22-CHAPTER XVII INSPIRATION—LOGICAL IN VIEW OF THE USE OF HUMAN WORDS

CHAPTER XVII INSPIRATION—LOGICAL IN VIEW OF THE USE OF HUMAN WORDS WE believe in full inspiration because of the inner connection of thought and word. For the unmistakable expressing of thought there is necessary a careful choice of corresponding words. In human speech words are indeed first of all mere symbols and signs for conceptions or thoughts; for the thinking of man does not arise from words, but from indistinct notions, sensations, and conceptions. But this does not contradict the fact that everything spiritual, if it is to attain to clear unfolding of a real thought or "idea," reveals itself in words. A thought only becomes properly a conscious thought if out of the subconscious realm of sensation and the indeterminate impression of will and feeling a word is born. As only through the birth the germ of life becomes a man or a beast, so only through the word does the spiritual possibility or the spiritual sensation become a clear spiritual actuality. The word may be regarded as the body of the thought, giving the spirit "visibility" and form. Therefore if the word is blurred the thought is blurred and all becomes foggy and indistinct. The saying "spirit without word" is therefore a "word without spirit," that is, a spirit-less (meaningless) word. In reference to the inspiration of the Bible the foregoing means that if the thoughts are inspired then must the words also be so. Without inspiration of its words the thoughts of the Bible would be without distinct form. A certain change (variation) of the words always includes a more or less definite change of the thoughts. Now it is exactly the delicacies and shades and stresses which quite often constitute the special beauties of the words of the Bible. Luther justly said that "Christ did not say of His thoughts but of His words that they are spirit and life" (John 6:63), and J. A. Bengel declares that "All the words which they should speak and write were prescribed exactly to the prophets . . . with the ideas God at the same time gave them the words." The Prince of preachers, Spurgeon, said:"We contend for every word of the Bible and believe in the verbal, literal inspiration of Holy Scripture. Indeed, we believe there can be no other kind of inspiration. If the words are taken from us, the exact meaning is of itself lost." As Monod said:"The Bible is heaven in words." The fact that the writers of the New Testament when quoting the Old Testament do not always repeat verbally the Hebrew text¹ is not at all to be regarded as inexactness or as a refutation of the inspired character of Holy Scripture. For the proper and uniform Author of the whole Bible is the Holy Spirit. Now an author has the right to repeat his own statements in freer form, without being compelled to retain their exact wording. More­over he has the right to make a statement which may follow closely the contents of a former statement but which, to suit some new situation, contains variations. Now when quoting the Old Testament Christ and the Holy Spirit were taking words out of His own Book (1 Peter 1:11; 2 Peter 1:21; Hebrews 3:7).

Even in the region of human art true inspiration (using the word in the wider sense) creates for itself a corresponding form of expression which extends to the details. Handel, the great contemporary of J. S. Bach, whom the British people so honored as to bury him in Great Britain’s most renowned resting place, Westminster Abbey, and who composed his greatest work, the oratorio TheMessiah, in the incredibly short time of twenty-four days, has in like manner applied to this his work the word of the apostle Paul, "Whether I was in the body or out of the body I know not: God knows" (2 Corinthians 12:2). And Joseph Haydn, the great composer of "TheCreation," testified:"If I think on God and His grace in Christ my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and spring from the pen."

God’s acts and self-revelations do not float as bodiless ideas above all earthly happenings but are woven deep and directly into concrete history. Therefore spirit and word are not simply near to one another but are united organically and in one another.

Let us not be mistaken. We do not speak of a stiff, mechanical, dictated inspiration of the word. This would be completely un­worthy of a Divine revelation. A mechanical inspiration (automatic dictation) is found in occultism, spiritism, and therefore demonism, where the evil inspiring spirit works by setting aside (substitution) and excluding the human individuality. Divine revelation, however, has nothing to do with such suppression of the human personality. It will not sanction the annulling of the God-given laws of human consciousness, nor transforming the man into an automaton; it causes rather the intensifying and heightening than the excluding of the human faculties. "Light cannot produce darkness, but rather acuter sight." The Divine revelation desires fellowship between the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. It seeks the sanctifying and transfiguring of the personality and setting it to serve. It desires not passive "mediums" but active men of God, not dead tools but living, sanctified co-workers with God, not slaves but friends (John 15:15).

