New Witnesses for God (Volume 3 of 3)

by B. H. Roberts

The message of the Old Testament was not written by the Divine hand, nor dictated by an outward compulsion; it was planted in the hearts of men, and made to grow in a fruitful soil. And then they were required to express it in their own language, after their natural methods, and in accordance with the stage of knowledge which their time had reached. Their human faculties were purified and quickened by the Divine Spirit; but they spoke to their time in the language of their time; they spoke a spiritual message, accommodated to the experience of their age, a message of faith in God, and of righteousness as demanded by a righteous God.^[[17]]

So, also, Lyman Abbot, in a series of lectures on "The Bible as Literature:"

Neither in ancient nor in modern theology is there a simpler, a more comprehensive statement of the origin and character of the Bible than in the single sentence with which the Second Epistle of Peter describes it: "Holy men of God spake, moved by the Holy Ghost." * * * According to this definition the Bible is written by good men, and it is written by good men under the inspiration or on-breathing of the Spirit of God. * * * * These men are not amanuenses who write by dictation; they embody in their writings their own experience, their own thought, their own life. Thus, we should expect to find in the Bible the personal equation of the writers strongly marked. We should expect, as the sunshine developes each seed after its kind, so the shining of God on the human soul would develop each germinant soul after its kind * * * We see not men writing as clerks write, embodying only the work of a dictator; we find in each one the stream, the current, the color of his own personality. We shall expect, also, to find all these men writing as Paul says he wrote: "We know in part, and we prophesy in part," and "We see in a glass darkly."^[[18]]

Views similar to those were entertained by the late Henry Drummond, the author of "Natural Law in the Spiritual World." Referring to the writers of the Hebrew scripture he said:

These men when they spoke were not typewriters. They were authors. They were not pens. They were men; and their individuality comes out in every page they wrote. Sometimes they write a better style than they do at other times. Sometimes their minds are clearer and their arguments more condensed and consecutive and logical.^[[19]] Look at some of the envolved theological statements in the New Testament, and contrast them with the absolutely pellucid utterances of the same author written on a different occasion, when he was in a different mood. Those men were not mere pens, I repeat; they were authors, and it is not the book that is inspired, so much as the men. God inspired men to make an inspired book. * * * Just as a scientific man in communication with nature reads its secrets, drinks in its spirit, and writes it down, so a man who walks with God catches the mind of God and gets revelations from God and writes them down; religion is not the result of this, but the cause of it.^[[20]]

Jenyns in his treatise on the "Internal Evidences of the Christian Religion" says:

Others there are who allow that a revelation from God may be both necessary and credible; but allege that the Scriptures, that is, the books of the Old and New Testament, cannot be that revelation—because in them are to be found errors and inconsistencies, fabulous stories, false facts, and false philosophy; which can never be derived from the fountain of all wisdom and truth. To this I reply that I readily acknowledge that the Scriptures are not revelations from God, but the history of them [i.e., the history of the revelations]. The revelation itself is derived from God; but the history of it is the production of men, and therefore the truth of it is not in the least affected by their fallibility, but depends on the internal evidence of its own supernatural excellence. If in these books such a religion as has been here described actually exists, no seeming or even real defects to be found in them can disprove the divine origin of this revelation, or invalidate my argument. * * * If any one could show that these books were never written by their pretended authors, but were posterior impositions on illiterate and credulous ages—all these wonderful discoveries would prove no more than this, that God, for reasons to us unknown, had thought proper to permit a revelation by him communicated to mankind, to be mixed with their ignorance, and corrupted by their frauds from its earliest infancy, in the same manner in which he has visibly permitted it to be mixed and corrupted from that period to the present hour. If in these books a religion superior to all human imagination actually exists, it is of no consequence to the proof of its divine origin, by what means it was there introduced, or with what human errors and imperfections it is blended. A diamond, though found in a bed of mud, is still a diamond, nor can the dirt which surrounds it depreciate its value or destroy its lustre.

