Thus, in order to attain to faith, we need no such doctrine of Scripture, and the attempt to force unbelievers into faith by means of it has had no success. It follows that, just as the Apostles already had faith before they arrived at that condition of mind, other than faith itself, in which they were able to take a share in producing the New Testament, in our case too faith must preexist before, by reading the New Testament, we are led to postulate a special condition of the apostolic mind in which its books were written, and a resulting special character of the books themselves. A doctrine of this kind can only be made credible to those who already are believers.

3. Hence throughout the whole of the foregoing exposition of faith we have assumed no more than faith itself, present in a feeling of need (in whatever source that feeling may have originated), and Scripture we have adduced only as expressing the same faith in detail; and it is only now that for the first time we are treating of Scripture in its natural connexion with the Christian Church and considering the question of its difference from other books. None the less, the old method, whether used in Confessions or in text-books, of placing the doctrine of Scripture first is not wholly censurable, if by Scripture proof of doctrine nothing more be meant than showing that a proposition so proved gives expression to an original and authentic element in Christian piety, and if precautions be taken to avoid the impression that a doctrine must belong to Christianity because it is contained in Scripture, whereas in point of fact it is only contained in Scripture because it belongs to Christianity. Were we to rest content with the former position, Dogmatic Theology would continue to be a mere aggregate of detached propositions, the inner connexion of which was left obscure. Either, its relation to the common faith of the Church would then be what has already been indicated; true and complete certainty of faith would only exist where there was ability to prove the divinity of Scripture, while all who lacked this degree of scientific culture would believe simply on authority; and thus piety would spring from, and depend on, science. Or, where the laity break away and base their faith on their experience, rejoicing in its vitality, the scientific exposition of faith would become something which, for the fellowship of the Church, is empty and worthless. Hence for the purpose of our argument it was important to get its true aim quite clear, independently of Scripture; and only to bring in the doctrine of Scripture at a point where its proper authority can be plainly seen to rest on the relation between the self-identical and the mutable and in its true connexion with the other essential features of the Church.

§ 129. The Holy Scriptures of the New Testament are, on the one hand, the first member in the series, ever since continued, of presentations of the Christian Faith; on the other hand, they are the norm for all succeeding presentations.

1. That the Holy Scriptures are the first member in the series in question implies that the succeeding members are homogeneous with the first; and this holds true alike of form and content. The New Testament writings are usually divided into historical and doctrinal books; this, however, is really correct only if the division is based not on the subject-matter preponderant in each case, but on the outward form. In the historical books the discourses of Christ and the Apostles form a very important part, and the apostolic letters with few exceptions are only intelligible in so far as either they contain historical elements or we can form from them a picture of the historical situation. Whether we retain this division or discard it and look more at the form of particular elements in these books, we can only say that all that has approved itself in the way of oral presentation of Christian piety in later ages of the Church has kept within the lines of these original forms,or is attached to them as an explanatory accompaniment. Even religious poetry, in the lyrical form which alone is genuinely churchly, has its germ in the New Testament; on the other hand, all explanatory and systematizing works, which as presentations of Christian piety have less originality and independence, are only aids to the understanding of the original testimonies or compilations drawn from them.

As regards content, however, the general rule is first of all to be applied that in every kind of fellowship the individual element approves itself only in so far as it gives expression to the common spirit. Here too, accordingly, everything of the kind which persists in influence alongside of Holy Scripture we must regard as homogeneous with Scripture; while nothing that does not persist can be given a place in the series.

