The inspiration of the Bible: Protestant Views on the Inspiration of the Bible.
A. At the Beginning of the Reformation
(1) As a necessary consequence of their attitude towards the Bible, which they had taken as their only rule of Faith, the Protestants were led at the very outset to go beyond the ideas of a merely passive inspiration, which was commonly received in the first half of the sixteenth century. Not only did they make no distinction between inspiration and revelation, but Scripture, both in its matter and style, was considered as revelation itself. In it God spoke to the reader just as He did to the Israelites of old from the mercy-seat. Hence that kind of cult which some protestants of today call "Bibliolatry." In the midst of the incertitude, vagueness, and antinomies of those early times, when the Reformation like Luther himself, was trying to find a way and a symbol, one can discern a constant preoccupation, that of indissolubly joining religious belief to the very truth of God by means of His written Word. The Lutherans who devoted themselves to composing the Protestant theory of inspiration were Melanchthon, Chemzitz, Quenstedt, Calov. Soon, to the inspiration of the words was added that of the vowel points of the present Hebrew text. This was not a mere opinion held by the two Buxtorfs, but a doctrine defined, and imposed under pain of imprisonment, and exile, by the Confession of the Swiss Churches, promulgated in 1675. These dispositions were abrogated in 1724. The Purists held that in the Bible there are neither barbarisms nor solecisms; that the Greek of the New Testament is as pure as that of the classical authors. It was said, with a certain amount of truth, that the Bible had become a sacrament for the Reformers.
(2) In the seventeenth century began the controversies which, in course of time, were to end in the theory of inspiration now generally accepted by Protestants. The two principles which brought about the Reformation were precisely the instruments of this revolution; on the one side, the claim for every human soul of a teaching of the Holy Ghost, which was immediate and independent of of every exterior rule; on the other, the right of private judgment, or autonomy of individual reasoning, in reading and studying the Bible. In the name of the first principle, on which Zwingli had insisted more than Luther and Calvin, the Pietists thought to free themselves from the letter of the Bible which fettered the action of the Spirit. A French Huguenot, Seb. Castellion (d. 1563), had already been bold enough to distinguish between the letter and the spirit; according to him the spirit only came from God, the letter was no more than a "case, husk, or shell of the spirit."
The Quakers, the followers of Swedenborg, and the Irvingites were to force this theory to its utmost limits; real revealation -- the only one which instructs and sanctifies -- was that produced under the immediate influence of the Holy Ghost. While the Pietists read their Bible with the help of interior illumination alone, others, in even greater numbers, tried to get some light from philological and historical researches which had received their decisive impulse from the Renaissance. Every facility was assured to their investigations by the principle of freedom of private judgment; and of this they took advantage. The conclusions obtained by this method could not be fatal to the theory of inspiration by revelation. In vain did its partisans say that God's will had been to reveal to the Evangelists in four different ways the words which, in reality, Christ had uattered only once; that the Holy Ghost varied His style accoring as he was dictation to Isaias or to Amos -- such an explanation was nothing short of an avowal of the ability to meet the facts alleged against them. As a matter of fact, Faustus Socinus (d. 1562) had already held that the words and, in general, the style of Scripture were not inspired. Soon afterwards, George Calixtus, Episcopius, and Grotinus made a clear distinction between inspiration and revelation. According to the last-named, nothing was revealed but the prophecies and the words of Jesus Christ, everything else was only inspired. Still further, he reduces inspiration to a pious motion of the soul. The Dutch Arminian school then represented by J. LeClerc, and, in France, by L. Capelle, Daillé, Blondel, and other, followed the same course. Although they kept current terminology, they made it apparent, nevertheless, that the formula, "The Bible is the Word of God," was already about to be replaced by "The Bible contains the Word of God." Morever, the term word was to be taken in an equivocal sense.
B. Biblical Rationalism
In spite of all, the Bible was still held as the criterion of religious belief. To rob it of this prerogative was the work which the eighteenth century set itself to accomplish. In the attack then made on the Divine inspiration of the Scriptures three classes of assailants are to be distinguished.
(1) The Naturalist philosophers, who were the forerunners of modern unbelief; the English Deists (Toland, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Morgan); the German Rationalists (Reimarus, Lessing); the French Encyclopedists (Voltaire, Bayle) strove by every means, not forgetting abuse and sarcasm, to prove how absurd it was to claim a Divine origin for a book in which all the blemishes and errors of human writings are to be found.
(2) The critics applied to the Bible, the methods adopted for the study of profane authors. They, from the literary and historic point of view, reached the same conclusion as the infidel philosophers; but they thought they could remain believers by distinguishing in the Bible between the religious and the profane element. The latter they gave up to the free judgment of historical criticism; the former they pretended to uphold, but not without restrictions, which profoundly changed its import. According to Semler, the father of Biblical Rationalism, Christ and the Apostles accommodated themselves to the false opinions of their contemporaries; according to Kant and Eichborn, everything which does not agree with sane reason must be regarded as Jewish invention. Religion restricted within the limits of reason -- that was the point which the critical movement initiated by Grotius and LeClerc had in common with the philosophy of Kant and the theology of Wegscheider. The dogma of plenary inspiration dragged down with it, in its final ruin, the very notion of revelation.
