"The Inspiration of the Apostles"
By E. G. Robinson
THE direct argument for the inspiration of the Scriptures is both brief and simple. The inspiration of the Old Testament rests on the authority of Christ and His apostles. Christ also promised the apostles that "the Holy Spirit whom the Father shall send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you." But this covers only so much of the New Testament as can be demonstrably shown to have been written by the apostles. Only on indirect and general evidence can the Gospels of Mark and Luke, and the Acts and the Epistle to the Hebrews, be regarded as inspired and as having equal authority with the writings of the apostles. What that evidence is, there is neither space nor need here to state. Suffice to say, that the perfect congruity of their teachings with those of the apostles, when taken in conjunction with the well-known prevalence of a supernatural inspiration in the first Christian churches, would of itself seem sufficient to entitle them to the same reverence that we pay to other parts
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of the New Testament. In short, were there no other evidence of the superhuman origin of the entire New Testament than the moral atmosphere pervading every part of it, and the tone of divine authority that breathes in all its injunctions and promises, these alone were sufficient to lift it immeasurably above all other moral and religious teaching, and to establish its claim to be regarded as the articulate voice of God to man. The very existence of the New Testament is to my mind a weighty reason for regarding it, and the whole of it, as inspired. That only four out of the many Gospels which we know were written, should have been preserved to us, and that only just so much and such parts of the literature of the apostolic period should have survived as were necessary to form the harmonious and complete whole of our New Testament, is one of those facts that can be ascribed neither to chance nor to the discrimination or the sagacity of critical and far-seeing men. He who out of the boundlessness of His resources in Nature produces millions of seeds for every one that He watches over and makes to germinate and reproduce its kind, watched over and out of the overflow of inspired literature that blessed the churches of the apostles' day, selected just so much as would be requisite for the continuous reproduction and preservation of a true religious life in the world. The same Spirit that inspired the utterances and the writings of the apostles and their fellow-helpers in founding the Church took care, during the dark and to us little known period between the death of the apostles and the latter half of the second century, to preserve and bring together just so much of its own productions as itself foresaw the Church would always need. I accept the New Testament, every part of it, and all the contents of every part, on its own internal evidence, as the united product of the Holy Spirit and of men whom the Spirit guided in writing it; just as, on the authority of Christ and the apostles, I accept the Old Testament as the product of men who were divinely guided in writing it.
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Every one at all acquainted with the question of the inspiration of the Scriptures is aware that an indefinite number of theories of divine inspiration have been propounded; and to every one who has attentively studied these theories it can hardly have failed to be evident that no one of them is satisfactory; that in fact, from the nature of the case, no satisfactory theory of either the mode or the extent of inspiration can be constructed. The fatal difficulty in theorizing about the mode lies in our incapacity for conceiving how the Infinite Mind and a finite mind, the Omniscient and a limited understanding, can have so worked together as to have preserved the integrity of each and to have given us precisely such a book as our Bible is. Every theory either makes the divine so to dominate the human as to override individuality, or, the human so to limit the divine as to make the united product of the two a kind of moral and religious mosaic, a species of plain work with patches of the divine plainly but skilfully inlaid. In theorizing on the extent of inspiration, the fatal difficulty is that we have no decisive test for determining what was inspired and what was not inspired. The most that we can safely say is that the Bible was written by men whom God inspired to write it; that the omniscient Holy Spirit so guided the minds of its writers that the divine will was perfectly accomplished in writing it, and yet that each writer wrote precisely as his endowments, acquirements, and literary tastes compelled him to write. The untrammeled individuality of each prophet and apostle must be admitted as an indisputable fact; and no rational mind, I think, will be disposed to admit that the Divine Spirit could have been in any way cramped or limited in the exercise of His guiding and directive energy. The Bible is the Word of God, but the word communicated through finite and imperfect human understandings. Yet I find in the Scriptures no authority whatever for saying that some parts of them were inspired and some parts were not. I find that certain portions are quoted as direct messages from God, and that other portions
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are mere records of purely human words and deeds; but I can find no reason for affirming that the sacred writers were inspired in recording the one and not in recording the other. I can see very plainly that the first were supernatural revelations, and the second only occurrences a knowledge of which could be easily and naturally acquired; but it is not the inspiration of revelation, but only of the Scriptures or written word, that we are here discussing.I cannot, therefore, accept the theory that "whatever the Bible was intended to teach was certified as true by the spirit of inspiration." If by "to teach" be meant to instruct, then I must affirm that every part of the Bible, even to its minutest particular, instructs me; but if "to teach" means to set forth authoritatively as divine truth, then how shall we know what was so certified? And to whom was the certification made? If to the writers, how happens it that they give us no clue for our guidance in distinguishing between the inspired and the uninspired? In the Book of Job, for instance, was it Job, or Eliphaz, or Bildad, or Zophar, or Elihu to whom the truth was certified, or to the unknown author of the book? And how shall we be certified as to which of the sentiments of the several speakers was intended to be taught? David was doubtless inspired in inditing his psalms; but how about those that are imprecatory? Was the truth certified to David in these as in writing the 22d and the 51st?
