Thus, when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ, he will find himself in a position where alike the authority of his Master and the 'communis sensus' of the society he belongs to, give into his hand certain documents and declare them inspired.
3. What in its general idea does this mean?
S. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world in a luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been the 'sacred school for all the world of the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life[298].' Every race has its special vocation, and we recognise in the great writers of each race the interpreters of that vocation. They are specially gifted individuals, but not merely individuals. The race speaks in them: Rome is interpreted by Virgil, and Greece by Aeschylus or Plato. Now every believer in God must see in these special missions of races, a Divine inspiration. If we can once get down to the bottom of human life, below its pride, its wilfulness, its pretentiousness, down to its essence, we get to God and to a movement of His Spirit[299]. Thus every race has its inspiration and its prophets.
But the inspiration of the Jews was supernatural. What does this mean? That the Jews were selected—not to be the school for humanity in any of the arts and sciences which involve the thought of God only indirectly, and can therefore be carried on without a fundamental restoration of man into that relation to God which sin had clouded or broken,—but to be the school of that fundamental restoration itself. Therefore, in the case of the Jews the inspiration is both in itself more direct and more intense, and also involves a direct consciousness on the part of its subjects. In the race, indeed, the consciousness might be dim; but the consciousness, as the prophets all assure us, did belong to the race, and not merely to its individual interpreters. They speak as recalling the people to something which they know, or ought to know, not as preachers of a new religion. They were 'the conscience of the state[300].' But special men, prophets, psalmists, moralists, historians, were thus the inspired interpreters of the Divine message to and in the race: and their inspiration lies in this, that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy Ghost, so shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and thoughts and aspirations, as to make them the instruments through which was imparted 'the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life.'
Various are the degrees of this inspiration: the inspiration of the prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration of the writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to lead him to ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience, passing through many a false conclusion, and cynical denial, till at the last his thought is led to unite itself to the great stream of Divine movement by finding the only possible solution of the problems of life in the recognition of God, and in obedience to Him.
Various also are the sorts of literature inspired: for the supernatural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural. The Church repudiated the Montanist conception of inspiration, according to which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy, as the passive unconscious instrument of the Spirit; and the metaphors which would describe the Holy Spirit as acting upon a man 'like a flute player breathing into his flute,' or 'a plectrum striking a lyre,' have always a suspicion of heresy attaching to their use[301]. As the humanity of Christ is none the less a true humanity for being conditioned by absolute oneness with God, so the human activity is none the less free, conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires it. The poet is a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian an historian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and methods, to be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. And just as truly as physiology, in telling us more and more about the human body, is telling us about the body which the Son of God assumed, so with the growth of our knowledge about the kinds and sequences of human literature, shall we know more and more about the literature of the Jews which the Holy Spirit inspired.
What then is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture? If we begin our inquiry with the account of creation with which the Bible opens, we may take note of its affinities in general substance with the Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogonies; but we are much more struck with its differences, and it is in these we shall look for its inspiration. We observe that it has for its motive and impulse not the satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity, or the later interest of scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental religious principles: that everything as we see it was made by God: that it has no being in itself but at God's will: on the other hand, that everything is in its essence good, as the product of the good God: that man, besides sharing the physical nature of all creation, has a special relation to God, as made in God's image, to be God's vice-gerent: that sin, and all that sin brings with it of misery and death, came not of man's nature but of his disobedience to God and rejection of the limitations under which He put him: that in spite of all that sin brought about, God has not left man to himself, that there is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental principles of true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies the supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation[302].
As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find ourselves in any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning of its inspiration. The first traditions of the race are all given there from a special point of view. In that point of view lies the inspiration. It is that everything is presented to us as illustrating God's dealings with man—God's judgment on sin: His call of a single man to work out a universal mission: His gradual delimitation of a chosen race: His care for the race: His over-ruling of evil to work out His purpose. The narrative of Genesis has all the fullest wealth of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of God that its special characteristic lies. As we go on into the history, we find the recorders acting like the recorders of other nations, collecting, sorting, adapting, combining their materials, but in this inspired—that the animating motive of their work is not to bring out the national glory or to flatter the national vanity, nor, like the motive of a modern historian, the mere interest in fact, but to keep before the chosen people the record of how God has dealt with them. This, as we perceive, gives them a special sense of the value of fact[303]. They record what God has done, how God did in such and such ways take action on behalf of His peculiar people, delivering them, punishing them, teaching them, keeping them, disciplining them for higher ends. And none who have eyes to see God's spiritual purposes can doubt that those historians read aright the chronicles of the kings of Israel. The spiritual significance which they see is the true significance. God's special purpose was on Israel.
It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take some of the highest places among the poets of all nations, but the poetic faculty is directed to one great end, to reveal the soul in its relation to God, in its exultations and in its self-abasements. 'Where ... did they come from, those piercing lightning-like gleams of strange spiritual truth, those magnificent out-looks upon the kingdom of God, those raptures at His presence and His glory, those wonderful disclosures of self-knowledge, those pure out-pourings of the love of God? Surely here is something more than the mere working of the mind of man. Surely ... they repeat the whispers of the Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal Wisdom[304].'
In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious and typical instances of inspiration[305]. The prophets make a direct claim to be the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not that the Divine Spirit supersedes their human faculties, but He intensifies them. They see deeper under the surface of life what God is doing, and therefore further into the future what He will do. No doubt their predictive knowledge is general, it is of the issue to which things tend. It is not at least usually a knowledge 'of times and of seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.' Thus at times they foreshorten the distance, and place the great deliverance and the 'day of Jehovah' in the too immediate foreground[306]. The prophetic inspiration is thus consistent with erroneous anticipations as to the circumstances and the opportunity of God's self-revelation, just as the apostolic inspiration admitted of S. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ within his own life-time. But the prophets claim to be directly and really inspired to teach and interpret what God is doing and commanding in their own age, and to forecast what in judgment and redemptive mercy God means to do and must do in the Divine event. The figure of the king Messiah dawns upon their horizon with increasing definiteness of outline and characteristic, and we, with the experience of history between us and them, are sure that the correspondence of prophecy and fulfilment can be due to no other cause than that they spoke in fact the 'word of the Lord.'