be held in context by the belief in the general action of the Holy
Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual soul. It is, we
may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult to believe in the
Bible without believing in the Church. The Apostles, indeed,--and the
New Testament canon consists largely of the words of Apostles--have an
authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands by
itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ; but when we find
them appealing to members of the Church, they appeal not as the
possessors of an absolute authority or of a Spirit in which others do
not share. They are the ministers of a 'tradition' to which they
themselves are subject, a tradition 'once for all delivered[293]:'
they appeal to those who hear them as men 'who have an unction from
the Holy One and know all things.' The tone in fact of the apostolic
writers forces us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as
co-operating with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which
they themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic writings
were written as occasion required, within the Church, and for the
Church. They presuppose membership in it and familiarity with its
tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors; for
edification, not for initiation. Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast
line be drawn between what lies within and what lies without the
canon. For example, Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has
built upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the
New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If 'Pauline' it is
pretty certainty not S. Paul's. In large part it is the judgment of
the Church which enables us to draw a line between it and S. Clement's
'scripture.' The line indeed our own judgment approves. The Epistle to
the Hebrews and S. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but
the latter depends on the former: it is secondary and the other is
primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between them. How
impossible to tear the one from the other. How seemingly irrational to
attribute absolute authority to the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews
which represents apostolic teaching at second hand[294], and then to
interpret it in a sense hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which
represents exactly the same stream of apostolic teaching only one
short stage lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of
Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the basis of,
the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put the matter more
broadly, how irrational it is, considering the intimate links by which
the New Testament canon is bound up with the historic Church, not to
accept the mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent
down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the mind of the
apostolic writers. Most rational surely is the attitude of the early
Church towards Scripture. The Scripture was regarded as the highest
utterance of the Spirit, the unique and constant test of the Church's
life and teaching. But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the
meaning of Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested
and verified or corrected her teaching: and this because all was of
one piece, the life of the Church including the Scriptures, the
inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit in the
Churches[295].
And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much controverted
subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? What does the doctrine
imply, and what attitude does belief in it involve towards the modern
critical treatment of the inspired literature?
1. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the doctrine holds in
the building up of a Christian faith. It is in fact an important part
of the superstructure, but it is not among the _bases_ of the
Christian belief. The Christian creed asserts the reality of certain
historical facts. To these facts, in the Church's name, we claim
assent: but we do so on grounds which, so far, are quite independent
of the _inspiration_ of the evangelic records. All that we claim to
shew at this stage is that they are historical: not historical so as
to be absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense,
so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in Christ is
to be found in the moral dispositions which predispose to belief, and
make intelligible and credible the thing to be believed: coupled with
such acceptance of the generally historical character of the Gospels,
and of the trustworthiness of the other apostolic documents, as
justifies belief that our Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary,
manifested as the Son of God 'with power according to a spirit of
holiness,' crucified, raised again the third day from the dead,
exalted to the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and
the source to it of the informing Spirit.
In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the method
of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church. Logically such
belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. Indeed, in the
past, Christian apologists have made a great mistake in allowing
opponents to advance as objections against the historical character of
the Gospel narrative, what are really objections not against its
historical character--not such as could tell against the substantially
historical character of secular documents--but against a certain view
of the meaning of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that
Christianity brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of
Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it[296].
2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and His
Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the Scriptures
of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of God; and the
Christian Church from the earliest days postulated the same belief
about the Scriptures of the New Testament. To disbelieve that 'the
Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Ghost,' was equivalent to being 'an
unbeliever[297].'
Thus, when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ, he will find
himself in a position where alike the authority of his Master and the
'communis sensus' of the society he belongs to, give into his hand
certain documents and declare them inspired.
3. What in its general idea does this mean?
S. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world in a
luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been the 'sacred
school for all the world of the knowledge of God and of the spiritual
life[298].' Every race has its special vocation, and we recognise in
the great writers of each race the interpreters of that vocation. They
are specially gifted individuals, but not merely individuals. The race
speaks in them: Rome is interpreted by Virgil, and Greece by Aeschylus
or Plato. Now every believer in God must see in these special missions
of races, a Divine inspiration. If we can once get down to the bottom
of human life, below its pride, its wilfulness, its pretentiousness,
down to its essence, we get to God and to a movement of His
Spirit[299]. Thus every race has its inspiration and its prophets.