Neither can I consent to accept the thesis of my friend Mr. Fox. It strikes me as a very unsafe test of inspiration to say that only the important portions of the apostles' writings, and not the insignificant and incidental parts, could have been inspired. Our estimates of important and insignificant are extremely uncertain, and from an omniscient point of view might be very different from even the opposite of those of any and of every individual man. To put the written communications of the apostles on the same level with their oral, also, seems to me to be without sufficient
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reason. Undoubtedly the apostles were profoundly unconscious that they were writing for future and distant generations, but the Holy Spirit that inspired them was not unmindful of it. While they thought they were writing for specific and limited ends, and did write much that was pertinent primarily to their own times only, the omniscient Spirit, foreseeing the centuries to come, so guided that every written word should in some way be profitable to all who should come after. For my single self there is nothing in the apostles' epistles, whether it be Paul's cloak, his thorn in the flesh, his salutations and numerous personal allusions, or John's elect lady, that are not of profound interest to me, and I trust also instructive and profitable. I cannot but believe that like everything else in the epistles they are also instructive to others, and should therefore be regarded as written by inspiration.In the formation of our opinion of the Bible as an inspired book very much, it seems to me, may be learned from the analogy of Nature. The world is the creation of God through the mechanical and chemical agency of material second-causes; so the Bible is the creation of God through the volitional agency of intelligent and rational second-causes. Both show plain marks of the imperfect agencies through which they were created. The world has its deserts, its deadly fruits, its miasmatic regions, its frigid and its torrid zones. These are the natural products of its creative second-causes, and have their uses. The Bible has its dreary but not useless passages - the devil's sayings, the details of foul and of treacherous acts, speculations of unwise men, oriental extravagances, instances of what may have been the errors of its times, and specimens of what to occidental minds may seem to be unsound logic. These, at least many of them, are attributable to the human agencies through which the Bible was produced. The Bible is a history of the divine process of establishing true religion in the world, and especially of the divine method of saving men from sin through the
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mediation of Jesus Christ; and like the globe on which we dwell, it bears unmistakable traces of the many centuries along which the events it reports took place, and the record of these was made. But the globe was made for rational beings to live on; and the Bible was written for rational beings to live by. Out of the earth comes the sustenance of our natural life; out of the Bible comes the sustenance of our spiritual life. Man has his reason, with all the surrounding light of nature to guard him against the use of the earth's poisonous and unwholesome products, vegetable and animal; and he has the same reason, with all the surrounding and converging light of the Scriptures as a whole, to guard him against a misuse of what, in the Scriptures, might prove unwholesome and poisonous to his soul. Man was also destined to live by fish, fowl, and flesh, but no sensible man in eating fish will insist on eating its bones, or in eating fowl and flesh will also insist on eating feathers, entrails, and pelts.It is an unpardonable abuse of the Bible - an abuse, however, that pleads "verbal inspiration" in its defence - to select single sentences regardless of their connections, and putting them together to make them into doctrinal propositions. A skillful manipulator may thus make the Bible teach whatever he wishes. How much, alas! is thus being continually read into the Scriptures, and then boldly proclaimed as actually taught by them. That the Bible has survived such abuse, and still maintains its ascendancy over the minds and hearts of men, is one evidence of its divine origin and authority.
E. G. ROBINSON.
Brown University.=========== [From The Baptist Quarterly Review, January, 1886. The document is from Google Books. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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