Inspiration as a Doctrine

AcroRDixG to the teaching of both Testp.ments, a few men seem to have been divinely inspired either to speak, or to put into a written form, what was coi nmunicated to them as the truth of God. This in-piratlon was, we are led to believe, accorded to but a few, not one of whom, however, so far as we can learn, ever brought moral discredit upon his solemn and august vocation. Some of them had been even profligate in iniquity befoie their inspira-i tion; but having spoken the word of God, they appear to have been purified as by a holy fire. That their number was but small, is ‘rather an argument in favour of their claim than otherwise, when we consider what is evident in all the highest energy and form of life known amonost ourselves. Few men, for example, have been inspired (qualified) to write the intermediate bible of civilisation, — that exciting and often tragical book which interposes between the volume of nature and the volume of spiritual testimony. There are but few historians, few poets, few aphorists. Yet the few do not speak for themselves alone: they represent human nature, and establish their right to supremacy and homage in proportion as they speak not the jargon of a class but the universal language of humanity. Inspiration does not separate David and Paul from the human race: it lifts the human race to a high pinnacle of honour and expectation. The divine inspiration of one man presupposes a corresponding degree of divine inspiration (actual or possible) in all other men. Few, indeed, may have been inspired to speak the word, but all have been inspired to feel it. Is inspiration, as commonly understood, given to but a few? So is wealth, so is poetry, so is courage, so is art, so is wisdom. The key of the chamber is given to one keeper, but the chamber itself is to be opened for the entrance of the whole world. “Why should David or Paul have been more inspired than I am?” is a peevish inquiry, wanting as much in reason as in digni-ty, and finding its natural completion in the profane inquiry — “Why is God more divine than I am?” It is the kind of question which vexes human life with the most pitiful discontent. It brings with it a brood worthy of itself. Why should Momer have been more poetical? Why should Plato have been more philosophical? Why should Euclid have been more mathematical y It will be answered that their supremacy is held only until a higher genius can successfully dispute it, and that Moses and John slioukl be allowed to hold theirs on the same condition. Be it so! ‘here do Moses and John deprecate a challenge of their personal supremacy ‘i Yet common justice will insist that if the inspiration of the biblical writers be challenged, the rival

Inspij’atiou as a Doctrine. 2 1

inspiration must cover the zv/iote of the origijial ground; for it must be borne In mind that not only do the biblical writers touch upon some subjects which may be treated by ordinary sagacity and learning, but they distinctly touch subjects which are connected with the innermost life and secret of the universe. It will not be enough, then, to limit the competition to the production of felicitous proverbs or artistic parables; there must be a moral purity, an intellectual grasp, a spiritual insight and sympathy, which shall so combine as to represent the same mastery and familiarity in relation to the invisible and supernatural which are to be found in the inspired testaments. Then will arise a farther question. Supposing something like an equality in the breadth and tone of the rival revela.tions, we must know in what direction they respectively move in affecting the practical life of mankind. Does the one move towards reverie, self-content, spiritual isolation? Does the other impel in the direction of philanthropy, sacrifice, worship? These are inquiries which can be definitively settled.

But the complaint is not so much that a few writers should have claimed divine inspiration, as that their authority should bind the religious faith of all men through all time. It is the idea of apparent despotism in doctrine that is strongly resented. Is the grievance substantial or imaginary.’* It should be observed that the Bible opens its revelation without any preliminary contract with the reader either as to a limit of faith or a deoree of authority. The beHevers in inspiration may possibly have themselves to charge with a grave mistake upon this important point; for it might be supposed by any one who has attended to the controversy without carefully reading the Bible itself, that the book has upon its very forefront a distinct statement of its divine inspiration and authority, which must be accepted without question or murmur. Nothinof can be farther from the fact. As to a formal claim of inspiration, there is no more of it in the opening of Genesis than there is in the opening of the Metamorphosis. Were the Bible put into the hands of a scholarly and critical pagan, without one word of introduction or comment, he would be a long time in discovering any tittle of a formal claim on the part of the book to be considered inspired and authoritative. He would at once be struck by the loftiness and firmness of its tone, and might be led so far as to say, “This man could not have spoken more boldly had the very gods themselves addressed him from the heavens “; or he might attribute the boldness to the quality of a language peculiar for pomp and sublimity; but he would not be either humbled or embarrassed by a preliminary demand for the surrender of his judgment or his life. The inspiration of the Bible grows upon a man much as a consciousness of his own intellectual and spiritual life grows upon him. This higher consciousness is often sudden in its development. It would seem that in a moment — yreceded it may be by a long-, though more or less unconscious, preparation — an initial lifetime is thrown off and a new spiritual citizenship is established. In this way the slave of dictionaries sometimes rises into a master of languages, the slow cipherer into a philosophical arithmetician, and the cautious student of politics into a sagacious statesman. The line of separation is invisible, almost imaginary, yet it divides experiences that are most diverse. In some such -way the Bible has suddenly elevated itself from a schoolbook to a revelation, and men have felt that they could not set it again in the rank of common writings without a sense of serious moral loss. They have not foreseen the result of their reading. At first they yielded to a merely literary fascination; by-and-by moral sympathy was touched in some degree; curiosity was excited; then came wonder, and after wonder came uncertainty, like a keen pain in the heart; then came a sentence like this to test the faith and to ripen the strange experience into Christian joy, — “holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”; and with that sentence came a responsibility which put the reader into a new and solemn relation to the Book.

