RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Inspiration
tion is attributed to them. As to the relation between the divine and human factors, Luther is equally certain that the Holy Ghost is the original author, and that the writers are to be known by their human characteristics and have put their own hearts into their work. Theoretically his teaching on this point is not to be distinguished from the traditional conception. For Calvin, too, the Bible is to be reverenced; the Holy Ghost is its author, though sometimes " he uses a rough and unpolished style." But this does not prevent Calvin from recognizing inaccuracies and seeing, with Luther, the expression of the human minds of the writers. Chemnitz is the first Lutheran theologian to attempt a systematic doctrine on the subject; but he is arguing against those who equally acknowledge the authority of the Bible, and the question of the nature and method of inspiration is not for him an urgent one. Selnecker includes inspiration under the head of revelation, and defines it as " a secret inbreathing by which the holy patriarchs and prophets were divinely taught many things "; but he places this process in unmistakable analogy with the indwelling and operation of the Spirit in other believers. Gerhard's full discussion of Scripture in general contains no more precise definition. But the more earnest these authors become in attempting to confirm the authority of the Bible, the less often are met concessions like those of Bugenhagen, that the Evangelists wrote " what to them seemed best," and that errors of the Septuagint passed over into the text of the New Testament.
When it became necessary to argue not only
against Rome, but against syncretism, and Calixtus,
in approximation to Roman Catholic
5. Post- theologians, distinguished between in- Reformation spiration in the strict sense, in regard
Develop- to the essential truths of salvation, ment. and a directio divina in regard to those things " which came by sensation or were otherwise known " for which no revelation but only guidance was needed, the time had come for a more rigid definition, for an assurance against the dangers which seemed to threaten the Bible among the very men who claimed to deduce their belief from it. Calovius was the founder of the new doctrine intended to serve this purpose. According to him, inspiration is the form of revelation. Nothing can be in the Scriptures " which was not to the writers divinely suggested and inspired." The doctrine was pushed to its extreme consequences by the Buxtorfs, who asserted the inspiration of even the Hebrew vowels, and by Voet, who made the same claim for the punctuation. All this was absolutely new. If the idea of ecstasy had been included, it might have seemed a revival of the man tic theory of Philo and the old apologists; but the lack of this conception made the process purely mechanical, not only without analogy, but in direct contradiction to the other operations of the Holy Spirit. The self-preparation of the writers, required on the ecstatic theory, was no longer necessary; nor was there any place for the personal witness which the apostles claim to give. The logical consequences of the doctrine were not, indeed, drawn by its supporters, but they are none
the less inevitable. Against this hard and fast theory the freer view of the Roman Catholic theologians (such as Bellarmine, Canus, and Simon) was less effective than it might have been on account of their tendency to subordinate Scripture to the Church; and little more followed the maintenance of a less rigid theory by the Arminians and some French and German Calvinists. The first marked influence was exerted by Pietism, with its personal experience of the workings of the Spirit, in which it was joined by some kindred souls among the English dissenters, such as Baxter and Doddridge. By degrees the official theology of Protestantism took a freer attitude, and the human factor in inspiration assumed a new prominence.
The modern development of the doctrine may be
traced partly from Schleiermacher and partly from
the school of Bengel. The former
6. Modern emphasized the special spirit of the
Develop- Scriptures, of which rationalism had ment. altogether lost sight; but this spirit was to him not the Spirit of God, independent of humanity, but his own conception of the term " Holy Spirit " — the common spirit of the Christian Church, the source of all its spiritual gifts and good works, as of all its processes of thought. Even the apocryphal writings are inspired, in so far as they show any trace of connection with the life of this spirit. The Old Testament, on the other hand, as the product not of the Christian but of the Jewish spirit, shares neither the dignity nor the inspiration of the New. The main emphasis is laid upon the human writers, who, by reason of their relation to Christ, are the authorized original witnesses to Christian truth. Schleiermacher's doctrine of inspiration is thus both formally and materially the exact opposite of the doctrine developed by the seventeenth-century theologians. It represents, however, a distinct and permanent progress, in the qualification of inspiration according to the period of history in which it appears, in the value placed upon the human factor for the attestation and communication of divine truth, in the proper placing of inspiration in the uniform and yet manifold working of the Holy Spirit, and of the literary work produced under its influence in the total of the authors' official activity. The first of these points, the relation of inspiration to history, is the one in which Schleiermacher's services were the most important. This is a point of departure for the modern development of the doctrine of inspiration, as represented by Rothe and Hofmann — though the connection is not always directly with Schleiermacher, but partially through the school of Bengel, whose most useful result is that formulated in 1793 by Menken in these words: " The Bible is no dogmatic treatise . it is much rather a historical, harmonious whole. All that it teaches, it teaches either immediately in history, or upon a basis of history, with its foundation and its interpretation in history." Space forbids to trace here the gradual development through the writings of individual modern authors who have handled this subject. As a rule they have renounced the theory of the direct operation of the Holy Spirit on the creation of the Scriptural books. They have replaced the
Inspiration