Therefore its inspiration is not mechanical but organic, not magical but divinely natural, not lifeless dictation but a living word wrought by the Spirit. Only so can God’s word be man’s word and man’s word God’s word. Only so can God’s word meet us as man’s word, that is, in the garment of human languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek. In a completely mysterious, inexplicable manner, in which it corresponds in general to the mystery of the Divine-human element in the whole kingdom of God, there are found in Holy Scripture the distinctions between the writers as to character, disposition, literary style, spiritual labor, with also the differences of their contemporary culture, surroundings and personal life history, but all this overruled and thereby thoroughly guarded by die inspiring Spirit of God.²

One need only compare the powerful style of an Amos or Isaiah with the mournful tones of the melancholy Jeremiah. How very different are the thought-structure and literary style of Paul from those of John. At the commencement of his Gospel Luke tells quite plainly as to his own intellectual work in compiling his account of the gospel. As to the surrounding civilizations, the Old Testament, especially in its arrangements of temple service and Divine worship, is full of references and parallels to the religious and cultural conditions of the ancient East; while the New Testament, viewed culturally and historically, is a thoroughly Hellenistic book, with hundreds of parallels and references to the mode of thought of the Greek-Roman world of the Mediterranean area. Paul especially, the evangelist to the great cities, has a pronounced Hellenistic picture-language from city life. Observe his numerous pictures and references from the Greek-Roman life, military, sport, amphitheatre, and law court.

Also the personal life history of the writer is reflected; for example, in the picture-language of the countryside of the shepherd Amos (Amos 7:14; Amos 2:13; Amos 3:4-6), in the prophetic utterances as to nations by the Minister of State, Daniel, in the portraying of the future priestly temple service by the priest Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:3 with chs. 40-48), in the summons to the building of the Temple, also through a priest (Zechariah).

Quite unmistakably there is thus a human factor in the Bible. But it must be clear to faith that this human factor does not consist in a measure of failure in the original text, that is, that the sacred text is a mixture of errors from personal, contemporary, historical, or scientific sources, but it (the human factor) arises from this interweaving of the Divine and human in the history. That the sacred writers as individuals were not on this account themselves free from mistakes is evident. As children of their time they shared with their contemporaries in numerous, especially scientific, errors. The Holy Scripture never attributes to them personally an absolute moral perfectness (see Peter in Galatians 2:11 ff.), or freedom from mistakes in natural knowledge. But when it is a matter of the special, strictly "official" service of the inspiration of the written Bible, then faith must postulate that here there is freedom from error in the original text. The decisive point is that the personal errors of the human instrument of inspiration did not obtrude into the sacred text itself.

It has been rightly pointed out that Scripture itself uses popular expressions in regard to astronomic, geologic, and other scientific matters, even as do most of our modern scholars in everyday intercourse. And it must be expressly said that the inspiration of the Spirit preserved the Biblical writers from declaring as true anything, historical or scientific, that in fact is false. " Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. What preserved him so that when writing the Pentateuch he did not accept the ancient Egyptian chronology, which later Manetho laid down definitely in his writings, and which began 30,000 years before Christ? What influenced Daniel, who was skilled in Chaldean science, to shut his ears to the monstrous Chaldean fables as to the creation of the world? Paul was acquainted with the best science of his time. Why do we find nothing in his speeches or letters similar to Augustine’s scornful rejection of the teaching that there are Antipodes or to the opinion of Ambrose, that the sun draws water up to itself that it may thereby cool and refresh itself from its extraordinary heat?"

It is indeed the mystery of the inspiration of the Bible that it allowed its human instruments to be thoroughly active, yet never­theless watched over and guarded each thought and each word so that the result is an absolutely trustworthy Divine Word free from error and fully interpenetrated by the Spirit. "God," said Dr. Saphir, "without whom no sparrow falls from the roof, and whose wisdom is declared by the smallest of His works, was surely able to watch over the utterance of Scripture; and microscopically to search into the wonder of His word is less the sign of a small mind than much rather of a thoughtful spirit." In all this we must distinguish clearly between revelation, illumination, and inspiration. Revelation is the uncovering of Divine mysteries, to the understanding of which illumination leads. The sacred writers did not need that to be "revealed" which they had experienced with eyes and ears or which they could get to know by inquiry (Luke 1:1-3). In such case the Spirit of God used their knowledge and purified it from all error.

