showing it not to be in accordance with the facts? The proposed method, therefore, does not conduct us to a somewhat modified doctrine of inspiration, but to a disproof of inspiration; by correcting the doctrine delivered by the Biblical writers, it discredits those writers as teachers of doctrine.

Let it not be said that in speaking thus we are refusing the inductive method of establishing doctrine. We follow the in- - ductive method. When we approach the Scriptures to ascertain their doctrine of inspiration, we proceed by collecting the whole body of relevant facts. Every claim they make to inspiration is - a relevant fact; every statement they make concerning inspiration is a relevant fact; every allusion they make to the subject is a relevant fact; every fact indicative of the attitude they hold towards Scripture is a relevant fact. But the characteristics of their own writings are not facts relevant to the determination of their doctrine. Nor let it be said that we are desirous of determining the true, as distinguished from the Scriptural, doctrine of inspiration otherwise than inductively. We are averse, however, to supposing tnat in such an inquiry the relevant “ phenomena ”’ of Scripture are not first of all and before all the claims of Scripture and second only to them its use of previous Scripture. And we are averse to excluding these primary “phenomena” and building our doctrine solely or mainly upon the characteristics and structure of Scripture, especially as determined by some special school of modern research by critical methods certainly not infallible and to the best of our own judgment not even reasonable. And we are certainly averse to supposing that this induction, if it reaches results not absolutely consentaneous with the teachings of Scripture itself, has done anything other than discredit those teachings, or that in discrediting them, it has escaped discrediting the doctrinal authority of Scripture.

Nor again is it to be thought that we refuse to use the actual characteristics of Scripture as an aid in, and a check upon, our exegesis of Scripture, as we seek to discover its doctrine of inspiration. We do not simply admit, on the contrary, we affirm that in every sphere the observed fact may throw a broad and most helpful light upon the written text. It is so in the narrative of creation in the first chapter of Genesis; which is only beginning to be adequately understood as science is making her first steps in reading the records of God’s creative hand in the structure of the world itself. It is preéminently so in the written prophecies, the dark sayings of which are not seldom first illuminated by the light cast back upon them by their fulfillment. As Scripture interprets Scripture, and fulfillment interprets prediction, so may fact interpret assertion. And this is as true as regards the Scriptural assertion of the fact of inspiration as elsewhere. No careful student of the Bible doctrine of inspiration will neglect anxiously to try his conclusions as to the teachings of Scripture by the observed characteristics and “ structure” of Seripture, and in trying he may and no doubt will find occasion to modify his conclusions as at first apprehended. But it is one thing to correct our exegetical processes and so modify our exegetical conclusions in the new light obtained by a study of the facts, and quite another to modify, by the facts of the structure of Scripture, the Scriptural teaching itself, as exegetically ascertained; and it is to this latter that we should be led by making the facts of structure and the facts embedded in Scripture co-factors of the same rank in the so-called inductive ascertainment of the doctrine of inspiration. Direct exegesis after all has its rights: we may seek aid from every quarter in our efforts to perform its processes with precision and obtain its results with purity; but we cannot allow its results to be “ modified” by extraneous considerations. Let us by all means be careful in determining the doctrine of Scripture, but let us also be fully honest in determining it; and if we count it a crime to permit our ascertainment of the facts recorded in Scripture ta be unduly swayed by our conception of the doctrine taught in Scripture, let us count it equally a crime to permit our ascertainment of its doctrine to be unduly swayed or colored by our conception of the nature of the facts of its structure or of the facts embedded in its record. We cannot, therefore, appeal from the doctrine of Scripture as exegetically established to the facts of the structure of Scripture or the facts embedded in Scripture, in the hope of modifying the doctrine. If the teaching and the facts of Scripture are in harmony the appeal is useless. If they are in disharmony, we cannot follow both — we must choose one and reject the other. And the attempt to make the facts of Scripture co-factors of equal rank with the teaching of Scripture in ascertaining the true doctrine of inspiration, is really an attempt to modify the doctrine taught by Scripture by an appeal to the facts, while concealing from ourselves the fact that we have modified it, and in modifying corrected it, and, of course, in correcting it, discredited Scripture as a teacher of doctrine.

Probably these four types of procedure will include most of the methods by which men are to-day seeking to free themselves from the necessity of following the Scriptural doctrine of inspiration, while yet looking to Scripture as the source of doctrine. Is it not plain that on every one of them the outcome must be to discredit Scripture as a doctrinal guide? The human mind is very subtle, but with all its subtlety it will hardly be able to find a way to refuse to follow Scripture in one of the — doctrines it teaches without undermining its authority as a teacher of doctrine.