(3) These philosophical historical controversiers about Scriptural authority caused great anxiety in religious minds. There were many who then sought their salvation in one of the principles put forward by the early Reformers, notably by Calvin: to wit, that truly Christian certitude came from the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Man had but to sound his own soul in order to find the essence of religion, which was not a science, but a life, a sentiment. Such was the verdict of the Kantian philosophy then in vogue. It was useless, from the religious point of view, to discuss the extrinsic claims of the Bible; far better was the moral experience of its intrinsic worth. The Bible itself was nothing but a history of the religious experiences of the Prophets, of Christ and His Apostles, of the Synagogue and of the Church. Truth and Faith came not from without, but sprang from the Christian conscience as their source. Now this conscience was awakened and sustained by the narration of the religious experiences of those who had gone before. What mattered, then, the judgment passed by criticism on the historical truth of this narration, if it only evoked a salutary emotion in the soul? Here the useful alone was true. Not the text, but the reader was inspired. Such, in its broad outlines, was the final stage of a movement which Spener, Wesley, the Moravian Brethren, and, generally, the Pietists initiated, but of which Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was to be the theologian and the propagator in the nineteenth century.
C. Present Conditions
(1) The traditional views, however, were not abandoned without resistance. A movement back to the old idea of the theopneustia, including verbal inspiration, set in nearly everywhere in the first half of the nineteenth century. This reaction was called the Réveil. Among its principal promoters must be mentioned the Swiss L. Gaussen, W. Lee, in England, A. Dlorner in Germany, and, more recently, W. Rohnert. their labours at first evoked interest and sympathy, but were destined to fail before the efforts of a counter-reaction which sought to complete the work of Schleiermacher. it was led by Alex, Vinet, Edm. Scherer, and E. Rabaud in France; Rich. Rothe and especially Ritschl in Germany; S.T. Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, and Matthew Arnold in England. According to them, the ancient dogma of the theopneustia is not to be reformed, but given up altogether. In the heat of the struggle, however, university professors like E. Reuss, freely used the historical method; without denying inspiration they ignored it.
(2) Abstracting from accidental differences, the present opinion of the so-called progressive Protestants (who profess, nevertheless, to remain sufficiently orthodox), as represented in Germany by B. Weiss, R.F. Grau, and H Cremer, in England by W. Sanday, C. Gore, and most Anglican scholars, may be reduced to the following heads:
(a) the purely passive, mechanical theopneustia, extending to the very words, is no longer tenable.
(b) Inspiration had degrees: suggestion, direction, elevation, and superintendency. All the sacred writers have not been equally inspired.
(c) Inspiration is personal that is, given directly to the sacred writer to enlighten, stimulate, and purify his faculties. This religious enthusiasm, like every great passion, exalts the powers of the soul; it belongs, therefore, to the spiritual order, and is not merely a help given immediately to the intellect. Biblical inspiration, being a seizure of the ntire man by the Divine virtue, does not differ essentially from the gift of the Holy Spirit imparted to all the faithful.
(d) It is, to say the least, an improper use of language to call the sacred text itself inspired. At any rate, this text can, and actually does, err not only in profane matters, but also in those appertaining more or less to religion, since the Prophets and Christ Himself, notwithstanding His Divinity, did not possess absolute infallibility. The Bible is a historical document which taken in its entirety contains the authentic narrative of revelation, the tidings of salvation.
(e) Revealed truth, and, consequently, the Faith we derive from it are not founded on the Bible, but on Christ himself; it is from Him and through Him that the written text acquires definitely all its worth. But how are we to reach the historical reality of Jesus -- His teaching, His institutions -- if Scripture, as well as Tradition, offers us no faithful picture? The question is a painful one. To establish the inspiration and Divine authority of the Bible the early Reformers had substituted for the teaching of the Church internal criteria, notably the interior testimony of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual efficacy of the text. Most Protestant theologians of the present day agree in declaring these criteria neither scientific nor traditional; and at any rate they consider them insufficient. They profess, consequently, to supplement them, if not to replace them altogether, by a rational demonstration of the autheticity and substantial trustworthiness of the Biblical text. The new method may well provide a starting-point for the fundamental theology of Revelation, but it cannot supply a complete justification of the Canon, as it has been so far maintained in the Churches of the Reformation. Anglican theologians, too, like Gore and Sanday, gladly appeal tot he dogmatic testimony of the collective conscience of the universal Church; but, in so doing, they break with one of the first principles of the Reformation, the autonomy of the individual conscience.
(3) The position of liberal Protestants (i.e. those who are independent of all dogma) may be easily defined. The Bible is just like other texts, neither inspired nor the rule of Faith. Religious belief is quite subjective. So far is it from depending on the dogmatic or even historical authority of a book that it gives to it, itself, its real worth. When religious texts, the Bible included, are in question, history -- or, at least, what people generally believe to historical -- is largely a product of faith, which has transfigured the facts. The authors of the Bible may be called inspired, that is endowed with a superior perception of religious matters; but this religious enthusiasm does not differ essentially from that which animated Homer and Plato. This is the denial of everything supernatural, in the ordinary sense of the word, as well in the Bible as in religion in general. Nevertheless, those who hold this theory defend themselves from the charge of infidelity, especially repudiating the cold Rationalism of the last century, which was made up exclusively of negations. They think that they remain sufficiently Christian by adhering to the religious sentiment to which Christ has given the most perfect expression yet known. Following Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, they profess a religion freed from all philosophical intellectualism and from every historical proof. Facts and formulae of the past have, in their eyes, only a symbolic and a transient value. Such is the new theology spread by the best-known professors and writers especially in Germany -- historians, exegetes, philologists, or even pastors of souls. We need only mention Harnack, H.J. Holtzmann, Fried. Delitzsch, Cheyne, Campbell, A. Sabatier, Albert and John Réville. it is to this transformation of Christianity that "Modernism", condemned by the Encyclical Pascendi Gregis, owes its origin.
In modern Protestantism the Bible has decidedly fallen from the primacy which the Reformation had so loudly conferred upon it. The fall is a fatal one, becoming deeper from day to day; and without remedy, since it is the logical consequence of the fundamental principle put forward by Luther and Calvin. Freedom of examination was destined sooner or later to produce freedom of thought.