But the inspiration of the Jews was supernatural. What does this mean?
That the Jews were selected--not to be the school for humanity in any
of the arts and sciences which involve the thought of God only
indirectly, and can therefore be carried on without a fundamental
restoration of man into that relation to God which sin had clouded or
broken,--but to be the school of that fundamental restoration itself.
Therefore, in the case of the Jews the inspiration is both in itself
more direct and more intense, and also involves a direct consciousness
on the part of its subjects. In the race, indeed, the consciousness
might be dim; but the consciousness, as the prophets all assure us,
did belong to the race, and not merely to its individual interpreters.
They speak as recalling the people to something which they know, or
ought to know, not as preachers of a new religion. They were 'the
conscience of the state[300].' But special men, prophets, psalmists,
moralists, historians, were thus the inspired interpreters of the
Divine message to and in the race: and their inspiration lies in this,
that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy Ghost, so
shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and thoughts and
aspirations, as to make them the instruments through which was
imparted 'the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life.'
Various are the degrees of this inspiration: the inspiration of the
prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration of the
writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to lead him to
ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience, passing through many
a false conclusion, and cynical denial, till at the last his thought
is led to unite itself to the great stream of Divine movement by
finding the only possible solution of the problems of life in the
recognition of God, and in obedience to Him.
Various also are the sorts of literature inspired: for the
supernatural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural. The
Church repudiated the Montanist conception of inspiration, according
to which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy, as the passive
unconscious instrument of the Spirit; and the metaphors which would
describe the Holy Spirit as acting upon a man 'like a flute player
breathing into his flute,' or 'a plectrum striking a lyre,' have
always a suspicion of heresy attaching to their use[301]. As the
humanity of Christ is none the less a true humanity for being
conditioned by absolute oneness with God, so the human activity is
none the less free, conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires
it. The poet is a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian
an historian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and methods, to
be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. And just as
truly as physiology, in telling us more and more about the human body,
is telling us about the body which the Son of God assumed, so with the
growth of our knowledge about the kinds and sequences of human
literature, shall we know more and more about the literature of the
Jews which the Holy Spirit inspired.
What then is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture? If we begin
our inquiry with the account of creation with which the Bible opens,
we may take note of its affinities in general substance with the
Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogonies; but we are much more struck
with its differences, and it is in these we shall look for its
inspiration. We observe that it has for its motive and impulse not the
satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity, or the later interest of
scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental religious
principles: that everything as we see it was made by God: that it has
no being in itself but at God's will: on the other hand, that
everything is in its essence good, as the product of the good God:
that man, besides sharing the physical nature of all creation, has a
special relation to God, as made in God's image, to be God's
vice-gerent: that sin, and all that sin brings with it of misery and
death, came not of man's nature but of his disobedience to God and
rejection of the limitations under which He put him: that in spite of
all that sin brought about, God has not left man to himself, that
there is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental principles of
true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies the
supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation[302].
As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find ourselves in
any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning of its inspiration.
The first traditions of the race are all given there _from a special
point of view_. In that point of view lies the inspiration. It is that
everything is presented to us as illustrating God's dealings with
man--God's judgment on sin: His call of a single man to work out a
universal mission: His gradual delimitation of a chosen race: His care
for the race: His over-ruling of evil to work out His purpose. The
narrative of Genesis has all the fullest wealth of human interest, but
it is in the unveiling of the hand of God that its special
characteristic lies. As we go on into the history, we find the
recorders acting like the recorders of other nations, collecting,
sorting, adapting, combining their materials, but in this
inspired--that the animating motive of their work is not to bring out
the national glory or to flatter the national vanity, nor, like the
motive of a modern historian, the mere interest in fact, but to keep
before the chosen people the record of how God has dealt with them.
