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The Inspiration
of the Scriptures: Part II
John Macleod
John Macleod (1872-1948) was Principal of the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh. This address was published in The Evangelical Quarterly (1935).
The written and the Incarnate Word are so alike the one to the other. The Incarnate Word was very God and very Man, and He was the sinless One. So too the written word is the very word of those who wrote it, and at the same time the very word of God Who made use of them. They were the penmen of scripture. They themselves were, to quote the word of Dr. John Duncan, the "men-pens" of the Holy Ghost. In the fullness of their individuality with all their gifts of style and expression He made use of them. There is mystery here without a doubt. It is not, however, a mystery that is unparalleled or unexampled. We have an illustration of it in the working of the efficacious grace in which we believe. The Lord, the Holy Ghost, works in the regenerate the faith of the Gospel and the repentance that is unto life. It is not the Spirit that believes or repents. It is the believer or the penitent. They exercise faith. It is the Spirit that works it. They exercise godly sorrow. It is the Spirit who is its author. He works all and they are the agents in it all. It is of His inworking and enabling that they repent and believe. But the faith that they exercise and the repentance by which they turn from sin to God are both the personal activity of the new-born soul. He worketh all their works in them and to Him belongs the undivided glory of them. Yet the works are theirs. His working does not overwhelm or obliterate their personality. It quickens the soul when dead in sin and it upholds the soul that it has brought alive. In the free exercise of a will that His grace has renewed they yield themselves in obedience of faith.
Now to those who hold with us this, the faith of the Reformed Churches, it sounds simply absurd to hear men describe the doctrine of inspiration as though it were an impossible thing for a transcendent sovereign God so to use a man in the full and free exercise of his faculties as an instrument of His own hand for making known His mind and will. Why, men who play well on an instrument may harp well or pipe well. The music of the pipe and of the harp may be in perfect harmony yet the hearer can tell the one from the other. They are both the music of the players who are pleased to make the one of them the pipe and the other of them the harp his instrument of music. A man's writing varies with the pen that he employs. That pen may be hard or soft. It may be broad or fine and according to its make will the script be that it is employed to produce. Yet you find men object to the doctrine of inspiration that there can be nothing in it because we can tell the style or expression of John or Paul or Isaiah.
It is of the essence of stupidity not to see that God Almighty is not confined to a dead level of monotony when He is pleased to speak to His creatures in His written word. To say that inspiration of necessity suppresses the distinctive features of human expression when men are under its influence is to refuse to acknowledge that God is able to use men in the full and free exercise of their distinct individuality. It sets unwarrantable bounds to the power of Almighty God. Yet men maintain that the doctrine of inspiration which teaches that there is the concursus of the Divine and the human is an impossibility. They hold that if the written word is wholly of God it can be only by His express dictation that this can be secured, or that He brings it about by making the writers so many machines. They denounce it as mechanical inspiration. They evidently think that they can tell what God can and what He cannot do in these things. So they take upon themselves to say that in the case when the written product is wholly divine it must be the effect of mere mechanical activity of the human writer.
Now in these things it becomes men to be modest and not to claim to know more than they know indeed. We who hold to the pervasive Divine character of Holy Writ are not bound to say how otherwise than by mechanical control such a result is brought about. The mode of the divine activity may, nay must, be to us an inscrutable mystery. We are not to outstep our bounds and to lay limits on the free Sovereignty of the Lord God and say - "Thou must do this and Thou must not do that". It is the bloated pride of an unhumbled heart that will utter words of such a kind. He gives no account of many of his matters and we dare not summon Him to our bar before whose bar we must ourselves stand. Men may press us to define what the inspiration is which brings it about that the words of men are at the same time, and fully, the words of God. We might answer that we are not minded to pry into the mysterious mode of the Divine co-agency and controlling agency in producing the Holy Scriptures: That operation of Divine power is one that results in a Book which on the one side is altogether the Word of the men who spoke and wrote it, while on the other side it is wholly the Word of the Living God Who made use of the writers as His instruments.