The point of Jenyns' argument is, that both in doctrine and ethics the New Testament is so far superior, so far surpasses in sublimity of idea and beauty of moral precept, all that is known amongst men outside of the New Testament, and is so far removed from the uninspired utterances of men that he claims the conclusion to be irresistible that the Christian Scriptures derive their origin immediately from God; that the knowledge which they teach is divine, no matter what faults may be charged to the expression of this knowledge. From this view point he becomes almost reckless in the admission of errors and defects in the writers of the New Testament. He has been much criticized, in fact, by the professional Christian ministry—for he was a layman as to his relation with the church, a member of the British parliament—for the admission of errors in the New Testament in the passage I have quoted above, but I think unjustly so. What is needed, both as to the New Testament scriptures and the Nephite scriptures, is a thoroughgoing recognition of the fact that the truth is of more consequence than the form in which it is expressed. The wheat is of more importance than the chaff in which it grows, and which holds it until the thrashing and the winnowing. The question is not so much is all the mine-ledge gold, but is there gold in the ledge.^[[21]]

The inspiration of God falls upon a prophet as a white ray of light may fall upon a prism, which separates the white ray of which it is composed—blue, orange, red, green, etc. The clearness of these several rays and the sharpness with which they are defined will depend upon the purity, and perhaps the position, of the prism through which the white ray passes. So with the white ray of God's inspiration falling upon men. It receives different colorings or expressions through them according to their personal characteristics. While it is true that the inspiration of God may be so overwhelming in its force at times that the prophet may well nigh lose his individuality, and become merely the mouth-piece of God, the organ through which the Divine speaks, yet the personality of the prophet is not usually so overwhelmed; hence each prophet preserves even under the inspiration of God his agency and his personal idiosyncrasies. Thus Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Nephi, Mormon, Moroni, all preserve their individuality in conception of ideas and in the expression of them, though inspired by the same spirit. So also Joseph Smith imparted certain characteristics to his translation of the Nephite record, notwithstanding the use of Urim and Thummim and the inspiration of the Lord that rested upon him. Just in what manner the Urim and Thummim was of assistance to him may be beyond human power to at present explain, but of this we may be certain, it was by no means the principal factor in the work; its place must forever be regarded as secondary; it was an aid to the Prophet, not he an aid to it; wonderful as it may be as a divine instrument it could not be so marvelous as the mind of man, especially as the mind of this man, Joseph Smith, this Seer, by way of pre-eminence; it is Joseph the "Seer" who translated the Book of Mormon aided by Urim and Thummim. This his statement: "Through the medium of the Urim and Thummim I translated the record by the gift and power of God."^[[22]] Mark these words—"I translated the record,"—not the Urim and Thummim. Of course the Prophet recognizes in this, as he did in all his prophetic work and his seership work, his obligation to the inspiration of God, and surely I do not wish to detract from the inspiration of God as a factor in his work. I merely desire to emphasize here that it was the Prophet under the inspiration of God that did the work, and that the divine instrument, Urim and Thummim, however wonderful, was merely an aid to the Prophet, as "glasses" may be an aid to the dim-sighted. But notwithstanding this aid provided by man's ingenuity, it is the eye after all that does the seeing, though this contrivance called "spectacles" helps the vision, and makes it more perfect. So, analogously, but in some way unknown to us, the Urim and Thummim aided the Prophet in his work of translation.

The defense of written revelation then against the existence of human elements in it—evident limitations in the knowledge of prophets concerning things other than the immediate matters on which they are inspired of God; unequal expression of ideas, falling sometimes from the sublime to the commonplace; lack of clearness and directness in expression, circumlocution;^[[23]] grammatical blunders; tautology; sometimes long suspension of thought (a frequent fault of both Old and New Testament writers), and some thought never completed at all—all these and many other faults of mere construction,—disarrangement of the mere garments of thought—are to be attributed to the weaknesses of men and their limitations in knowledge, rather than to any fault in the inspiration supplied of God. It is the body that is defective, not the soul; the expression that is defective, not the inspired truth struggling for utterance through the faulty diction of prophets, ancient or modern—"If there be faults, they are the faults of men; therefore, condemn not the things of God because of the faults of men," will yet come to be regarded as a golden text in defense of written revelation.