This, as we perceive, gives them a special sense of the value of
fact[303]. They record what God has done, how God did in such and such
ways take action on behalf of His peculiar people, delivering them,
punishing them, teaching them, keeping them, disciplining them for
higher ends. And none who have eyes to see God's spiritual purposes
can doubt that those historians read aright the chronicles of the
kings of Israel. The spiritual significance which they see is the true
significance. God's special purpose was on Israel.
It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special
inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take some of
the highest places among the poets of all nations, but the poetic
faculty is directed to one great end, to reveal the soul in its
relation to God, in its exultations and in its self-abasements. 'Where
... did they come from, those piercing lightning-like gleams of
strange spiritual truth, those magnificent out-looks upon the kingdom
of God, those raptures at His presence and His glory, those wonderful
disclosures of self-knowledge, those pure out-pourings of the love of
God? Surely here is something more than the mere working of the mind
of man. Surely ... they repeat the whispers of the Spirit of God, they
reflect the very light of the Eternal Wisdom[304].'
In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious and typical
instances of inspiration[305]. The prophets make a direct claim to be
the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not that the Divine Spirit
supersedes their human faculties, but He intensifies them. They see
deeper under the surface of life what God is doing, and therefore
further into the future what He will do. No doubt their predictive
knowledge is general, it is of the issue to which things tend. It is
not at least usually a knowledge 'of times and of seasons which the
Father hath put in His own power.' Thus at times they foreshorten the
distance, and place the great deliverance and the 'day of Jehovah' in
the too immediate foreground[306]. The prophetic inspiration is thus
consistent with erroneous anticipations as to the circumstances and
the opportunity of God's self-revelation, just as the apostolic
inspiration admitted of S. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ
within his own life-time. But the prophets claim to be directly and
really inspired to teach and interpret what God is doing and
commanding in their own age, and to forecast what in judgment and
redemptive mercy God means to do and must do in the Divine event. The
figure of the king Messiah dawns upon their horizon with increasing
definiteness of outline and characteristic, and we, with the
experience of history between us and them, are sure that the
correspondence of prophecy and fulfilment can be due to no other cause
than that they spoke in fact the 'word of the Lord.'
Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation, marked by
an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a spiritual fabric,
which in its result we cannot but recognise as the action of the
Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God and of the spiritual life gradually
appears, not as the product of human ingenuity, but as the result of
Divine communication: and the outcome of this communication is to
produce an organic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached, a
redemption not yet given, a hope not yet satisfied. In this general
sense at least no Christian ought to feel a difficulty in believing,
and believing with joy, in the inspiration of the Old Testament: nor
can he feel that he is left without a standard by which to judge what
it means. Christ, the goal of Old Testament development, stands forth
as the test and measure of its inspiration.
The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of men of
sub-apostolic rank, like S. Luke and probably the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except perhaps in the case of
the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspiration to write, other than the
inspiration which gave power to teach. What then is, whether for
writing or for teaching, the inspiration of an Apostle?
If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the Revealer of the
Father, it almost stands to reason that He must have secured that His
revelation should be, without material alloy, communicated to the
Church which was to enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, in fact, we find
that He spent His chief pains on the training of His apostolic
witnesses. And all the training which He gave them while He was
present among them was only to prepare them to receive the Holy Ghost
Who, after He was gone, was to be poured out upon them to qualify them
to bear His witness among men.
'Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye
shall be My witnesses:' 'These things have I spoken unto you while yet
abiding with you. And the Comforter, even the Holy Ghost, Whom the
Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring
to your remembrance all that I said unto you.' 'I have yet many things
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the
Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all the truth[307].'
Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and deliberately
qualified to interpret Christ to the world. It understands by their
inspiration an endowment which enables men of all ages to take their
teaching as representing, and not misrepresenting, His teaching and
Himself. In S. John's Gospel, for example, we have an account of our
Lord which has obviously passed through the medium of a most
remarkable personality. We have the outcome of the meditation, as well
as the recollection, of the Apostle. But, as the evidence assures us
that the Gospel is really S. John's, so the Church unhesitatingly
accepts S. John's strong and repeated asseveration that he is
interpreting and not distorting the record, the personality, the
claims of Jesus Christ. 'He bears record, and his record is
true[308].'