We like to consider inspiration as that exercise and just that exercise of divine controlling and determining power which secures that those who are its instruments wrote the very Word of God. Men have spoken of guidance and control and direction and superintendence and suggestion as modes of inspiration. It may quite possibly be that these words may be competently applied to the character of its work. But when we go into these things we are going beyond our depth. We who cannot tell how soul and body co-exist and go to make up our full person are overstepping the bounds of our province when we speculate as to how God is working in bringing such a product as Holy Writ into being. Let it be enough for us to recognize what it is and what it claims to be and leave it with Him to bring His counsel to pass as seems best to His unsearchable wisdom.
A full inspiration extends not only to the substance but to the form, not only to the thought but to the expression of Holy Scripture. In other words the inspiration that is responsible for producing the written Word of God is at once full and verbal. In the Downgrade controversy in which Mr. Spurgeon took part in his later years, he said that the attacks that were then so common on verbal inspiration were but the verbal form of the attack on inspiration. In saying so he hit the nail on the head. Those who are content to learn their doctrine of inspiration from the statements, teaching, and phenomena of Scripture itself will not be slow to acknowledge that the very words, which are but the vesture of the thought, are God's chosen Words. Thought and expression are interlinked and when Paul laid stress on the word "Seed" in his Epistle to the Galatians, or when our Lord quoted Psa_110:1-7 to ask how Messiah could be David's son when David in the Spirit spoke of Him as his Lord, or when he answered the Sadducees by referring them to the words spoken from the Burning Bush we are confronted with Scripture's own use of Scripture. And this teaches us the stress which it lays upon the very words that it employs.
Again when men refer to Scripture quotations as not verbally accurate they forget that the Supreme Author of Scripture is surely free to express Himself as He pleases. He knows His own thought and how to utter it. May He alone not vary the expression of His thought, the thought remaining the same, as He sees right?
When we are told that our doctrine of inspiration can hold good only of the autographs of Holy Writ we might answer that it is the whole aim and endeavour of a reverent criticism, that is, of the study of Scriptures by believers, to attain to certainty as to the precise text and the exact meaning of the Word of God as it was at first given. And the more real our conviction of the truth of Divine Inspiration the more should be our zeal and diligence in this study.
It is boldly affirmed at other times that if it was the original text that was inspired we are not entitled to speak of any translation of Scripture, even the very best, as being the Word of God. The niggling spirit that carps at the acknowledgment of a good translation as the Word of God in another language comes in conflict with an obvious feature of Scripture usage; for we find that the New Testament makes use of a translation of the Old Testament. In this usage the translation is freely employed and no exception is taken to it as though the quality of Divine authorship and authority had evaporated in the process of translation.
When again the objection is raised that we are face to face with a large variety of readings in our oldest manuscripts and that it is inept for us to hold the inspiration of Scripture seeing that we cannot be sure as to the exact reading at some points of the original text. Men forget that by the time when our Lord was upon earth there is no doubt but there were already in existence a multitude of various readings in the Hebrew Text and the Greek translation of the Old Testament. There were undoubtedly various exhibitions of Scripture in the instances in which that translation diverged from a literal representation of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament. Now of these things our Lord takes no notice. So also His apostles. The cardinal controlling consideration that the Scriptures as the people had them in their hands or had access to them, were the Word of God is what He and they lay stress upon. And this is ample warrant for us to follow in their steps.
But how often do we hear men daring to say that when our Lord emptied Himself in His humiliation He consented to such an abridgment of His knowledge as that He shared in the limitations and prejudices of His Galilean environment, and so took Old Testament Scripture at its current valuation? When they say this they think that they have got rid of His witness to the word which Israel had in their hands. They imagine that they have put Him out of action as an authoritative teacher in regard to such matters of criticism and that they have left the ground clear for exercising the utmost freedom in their handling of the Old Testament. Well, what have they succeeded in doing? For themselves they have got rid of the note of authority which sounds through His teaching and they have taken up the position that the Incarnate Son of God was the victim of nescience, ignorance and local and provincial prejudice. Would it not be more in keeping with the attitude that they have resolved to adopt that they should at once deny the truth of His Incarnation? Their profession of it when they strip His words of final authority is like the kiss of Judas when his Lord was to be taken and slain.