If the Bible is divinely inspired, it follows that it is divinely authoritative. Inspiration and authority must stand or fall together. Consider what it is that is professedly revealed. What is it? It is not history; it is not cosmogony; it is not ethnology; it is not even a code of morals. It is worth while, then, to pause a moment, that we may get the full emphasis of the answer. The supreme revelation that is made in the* Bible is the revelation of God. Everything else belongs to the region of detail. The divine personality is the vital and all-embracing revelation. Creation may suggest it; the curious interweaving and combination of daily events may point towards it as towards a possibility; but the Bible distinctly reveals it as the secret of all things. But the Bible havinof made this revelation cannot stop there. The term God includes all other terms. It is not a high symbol in abstract reasoning, or the almost aerial line which the metaphysician is content to becjin with: it is the all-controllincr factor in regions visible and invisible, — it is this, or it is nothing. The moment, therefore, that the question of divine Fatherhood or Rulership is raised, all the great questions covered by the term “humanity” are raised along with it, and by their very urgency they may easily create a clamour unfavourable to the consideration of their most important bearings. It is better, therefore, to reason downward from the quiet and solemn heights of the divine personality, than to struggle upwards through all the controversy and bewilderment of human interests. If the Bible declares the true idea of God, it must presumptively give the true doctrine of human nature. God must be self-declared. Man has no instruments that can measure the divine power, or search out the divine wisdom. But Jiow is God to grant a revelation of Himself? Christian theology answers, — By the inspiration of chosen men who shall be His instruments for this special purpose. Instantly that inspiration becomes thus individualised a great difficulty arises, — the very difficulty which has been pointed out in the divine incarnation: we look at the divine mystery through the human medium, and instead of fixing the mind upon the inspiring Spirit we fix it upon the inspired man. It is thus that loss is incurred, and that disadvantage is inflicted upon the subjects of inspiration. To speak, for example, of the inspiration of David, is to limit a divine quantity by a human personality; and the danger (almost inevitable) is that the mind be fixed upon the term Da’Oid rather than upon the term inspiration. We must enlarge the minor term if we can; and how is this to be done but by speaking, not of the inspiration of Moses or David, Ezekiel or John, but of the inspiration of Jmnianity, the individuals themselves being nothing but the points of contact at which a divine action is set up. Much is gained by this elimination of the personal element. Inspiration is greater than personality. Instead of speaking of the authority of Paul, we are to speak of the authority of truth: Paul may, indeed, have b’jcn chosen as the medium of utterance, but the utterer is God. It is mere peevishness, or perhaps defiance, which chafes at the authority of a ma7i: that is not the question at all; assent is sought to the proposition that the eternal authority of God has been declared through human instrumentality. In what other way could it have been declared? Is there any other vip.y so free from the vulgarity of sensationalism, so rational, so philosophical, so ennoblinor so sublime? No homaore is offered to Moses, to David, or to Paul. The Bible, in all its divine elements, would be unimpaired were the L^ names of its human penmen removed. Yet those names are of peculiar

value in humanising a volume which requires softening shadows to mitigate its unique glories. The writers never obtrude their personal dignity; they never conceal their personal weaknesses; the word of the Lord is a burden to them, and is often accepted with hesitation and misgiving. But what if there be slips or other faults in the work, of the inspired men? In one sense, so much the better; in the sense, for example, that these are imperfections which actually beget confidence, — superficial imperfections which give all the advantage of contrast to work that is known to be solid and enduring. The musician is limited by his instrument. Though he may have ravished a world by his strains, he could be almost angry with the instrument which has failed to express the still finer tones which madden him with indescribable joy. In the matter of inspiration the Almighty proposed to dwell in houses of clay, what wonder if they were unequal to such a Presence?

