Inspiration - Glenn Conjurske
Inspiration
by Glenn Conjurske
The doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures is fundamental to Christianity. Lose that, and all is lost. This doctrine is naturally, therefore, one of the objects of the devil’s most persistent opposition. But the devil transforms himself into an angel of light. He preaches darkness, but preaches it as though it were light. Sometimes, to be sure, he deals in direct denials of the truth, but these will not always serve his purpose, for there are many who will give no credit to such denials. Even the most blatant modernists have seldom denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, for they, possessed of the same serpentine cunning which is employed by their mentor the devil, know very well that to deny inspiration would be to lose the ear of the people. They rather redefine the doctrine of inspiration, so as to deny it in fact, while maintaining it in appearance.
Those denials must of course be subtle and gradual. But howsoever gradual they may be, they must begin somewhere. Now it seems to me that the most likely place for such errors to begin is simply in the ignorance of the people of God concerning the true doctrine of inspiration. That ignorance opens the door to deception. Yet that ignorance is very prevalent in the church today. It generally consists of taking a part of the Bible doctrine in place of the whole, or in taking a subordinate part of the doctrine for the primary part. An unperceived shift in emphasis is the beginning of the departure from the truth, but that shift would be plainly perceived if people but understood the true Bible doctrine.
That shift in emphasis consists of applying the doctrine of inspiration primarily to the writers of Scripture, rather than to the writings which they penned. It consists of shifting the emphasis to the process which produced the Bible, rather than to the result of that process. Nothing is more common than to hear the teachers of the church speak of “inspired writers,” “inspired penmen,” “inspired prophets,” “inspired apostles,” “the inspired Psalmist,” and so forth. But such language is unscriptural. It is no doubt well meant, and something might be said in its justification, but it is nevertheless unscriptural. And it is quite often extended far beyond mere unscriptural terminology, to embrace a concept which is altogether false. We often hear about “inspired apostles” guiding the early church. Thus inspiration, and with it implied infallibility, is extended to the whole of their conduct and ministry. But this is a theological fiction. The apostles erred, as other men do. They were no more inspired than any man of God is today. Wiser they may have been, and more godly, and more devoted, and more gifted, but they were not more inspired. Their writings which we possess are inspired, and that is the extent of it. Their daily conduct, their ordinary preaching and teaching—-these were not “inspired.” The men may have been full of the Holy Ghost, but so may we be today. This does not secure infallibility.
The Bible uses the term “inspiration” only once, and there its application is to the writings, not to the writers. Let this be once understood, and a good deal of confusion is dispelled. The only place in which the Bible speaks of inspiration is II Tim. 3:16, where we read, in the English version, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Alas, the translation itself tends to obscure the doctrine, for “given by inspiration” naturally directs the mind to a process of inspiration by which the Scriptures were given. The Greek, however, speaks otherwise. The reader should understand that “given by inspiration of God” is all the rendering of one Greek word—-a compound adjective which means “God-inspired,” or “God-breathed.” What the text actually says, then, is “All scripture is God-inspired.” Observe, it speaks of what the Scriptures are. This may imply something of the process by which they came to be so, but it says nothing of the writers being inspired.
Observe, it is “all Scripture” which is God-inspired. The word “scripture” means “writing”—-not the process of writing, but that which is written. “All Scripture”—-all that is written—-is God-inspired. This, of course, does not refer to all that has been written in the history of the world. It hardly needs to be said that it has nothing to do with the writings of the Greek philosophers, nor the chronicles of the kings of Assyria, nor the works of Tertullian or Martin Luther. The term “scripture” in the New Testament has a recognized and indisputable theological sense. It is a reference to certain specific and peculiar writings—-to the sacred writings, the writings of the Bible, and none else. When Christ spoke to the Sadducees, “Ye do err, not knowing the writings nor the power of God”—-when he said, “Search the writings, for in them ye think ye have eternal life”—-when he said, “the scripture cannot be broken”—-it was well understood and without doubt that he spoke of the writings of the Bible alone, so much of it as then existed. It is the sacred writings, then, the canonical books of the Bible, which are God-inspired. Which those books are, or how it is to be determined which they are, is another question, but so far as the Old Testament is concerned, they are without question those books which the Jews held sacred in the time of Christ. The Son of God himself put his stamp of approval upon these, and affirmed that they cannot be broken.
But we have all kinds of “theories of inspiration,” precisely for failure to understand what inspiration is. Yet what are these theories, but barking up the wrong tree? The coon is elsewhere. These “theories of inspiration” in general deal with the process by which the Bible was written, not with the written result. Fundamentalists have often been led into fruitless debates with liberals over such theories of inspiration, but it is generally a waste of words, and it is a great mistake to debate with a modernist on his ground in this matter. In a good article on inspiration, James M. Gray says of the enemy attacks on the Bible, “They lead men away from the contents of the book to consider how they came, this brings us back to consider what they are. Happy the day when the inquiry returns here, and happy the generation which has not forgotten how to meet it.”