But how does the case stand in regard to the words that our Lord spoke? Let us but listen to what He has Himself to say. "I have not spoken from Myself but the Father which sent Me; He gave me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that His Commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak, therefore, even as the Father said unto Me so I speak." The quarrel then of those who will not hear and rest in His words as final is with the Father, who, as He dwelt in His Son and did the works, gave to His Son in Whom He dwelt the words that He should speak. We should bear in mind that when the Son came as His Father's Servant to do His will He was sent and thus had at once a mission and a commission. Within the bounds of that commission He kept Himself. When He was tempted by Satan to turn the stones into bread the tempter aimed at inducing Him to lay aside that form of a servant in which He had come. This the faithful Servant would not do. Throughout His ministry He kept a servant's place and the Will of the Father was the rule of His service. This held in regard to the very words that He spoke. When then He spoke of the word which had already been given as a Scripture that could not be broken the witness which He bore to it is the very word which His Father gave Him to speak. So all who have recognized Him as a Son sent as a servant receive His word as final and rest in it.
Whatever endeavours the adversaries by their excursions in the department of criticism have made to set aside the authority and finality of His witness come to naught when we are face to face with the claim that He makes to speak the Father's words. Let this claim be set aside and He is set aside. When this claim is acknowledged Christian Faith rests with security in the words that He has spoken.
It is the very Son of the Father that has spoken the very words which the Father gave Him to speak. And it is in keeping with the fitness of things in this situation that when the words of the Father are to be spoken they should be spoken by His everlasting Word. We see then how vain the attempt is to shake the authority of our Lord's witness to Old Testament Scripture and at the same time we see how the truth that He spoke only the words which the Father gave Him to speak stamps His every Word with absolute authority. The promises that He gave to His Apostles were among those words. Those promises we recognize to have been fulfilled in the subsequent ministry of the Apostles and so the revelation given once for all in the fullness of the times is preserved in its written form for all time and is still and will be to the end the abiding possession of all to whom the New Testament Scriptures have come.
Modern Sadduceism in all its forms has a quarrel with the Divine authority of the written word. This is so because its animating principle is not the faith which takes its seat at the footstool of the Son of God, but the unbelief which carps and cavils at His message. It has made the most of its parade of objections and difficulties yet Christian believers who have heard the voice of the Son of God as He still speaks the words of everlasting life have not been greatly moved. Those of them who have enquired into these matters have learned to wait for further light to clear up the difficulties that are to be met with and they do this with all the more confidence and composure of mind because so many of the difficulties that were the stock in trade of unbelievers in former days have been already cleared up; and they cherish the confidence that there is still in store for the Church of God an experience of clearing up in regard to those difficulties on which unbelief still lays stress.
In this connection some writers on the subject of the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures have put the cart before the horse. In seeking to state the doctrine of inspiration they begin at the wrong end. They start with the difficulties and having come to their conclusions in regard to these they employ those conclusions to modify and determine the sense in which the clear evidence of the statements of the Bible itself should be taken. This is not the course that men would take to arrive at the teaching of Scripture in regard to any other subject, say, sin or salvation. What is obviously the right course to take is that we should first see what the witness of the sacred Writings is and when we have taken a conjoint view of that witness as exhibited in various statements of the Word, then we should put objections and difficulties into their own subordinate place and not suffer the impression that they make upon us to override the plain statements on which the body of our doctrine rests.
As we indicated at the outset it is only when we are agreed as to the fact that Christian Truth is indeed a Divine Revelation that we come logically to discuss the doctrine of what Inspiration is. When we recognize the authentic character of our Scripture documents as an exhibition of the truth which our Lord and His Apostles proclaimed we are warranted in going further than stating that these documents are in a general sense authentic and trustworthy; we are warranted too, in holding that they are what they claim to be, not only a written embodiment of a real Divine Revelation, but a divinely given record of that Revelation, so that it is indeed God's own Word which He has been pleased to commit to writing. In the everyday working of Christian Faith this is proceeded upon. And when questions are raised about it and we look into them we find that the working understanding of Christian Faith can be set aside only by refusing to accept the substantial truth of the claims that our Lord made for Himself and that His Apostles on His behalf continue to make. For they continue to make the same claims as He did and these we have in the Word that enshrines their ministry of teaching and witness. To refuse then to accept the teaching of Scripture in regard to the claims that it makes to be the Word of God is to meet its claims not with a loyalty of a Christian Faith, but with the unbelief that has not yet learned to bow to the authority of Christ, the Son of God.