We have said that the divine inspiration of one man presupposes a corresponding degree of divine inspiration (actual or possible) in all other men. The inspiration of speech presupposes the inspiration of hearinir true llstcnino- belnl: n.uch more than an exercise of a merely physical function. If few

Ijispiratio7t as a Doctrine. 27

men know how to speak, fewer still know how to listen. Men are preoccupied; voices of prejudice, interest, self-worship, never cease to besiege the ear of the soul: add to these a drowsiness hardly distinguishable from a temptation, and a persistent appeal from the whole external estate of life, and the difficulty of spiritual hearing will be no longer a mystery. The universal inspiration comes through a quickening and sanctifying action upon the moral sense of mankind. The one thing which that moral sense never did accomplish is the discovery of God. In its most exalted and energetic moods it got no farther than an inscription to the Unknown Power, — a long way, too,^ — a sublime distance, verily, — still, not a Bible, but a marble slab.

That the biblical revelation of God does not instantly satisfy every mind, and bring into unanimity the religious sentiment of the world, is a self-destructive argument as applied against the doctrine of divine inspiration. It proves too much. Where is there unanimity upon any subject which challenges alike the intellectual and moral attention of mankind? Not only so, the Bible itself anticipates the very difficulty, and mourns with pathetic lamentation that the disclosure of God has been received with incredulity or resentment. If it be suggested that such a revelation should have been given as would at once, by its copiousness and brilliance, have established itself in the confidence of the world, the suggestion proceeds in forgetfulness of the fact that that very confidence itself has been warped and vitiated, and is no longer the simple and honest love which is the secret of spiritual sympathy and interpretation. How to recover the idea of God was the problem. The Bible distinctly undertakes its solution, and in so doing claims authoritatively to be known, not as a volume of history, a code of morals, a treatise on philosophy, but as the one written Book of God.

Inspiration had at the very outset to encounter the difficulty of language, inasmuch as there was no speech common to the whole world.* The world

* “And while thus the characteristic excellences of the Greek language invite us to the investigation of the likenesses and differences between words, to the study of the words of the New Testament there are reasons additional inviting us. If by such investigations as these we become aware of delicate variations in an author’s meaning, which otherwise we might have missed, where is it so desirable that we should mjss nothing, that we should lose no finer intention of the writer, as in those words which are the vehicles of the very rain J of God Himself? If thus the intellectual riches of the student are increased, can this anywhere be of so great importance as there, where the intellectual may, if rightly used, prove spiritual riches as well? If it encourage thoughtful meditation on the exact forces of words, both as they are in themselves, and in their relation to other words, or in any way unveil to us their marvel and their mystery, this can nowhere else have a worth in the least approaching that which it acquires when the words with which we have to do are, to those who receive them aright, words of eternal life; while in the dead carcases of the same, if men suffer the spirit of life to depart from them, all manner of corruptions and heresies may be, as they have been, bred. The words of the New Testament are eminently the o-Tot;^£ra of Christian theology, and he who will not begin with a patient study of those, shall never make any considerable, least of all any secure, advances in this; for here, as everywhere else, sure disappointment awaits him who thinks to possess the whole without first possessing the parts of which that whole is composed.” — Archbishop Trench oti New Testament Synonyms.

has a common heart, a common nature, a common instinct, but not a common tongue. Even in the same language words constantly vary in expressiveness and value: not only does time change their application and their limits, but they actually convey different meanings to different minds; and there is not always an interpreter at hand to draw the line of exact signification and prevent confusion and controversy. A word may not mean precisely the same thing to any two men, though it may be well known to both of them in a rough sense, which may suffice for ordinary purposes. How to express an eternal quantity through a mutable language! This is in another form the precise difficulty of the Incarnation; for what flesh is to spirit speech is to thought. The difficulty has never been wholly overcome, — certainly not in the Incarnation, for Jesus Christ was despised and rejected of men; and certainly not in the Bible, for it has provoked more controversy, fiercer and bitterer too, than any other book in all literature. It should be noted, too, that the very objections which from the beginning have been urged against Christ, have also been pressed against the Bible; objections relating to form, to structure, to origin, to apparent contradiction, and to manifest insufficiency to meet the demands of the situation. In both cases human expectation was set at naught, and somethino; was offered which could not but mortify the pride of the receiver. We must, then, go beyond forms, symbols, and measurable quantities, and find the meaning of inspiration in elevation

30 The Piwaclete.

and purity of thought, in the scrupulousness and magnanimity of moral instinct, in the ennobling and all-hoping charity by which our best life is distinguished; and ceasing all pedantic strife about mere -words, must cast ourselves with reverence and holy joy upon the eternal Word,