Modernists scoff at what they are pleased to call “the dictation theory,” or “the mechanical theory” of inspiration, but it is of little consequence whether such theories are true or false. The fact of inspiration secures that what is written IS inspired. How it got to be that way is another question, and about the most we can say for it is, “We don’t know.” If I am asked if I believe in a mechanical theory of inspiration, I must say, “Certainly”—-for certain prophets of the Old Testament wrote, under the direct control of the Holy Ghost, things which they themselves did not understand. But this cannot account for the epistles of John or Paul. As for dictation, certainly Christ dictated the letters in the second and third chapters of Revelation to John, but that was not inspiration. Inspiration is what secures the written record of those letters. Revelation and inspiration are two different things. God may reveal things to his servants in many manners, but that is not inspiration. Inspiration is what secures the written record of that revelation—-along with the written record of many things which man may know without any revelation. Christ revealed and taught many things to his apostles while he walked the earth, but that was not inspiration. Inspiration secured the written record of those things. And it must be understood that in many cases there is no revelation at all in inspiration. When Daniel copied the declaration of Nebuchadnezzar, or when Ezra copied the decree of Cyrus, there was no revelation in this, yet what they wrote is the inspired word of God. When Solomon recorded his own experiences in the book of Ecclesiastes, there was no revelation in this, but what he wrote is the inspired word of God. When Paul wrote his epistles, he wrote some things which had been revealed to him, and some things which he had learned by study and experience. He wrote freely and spontaneously his own thoughts, from his own heart and soul, and yet the result is the inspired word of God. This is the Bible doctrine of inspiration.
James M. Gray well says again, “When we speak of the Holy Spirit coming upon men in order to the composition of the books, it should be further understood that the object is not the inspiration of the men but the books—-not the writers but the writings. It terminates upon the record, in other words, and not upon the human instrument who made it.”
Yet the Bible does have something to say about the process which brought the Scriptures into being. “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (II Pet. 1:20-21). Though this speaks of the prophets speaking, yet it is of the prophecy “of the Scripture” that it speaks—-that is, of the written prophecies. We must understand, then, that Peter’s reference to the prophets’ speaking is intended to apply to their writing. The same sort of expression is used elsewhere in Scripture. Quoting Isaiah, John says, “These things said Isaiah, when he saw his glory and spake of him.” (John 12:41). Again, “For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day…” (Heb. 4:4). Again, “…of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood.” (Heb. 7:14). All of these refer to the written Scriptures.
We learn, then, two things concerning the origin of the Scriptures from II Pet. 1:21. First, the men who wrote them were “holy men of God,” men who would naturally speak that which was true and holy and edifying—-men who would from their own hearts speak the things of God. Yet that secures nothing of infallibility. But we learn further that these holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. But something must be said on “as they were moved,” as this may be ambiguous in the English. “As they were moved” translates a present participle, and the word “as” must be understood as “while,” not “when.” That is, the expression does not mean merely that the men were moved to speak, but that they were moved while they spake. The word rendered “moved” is used often in the New Testament, but is nowhere else so translated. It most commonly means “brought,” but sometimes “borne” or “carried.” It is obviously in the latter sense that it is used here.
The present passive participle rarely appears elsewhere in the New Testament, and when it does, it is usually in the sense of “bring,” and not “bear.” The present passive verb, however, appears in Acts 27:15, of a ship being borne by the wind, where the English version, however, has a paraphrase (“we let her drive”). The interlinear translation in The Englishman’s Greek New Testament better renders it, “we were driven along,” and The Englishman’s Greek Concordance, “we were borne along.” The present active participle appears in Heb. 1:3, where it is rendered, “upholding all things by the word of his power.” The word obviously, then, means something quite beyond merely moving the prophets to speak. It denotes the bearing them forward in their speaking.
So Christopher Wordsworth renders our text, “holy men of God spake, being borne along by the Holy Ghost,” and Bengel writes on the verse, “they did not bear, but were borne: they were passive, not active instruments. That which is borne, is borne by no force of its own; it does not move and advance anything forward by its own labour.” Though certainly these holy men of God were not compelled against their wills, but wrote freely from their own hearts—-and in the epistles the apostles wrote freely their own thoughts—-yet they were so borne through the whole of it by the Holy Ghost that the result of it all was the inspired word of God.
How the Holy Ghost so wrought is really none of our concern. We have to do with the finished product, not with the process by which it was produced. In reality, we do not know how the Spirit of God wrought to produce the book, nor is it at all probable that he wrought always in the same manner, in the production of its various parts. We do know that the whole book is “God-inspired,” but God has not revealed to us the details of how that came about. On these points Louis Gaussen well says,
“Were we asked, then, how this work of divine inspiration has been accomplished in the men of God, we should reply, that we do not know; that it does not behove us to know;…
“And were we, further, called to say at least what the men of God experienced in their bodily organs, in their will, or in their understandings, while engaged in tracing the pages of the sacred book we should reply, that the powers of inspiration were not felt by all to the same degree, and that their experiences were not at all uniform; but we might add, that the knowledge of such a fact bears very little on the interests of our faith, seeing that, as respects that faith, we have to do with the book, and not with the man. It is the book that is inspired, and altogether inspired: to be assured of this ought to satisfy us.”
Now it is this God-inspired book which the Son of God assures us “cannot be broken.” And observe where and how he assures us of this. “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I said, I am the Son of God.” (John 10:34-36). He singles out one of the statements of the Old Testament which is the most likely to give offense—-the most likely to stumble even the godly—-and cites it without the slightest misgiving, and then drops a little parenthetical, incidental word, to assure us that however unlikely the thing may seem, as it is part of the Scriptures, it cannot be broken. It will stand, that is, however unlikely it may seem, however false it may appear to the best of human minds, however offensive it may be to good or evil men. All of the wisdom of the philosophers may be consigned to nothingness, kingdoms and dynasties may rise and fall, heaven and earth may pass away, but these God-inspired words cannot be broken. These are the words of the Holy Scriptures which we possess. This it is which the fact of inspiration secures to us—-not God-inspired men who lived and died two or three thousand years agone, but a God-inspired book which we hold in our hands.
“Holy Bible, BOOK DIVINE,
Precious Treasure, thou are mine!”
Glenn Conjurske