Biblical inspiration then is that further activity of the Holy Spirit through which He mysteriously filled the active human spirit of the Biblical writers and guided and overruled them, so that there arose an infallible Spirit-wrought writing, a sacred record, a Book of God, with which the Spirit of God evermore organically unites Himself. Of course, clearly all these remarks attach to the original texts of the Bible. The number of variant readings in later text transmission is not small. Yet no one need be alarmed.

Dr. B. Kennicott in his edition of the Hebrew Bible (VeinsTestamentumHebraicum, published at Oxford) deals with consonantal variants in more than six hundred manuscripts. These have, according to Dr. R. D. Wilson, about 284 millions of letters. Among these letters there are about 900,000 variants, 750,000 of which are the quite trivial variation of "w" and "y". So there is, as Dr. Wilson remarks, only one variant for 316 letters and, apart from the insignificant "w" and "y" variations, even only one variant for no less than 1,580 letters (comp. Professor I.K. Skilton, TheInfallibleWord. Philadelphia-London 1946, pp. 139, 140). In particular, the accuracy of the Jewish Massoretes (copyists, from Heb. massora=transmission) proves that the sacred book of the Jews is the most carefully transmitted book of all antiquity. For preserving the correct consonantal text each copyist had to accept, among other, the following rules: He counted exactly how often one and the same word occurs in the whole Old Testament or in parts thereof. He made notes of how similarly sounding sentences differed from one another. He counted how often one and the same word comes at the beginning, middle, and end of a verse. It was ascertained which was the middle letter of the Torah (the law); indeed, at the end of the Old Testament it was shown how many times each letter came in the whole book. The high quality of the traditional (Massoretic) text has been newly established by comparison with the manuscript of Isaiah found in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea. This comes from the second or first century B.C., and so is about a thousand years older than the most ancient of the previously known manuscripts of the Old Testament. These last come from 900 to 1000 years after Christ.

Comparison has indeed shown that the number of variations is certainly not small. But many of them are only different orthography or older forms of the endings of the same Hebrew words. But above all this, exact comparison has demonstrated yet again the eminently reliable work which the Massoretes and their predecessors of the early centuries after Christ put into their copying of the sacred text. From them we derive the Hebrew text which is the basis of our present editions of the Old Testament. As regards the New Testament, according to Professor Skilton, the 200,000 variants in words distribute themselves among more than 4,000 manuscripts of earlier and later date, a part only fragmentary or very small, a part larger or almost complete. But a single complete or nearly complete New Testament manuscript contains almost 150,000 words. This shows that the percentage of the variants in their relationship to the whole text must certainly not be over-emphasized.

Dr. F. J. A. Hort was one of the most distinguished investigators of Biblical manuscripts. He was joint-Editor with Bishop B. F. Westcott of the very best edition of the Greek text of the New Testament. According to them "the proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is no less than seven eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth, there­fore, formed in great part by changes of order or other compara­tive trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism."

Speaking of this small part—this remaining eighth—Dr. Warfield, another authority on New Testament textual investi­gation, states that 95% of all variations in the New Testament text "have so little support that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur." Indeed, with absolute certainty it can be affirmed that not a single complete sentence of the original text has disappeared from the manuscripts. For our faith all these thousand readings have not the slightest significance. Dr. Hort and Dr. Westcott in their epoch-making Introduction to their standard work, TheNewTestamentintheOriginalGreek even declare:"What can in any sense be called substantial varia­tion is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than athousandthpart of the entire text."³ So also states Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, a front-rank authority in the English-speaking world in the field of New Testament textual criticism:"The authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established. . . . The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries."

