A great deal is being said of late of “the present problem of inspiration,” with a general implication that the Christian doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures has been brought into straits by modern investigation, and needs now to adapt itself to certain assured but damaging results of the scientific study of the Bible. Thus, because of an assumed “present distress,” Canon Cheyne, in a paper read at the English Church Congress of 1888, commended a most revolutionary book of Mr. R. F. Horton’s, called “Inspiration and the Bible,”1 which explains away inspiration properly so called altogether, as the best book he could think of on the subject. And Mr. Charles Gore defends the concessive method of treating the subject of inspiration adopted in “Lux Mundi,” by the plea that the purpose of the writers of that volume “was ‘to succour a distressed faith,’ by endeavoring to bring the Christian creed into its right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historical, critical.”2 On our side of the water, Dr. Washington Gladden has published a volume which begins by presenting certain “new” views of the structure of the books of the Bible as established facts, and proceeds to the conclusion that: “Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration nor the theory of plenary inspiration can be made to fit the facts which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before us. These writings are not inspired in the sense which we have commonly given to that word.” Accordingly he recommends that under the pressure of these new views we admit not only that the Bible is not “infallible,” but that its laws are “inadequate” and “morally defective,” and its untrustworthiness as a religious teacher is so great that it gives us in places “blurred and distorted ideas about God and His truth.”3 And Prof. Joseph H. Thayer has published a lecture which represents as necessitated by the facts as now known, such a change of attitude towards the Bible as will reject the whole Reformed doctrine of the Scriptures in favor of a more “Catholic” view which will look upon some of the history recorded in the Bible as only “fairly trustworthy,” and will expect no intelligent reader to consider the exegesis of the New Testament writers satisfactory.4 A radical change in our conception of the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God is thus pressed upon us as now necessary by a considerable number of writers, representing quite a variety of schools of Christian thought.
Nevertheless the situation is not one which can be fairly described as putting the old doctrine of inspiration in jeopardy. The exact state of the case is rather this: that a special school of Old Testament criticism, which has, for some years, been gaining somewhat widespread acceptance of its results, has begun to proclaim that these results having been accepted, a “changed view of the Bible” follows which implies a reconstructed doctrine of inspiration, and, indeed, also a whole new theology. That this changed view of the Bible involves losses is frankly admitted. The nature of these losses is stated by Dr. Sanday in a very interesting little book5 with an evident effort to avoid as far as possible “making sad the heart of the righteous whom the Lord hath not made sad,” as consisting chiefly in making “the intellectual side of the connection between Christian belief and Christian practice a matter of greater difficulty than it has hitherto seemed to be,” in rendering it “less easy to find proof texts for this or that,” and in making the use of the Bible so much less simple and less definite in its details that “less educated Christians will perhaps pay more deference to the opinion of the more educated, and to the advancing consciousness of the Church at large.” If this means all that it seems to mean, its proclamation of an indefinite Gospel eked out by an appeal to the Church and a scholastic hierarchy, involves a much greater loss than Dr. Sanday appears to think - a loss not merely of the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of the Scriptures, but with it of all that that doctrine is meant to express and safeguard - the loss of the Bible itself to the plain Christian man for all practical uses, and the delivery of his conscience over to the tender mercies of his human instructors, whether ecclesiastical or scholastic. Dr. Briggs is more blunt and more explicit in his description of the changes which he thinks have been wrought. ” I will tell you what criticism has destroyed,” he says in an article published a couple of years ago. “It has destroyed many false theories about the Bible; it has destroyed the doctrine of verbal inspiration; it has destroyed the theory of inerrancy; it has destroyed the false doctrine that makes the inspiration depend upon its attachment to a holy man.”6 And he goes on to remark further “that Biblical criticism is at the bottom” of the “reconstruction that is going on throughout the Church” - “the demand for revision of creeds and change in methods of worship and Christian work.” It is clear enough, then, that a problem has been raised with reference to inspiration by this type of criticism. But this is not equivalent to saying that the established doctrine of inspiration has been put in jeopardy. For there is criticism and criticism. And though it may not be unnatural for these scholars themselves to confound the claims of criticism with the validity of their own critical methods and the soundness of their own critical conclusions, the Christian world can scarcely be expected to acquiesce in the identification. It has all along been pointing out that they were traveling on the wrong road; and now when their conclusions clash with well-established facts, we simply note that the wrong road has not unnaturally led them to the wrong goal. In a word, it is not the established doctrine of inspiration that is brought into distress by the conflict, but the school of Old Testament criticism which is at present fashionable. It is now admitted that the inevitable issue of this type of criticism comes into collision with the established fact of the plenary inspiration of the Bible and the well-grounded Reformed doctrine of Holy Scripture based on this fact.7 The cry is therefore, and somewhat impatiently, raised that this fact and this doctrine must “get out of the way,” and permit criticism to rush on to its bitter goal. But facts are somewhat stubborn things, and are sometimes found to prove rather the test of theories which seek to make them their sport.