Inspiration is not necessarily Verbatim Reporting.
It is not absolutely necessary to make such a claim to prove the inspiration of the Scriptures. Verbatim Reporting is, in a sense, a mere mechanical operation. It would have robbed the writers of their individuality, and made them mere machines. But no; the Holy Spirit used the memories, the intuitions, the judgments, and indeed the idiosyncrasies of the writers, so that while each recorded that part of the event or discourse which (as we may express it) adhered to himself, he was enabled to give it with substantial accuracy.
3. VARIOUS THEORIES OF INSPIRATION.
It will be in order here to note briefly various theories of inspiration; for it must be known that all students do not agree as to the degree of inspiration that characterized the writers of the Scripture. When a man says, "I believe in the inspiration of the Bible," it will be quite in place in these days to ask him what he means by inspiration. Following are some of the views of inspiration held at the present day.
a) Natural Inspiration.
This theory identifies inspiration with genius of a high order. It denies that there is anything supernatural, mysterious, or peculiar in the mode of the Spirit's operation in and upon the Scripture writers. It claims that they were no more inspired than were Milton, Shakespeare, Mahomet, or Confucius.
Such a theory we absolutely reject. For if such be the character of the inspiration possessed by the Scripture writers, there is nothing to assure us that they were not liable to make the same errors, to teach the same false views of life, to give expression to the same uncertainties concerning the past, the present, and the future as did these shining lights of mere human genius.
When David said, "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His word was in my tongue," he meant something more than the prayer which forms the gem of Paradise Lost. When Isaiah and his brethren said, "Thus saith the Lord," they claimed something higher than that they were speaking under the stirrings of poetic rapture. When Paul said to the Corinthians, "Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth (1 Cor. 2:13)," he used the language to which you will find no parallel in the literature of mere human genius. And no man of candor or intelligence can pass from the writings even of the unapproachable Shakespeare into the perusal of the Bible without feeling that the difference between the two is not one simply of degree, but of kind; he has not merely ascended to a loftier outlook in the same human dwelling, but he has gone into a new region altogether. There is a certain "unknown quality" in this Book which clearly distinguishes it from all others; and if we may take its own explanation of the matter, that unknown quality is its divine inspiration.
b) Universal Christian Inspiration, or Illumination.
According to this theory, the inspiration of the Bible writers was the same as has characterized Christians of every age; the ordinary Christian of to-day is inspired as much as was the Apostle Paul.