Nevertheless it is true that God has suffered the introduction of certain faults in the copying of the sacred text. The history of the formation of the texts of the Old and New Testaments shows this beyond contradiction. We need only refer to the critical apparatus of the Nestle Greek Testament, as well as to the corresponding references in all scientific commentaries and editions of the original Greek text. A widespread objection against belief in full inspiration is drawn from this. It is said that the whole question of full inspiration is in consequence shown in advance to be more or less fruitless, more historical and theoretical than in any sense practical, more a question of the past than the present. The original texts of the Bible are in any case no more available. Also, that no one whose judgment is to be taken at all seriously will assert that the translation he uses, however careful and distinguished it may be, or in whatever language, is in all details without mistakes, absolutely perfect and unexceptionally clear. Indeed, that this last cannot be said without limitation of even the very best of our existing ancient texts of the Hebrew and Greek Bible. Only evident ignorance of the actual facts of textual history could assert otherwise. In view of all this, so it is asked, does it not follow that there is norealdifference whether one does now believe in a full inspiration of the original texts or not, it only being pre-supposed that we do in general acknowledge Holy Scripture to be fundamentally God’s Word, even if, under the circumstances, it were linked from the beginning with certain human imperfections? It is a clear fact that no one today has the actual original text. Our answer runs:

We do not at all underestimate the weight of this objection. A mathematical refutation is not possible, nor at all necessary. Even as in our relation to the "living Word," Christ, so here in our relation to the written Word, the Bible, we find ourselves entirely on the ground of personal faith. At the same time faith sets against this objection quite definite and clear postulates. We point the reader to the seven chief arguments of our discussion concerning the inspired character of the Bible as the God-given record of the history of salvation.⁵ Neverthelesswemustassertwithemphasis: There is a vast difference between the two attitudes!

It is something distinctly different whether one declares:

This difference is consequently of the highest significance, and precisely in reference to our present attitude to the Bible. Therefore, and for this very reason, he who believes in the full inspiration, of the original documents will doubly endorse scientific labor on the history of the text and its investigation. Indeed, the more we reject unbelieving criticism as to the contents of the Bible the more we endorse critical inquiry as to its text. Precisely because of such a believing attitude we wish to know with the utmostpossibleexactness what God originally said in His perfect written Word. And in general, there is further difference whether one, in digging a foundation comes at last to a solid, unbroken, vast stretch of rock or only to a subsoil which, indeed, in a high measure is firm but yet in certain places is mixed with sand. Moreover, under given circumstances, to one who doubts full inspiration, each according to his subjective attitude—one more, the other less—even such longer or shorter passages of Scripture may appear as not completely binding, though textual criticism has proved them to be undoubtedly genuine. To the question why God permitted the original manuscripts of the sacred writers to be lost we reply, first: Were they still in existence they would by some be doubtless honored as relics, and would have indeed been almost worshipped, as the Israelites did with the serpent of brass, which in a similar way had been originally connected with a wondrous work of God (Numbers 21:8; 2 Kings 18:4). And secondly: In any case doubt would never have been silenced as to whether these in fact were or were not the original manuscripts. So certainty would never have been reached by the presence of those original writings. They could rather have been a danger of religious confusion than a reliable help. Thus there lies Divine wisdom in the absence of the original manuscripts.⁶

Notes

¹ For example, Hebrews 10:5 "body" with Psalms 40:6 "ears"; also Acts 15:16 with Amos 9:2; Amos 9:12; or Hebrews 13:5 with Deuteronomy 31:6.

²Concerning this interweaving of the eternal and temporal, and the uniform Divine-human character of the inspiration of the Bible, see The Dawn of World Redemption, pp. 144ff.

³The New Testament in the Original Greek, 1882. Appendix Introduction, p. 2.

⁴F.G. Kenyon, The Bible and Archaeology, 1940, p. 228. F.F. Bruce (University of Sheffield), one of the most widely read men of our generator in the field of Biblical history, archaeology and literature, says: "There is no greater authority in the field of New Testament textual criticism than Sir Frederic Kenyon" The testimony of such a scholar and specialist as Kenyon is therefore in our connection all the more worthy of consideration. - F.G. Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts. London 1939, p. 23. F.F. Bruce, M.A., The Books and the Parchments. London 1950, p. 180.

⁵pp. 100 to 136. The seven are placed together in the Table of Contents.

⁶Moreover, what if a holder of one or other of those manuscripts had cunningly falsified them and so had been able to claim Scriptural authority for deadly error? [Trans.]