This assurance is indeed not without verification: it is verified by
the unity of testimony which, under all differences of character and
circumstance, we find among the apostolic witnesses. The accepted
doctrine of the Church when S. Paul wrote his 'undoubted
Epistles,'--the points of agreement amidst all differences between him
and the Judaizers--gives us substantially the same conception of the
Person of the Incarnate Son of God as we find in S. John[309]. The
same conception of what He was, is required to interpret the record of
what He did and said in the Synoptic Gospels. Further, the witness of
the Apostles, though it receives its final guarantee through the
belief in their inspiration, has its natural basis in the prolonged
training by which--'companying with them all the time that He went in
and out among them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day
that He was received up,'--they were prepared to be His witnesses.
Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the apostolic inspiration,
it is a reasonable act of faith.
If we pass from the writings properly apostolic to those like
S. Luke's records, which represent apostolic teaching at second hand,
we do not find that the inspiration of their writers was of such sort
as enabled them to dispense with the ordinary means or guarantees of
accuracy. The simple claim of S. Luke's preface to have had the best
means of information and to have taken the greatest care in the use of
them, is on this score most instructive. We should suppose that their
inspiration was part of the whole spiritual endowment of their life
which made them the trusted friends of the Apostles, and qualified
them to be the chosen instruments to record their teaching, in the
midst of a Church whose quick and eager memory of 'the tradition'
would have acted as a check to prevent any material error creeping
into the record.
4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken of by
S. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which qualifies the
writings of those who were its subjects, to be permanent sources of
spiritual instruction. 'Every Scripture inspired of God is also
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction
which is in righteousness[310].' Following out this idea of Holy
Scripture then, we are led to think of the belief in inspiration as
having this primary practical result: that we submit ourselves to the
teaching of every book which is given to us as inspired. We are to put
ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers; with
S. James, for example, in the New Testament, as well as with S. John
and S. Paul; with S. Luke as well as with S. Matthew; with the
Pastoral Epistles as well as with the Epistle to the Galatians[311].
At starting each of us, according to his predisposition, is conscious
of liking some books of Scripture better than others. This, however,
should lead us to recognise that in some way we specially need the
teaching which is less attractive to us. We should set ourselves to
study what we like less, till that too has had its proper effect in
moulding our conscience and character. It is hardly possible to
estimate how much division would have been avoided in the Church if
those, for example, who were most ecclesiastically disposed had been
at pains to assimilate the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans, and
those who most valued 'the freedom of the Gospel' had recognised a
special obligation to deepen their hold on the Epistles to the
Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of S. James.
To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put ourselves to
school with every part of the Old Testament, as of the New. True, the
Old Testament is imperfect, but for that very reason has a special
value. 'The real use of the earlier record is not to add something to
the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided
insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of
Divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth[312].'
We see in the Old Testament the elements, each in separation, which
went to make up the perfect whole, and which must still lie at the
basis of all rightly formed life of individuals and societies.
Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old Testament
forces us to recognise a real element of the Divine education in the
imprecatory Psalms. They are not the utterances of selfish spite[313]:
they are the claim which righteous Israel makes upon God that He
should vindicate Himself, and let their eyes see how 'righteousness
turns again unto judgment.' The claim is made in a form which belongs
to an early stage of spiritual education; to a time when _this life_
was regarded as the scene in which God must finally vindicate Himself,
and when the large powers and possibilities of the Divine compassion
were very imperfectly recognised. But behind these limitations, which
characterize the greater part of the Old Testament, the claim of these
Psalms still remains a necessary part of the claim of the Christian
soul. We must not only recognise the reality of Divine judgments in
time and eternity, bodily and spiritual; we must not only acquiesce in
them because they are God's; we must go on to claim of God the
manifestation of His just judgment, so that holiness and joy, sin and
failure, shall be seen to coincide.