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The Inspiration of the Bible

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 31, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 55.

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The Inspiration of the Bible

By L. L. Caviness

L. L. CAVINESS
The inspiration of the Bible is one of the most vital doctrines of Christianity, yet there are some, even among professed members of the Christian church, who are either undermining this fundamental doctrine or allowing their belief to rest on false grounds.
“On what ground do we believe that the Bible is inspired? Some will give the ready answer, ‘We believe that the Bible is inspired because the church says so.’ . . . When we say that we accept the inspiration of the Bible because the church declares it, we are very much disposed to listen to what the church says on other things, rather than to what the inspired Book says; for we instinctively feel that the authority which establishes our authority must have more weight than the authority that is established. . . . Others there are who, when asked why they believe the Bible to be inspired, would reply: ‘It is because we have found it to be so, practically; by reading it we found our way to God; by searching it the will of God has become clearer to us; by living according to its precepts we have proved that they are divine.’”—“Inspiration and the Bible,” Robert F. Horton, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1891, pages 4, 5.
When we come to the nature of this inspiration, we find numerous theories. It is well for all to differentiate clearly between the fact of inspiration and the diversity of theories as to its nature, which are held by equally earnest and sincere Christians.
“There are, it is well known, many theories of inspiration. But whatever view or theory of inspiration men may hold, plenary, verbal, dynamical, mechanical, superintendent, or governmental, they refer either to the inspiration of the men who wrote or to the inspiration of what is written. In one word, they imply throughout the work of God the Holy Ghost, and are bound up with the concomitant ideas of authority, veracity, reliability, and truth divine.”—“The Fundamentals,” Testimony Publishing Co., Vol. I, page 105.
The following two quotations will express the two views, Mr. Stowe holding that the men were inspired, and Bishop Wordsworth the writing:—
“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired, it is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired; it is the men who wrote the Bible that were inspired. Inspiration acts not on the man’s words, not on the man’s thoughts, but on the man himself; so that he, by his own spontaneity, under the impulse of the Holy Ghost, conceives certain thoughts and gives utterance to them in certain words, both the words and the thoughts receiving the peculiar impress of the mind which conceived and uttered them.”—“Origin and History of the Books of the Bible,” C. E. Stowe, Hartford Publishing Co., Hartford, Conn., 1867, page 19.
“We are firmly persuaded that there are not any, even the least, errors or inaccuracies in the New Testament. . . . It is indeed true that the apostles and evangelists, whose instrumentality was used by the Holy Spirit in dictating Scripture to the world, were not infallible in practice. They were men, and liable to err. . . . In fact, the human fallibility of those persons by whose instrumentality Holy Scripture was written, and the inerrancy of Holy Scripture itself, written by their instrumentality, constitute together the very essence of inspiration.”—“New Testament,” Bishop Wordsworth, 6th edition, 1871, Vol. I, page 19.
The New Testament itself gives support to verbal inspiration:—
“1. Heb. 12:27. The writer of this epistle, quoting from Haggai 2:6, elaborates an important argument concerning the future judgment from the simple words ‘yet once more.’”
“2. Luke 20:37. Here the Lord Jesus proves to the Sadducees the doctrine of the resurrection by reminding them of the tense used by God when he spoke to Moses, centuries after the patriarch had been dead; namely, that he did not say, ‘I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ but ‘I am.’”
“3. Gal. 3:16. Here the Holy Spirit, writing by the apostle Paul, proves the necessity of simple faith in Christ apart from the works of the law, by calling attention to a single letter, s, in the Old Testament; namely, ‘He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.’”—“All About the Bible,” Sidney Collett, New York, Fleming H. Revell Co., page 82.
Let us next consider the method of this inspiration.
“The divine word which the Bible reveals to us passes through four successive forms before reaching us in a translation. First, it was from all eternity in the mind of God. Next, it was passed by him into the mind of man. In the third place, under the operation of the Holy Ghost, and by a mysterious process, it passed from the prophets’ thoughts, into the shapes and symbols of an articulate language; it took shape in words. Finally, after having undergone this first translation, alike important and inexplicable, men have reproduced and counter-chalked it, by a new translation, in passing it from one human language into another human language. Of these four operations, the three first are divine; the fourth alone is human and fallible.”—“Theopneustia; the Bible; Its Divine Origin and Inspiration,” L. Gaussen, Cincinnati, Cranston & Stowe, page 155.
It seems very clear that verbal inspiration can apply only to the documents as they were first written by their several authors. With this in mind, we are not surprised at errors in translations, or even at discrepancies in existing Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
“Various readings are properly attributable to errors of copyists, or the designed work of revisers in transmission.”
“The holy revelation was committed to fallible men, and though it is true that God might have miraculously preserved the original autographs of the inspired writers, or restrained the various scribes from error in transcription, he has not thought fit to do so. That he might have thought fit to make fallible men infallible is true, but that he has done so is not true. No book was ever so solemnly and sacredly guarded from error and corruption as the Hebrew Bible, yet it is evident that the Bible has not been transmitted to us in the exact words in which it left the hands of the inspired writers. It is clear that the books have been exposed to the ordinary causes which deteriorate the text. The substance is the same, and the words in transmission have been so guarded that, however they may have been varied in transcription, the value of the substance has never been touched.”—“The Bible and Its Transmission,” Walter Arthur Copinger, London, Henry Sotheran & Co., 1897, pages 1–3.
The prophecies of the Bible are one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of the Bible, as H. L. Hastings, the anti-infidel writer, points out:—
“The Book, to my mind, bears the marks of inspiration in the foresight which it exhibits. This Book foretells things. You cannot do that. You cannot tell what will be next year, or next week. ‘The spirits’ cannot tell who will be the next president, or governor, or emperor. They may tell a great many things which are past. They may tell you who your grandmother was, and may copy the inscription on your grandfather’s gravestone, and may tell things which are written in the family record. They may reveal many things in the past,—for the devil knows about the past,—but they cannot foretell the future. I did hear of one spiritual medium who foretold her own death, and she died within a few hours; but when they got the stomach pump, they pumped out of her stomach poison enough to kill two or three. That kind of prophecy requires no omniscient foresight. . . . The revelations of prophecy are facts which exhibit the divine omniscience. So long as Babylon is in heaps; so long as Nineveh lies empty, void, and waste; so long as Egypt is the basest of kingdoms; so long as Tyre is a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea; so long as Israel is scattered among all nations; so long as Jerusalem is trodden underfoot of the Gentiles; so long as the great empires of the world march on in their predicted course,—so long we have proof that one omniscient mind dictated the predictions of that Book, and ‘prophecy came not in old time by the will of man.’”—“Will the Old Book Stand?” H. L. Hastings, pages 18, 19.