2. But if in the historical development of the Christian Church redemption is being ever more completely realized in time, and the Holy Spirit is thus pervading the whole ever more perfectly, it looks as if the first of this or any other series cannot be the norm for all succeeding members; for in any such development each later member must be more perfect than the preceding. There is truth in this, but only when we are comparing two whole phases of the development, each in its entirety. If we consider the Church during the Apostolic Age as a unity, its thinking as a whole cannot supply a norm for that of later ages. For owing to its naturally most unequal distribution of the divine Spirit, as well as to the further fact that not everyone was equally productive in religious ideas even in the measure of his participation in the common spirit, it was very easily possible (since Jewish and pagan views and maxims were still uneradicated and their antagonism to the Christian spirit could only be recognized gradually) that expositions of religion might be produced which, strictly speaking, were rather Judaism or paganism coloured by Christianity than Christianity itself, i.e. were, if considered as Christian, in the highest degree impure. Contemporary with all this very imperfect material, however, were the presentations given in preaching by the immediate disciples of Christ. In their case, the danger of an unconsciously debasing influence from their previous Jewish forms of thought and life on the presentation of Christianity by word and act was averted, in proportion as they had stood near to Christ, by the purifying influence of their living memory of Christ as a whole. Thereby every idea which had attained that clearness in consciousness which must precede oral exposition, was at once forced to betray any antagonism it might have to the spirit of Christ’s life and teaching. This holds good, in the first place, of their narratives of Christ’s words and deeds, which fixed the standard that was to have the widest purifying influence. But it also holds pre-eminently of all that the Apostles taught and ordained for Christian churches, as acting in Christ’s name; though it must not be forgotten that even when acting merely as individuals, each of them found not only his complement but his corrective in one of the other Apostles.¹ Thus in the Apostolic Age what is most perfect and what is most imperfect stood side by side as canonical and apocryphal (both these words taken in the sense indicated by the discussion above)—two extremes which can never reappear in the same form in any later age. Church presentations of Christianity could not but diverge ever more widely from the apocryphal, since the influence of foreign elements on the Church decreased—even though in matters of detail there were ever new accretions from the realm of Judaism—in proportion as the bulk of Christians came to be born and nurtured in the bosom of the Church. On the other hand, the Church could never again reproduce the canonical, for the living intuition of Christ was never again able to ward off all debasing influences in the same direct fashion, but only derivatively through the Scriptures and hence in dependence on them. If then we take both together—canonical and apocryphal—the Apostolic Age itself comes under the general rule; the influence of the canonical evidently becomes surer and wider as the apocryphal disappears even in outlying parts of the Church; thus viewed as a whole, the later presentation is also the more perfect. On the other hand, if we take the canonical by itself, it has an authority normative for all later times. Such authority we do not ascribe uniformly to every part of our Holy Scriptures, but only in proportion as the writers attained to the condition just described, so that casual expressions and what are merely side-thoughts do not possess the same degree of normativeness as belongs to whatever may at each point be the main subject. Nor is it meant that every later presentation must be uniformly derived from the Canon or be germinally contained in it from the first. For since the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, no age can be without its own originality in Christian thinking. Yet, on the one hand, nothing can be regarded as a pure product of the Christian Spirit except so far as it can be shown to be in harmony with the original products; on the other, no later product possesses equal authority with the original writings when it is a question of guaranteeing the Christian character of some particular presentation or of exposing its unchristian elements.

§ 130. First Theorem.—The individual books of the New Testament are inspired by the Holy Spirit, and the collection of them took place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Conf. Helv. i.: Scriptura canonica, verbum Dei Spiritu s. tradita et … mundo proposita, etc.—Conf. Gall. v.: Credimus verbum his libris comprehensum ab uno Deo esse profectum.—Conf. Scot. xviii.: Spiritus dei per quem s. scripturae litteris sunt mandatae.—Conf. Belg. iii.: Confitemur sanctos Dei viros divino afflatos spiritu locutos esse. Postea vero Deus … servis suis mandavit, ut sua illa oracula scriptis consignarent.—Decl. Thor.: Profitemur … nos amplecti sacras canonicas … scripturas … instinctu spiritus s. primitus scriptas, etc. 1. It is not easy to assign exact limits of meaning to the ecclesiastical term ‘inspiration’ in general, and here we merely wish to make some preliminary observations before entering on a special discussion of the subject. The word θεόπνευστος, which is used of the Old Testament writings,² and which historically constitutes the most definite basis of usage, may very easily lead to a conception of the Holy Spirit as occupying a relation to the writer which has special reference to the act of writing but is otherwise non-existent. This suggestion attaches less to the phrase ὑπὸ πνεύματος ἁγίου φερόμενοι.³ Here the interpretation that these men were always so ‘moved,’ speaking and writing in what was thus a permanent state, is in itself quite as natural as one to the effect that they were only ‘moved’ to speak and write. Since the ecclesiastical term is not strictly scriptural and is, besides, figurative, it is necessary to define it by relation to cognate terms, which also describe ways of arriving at ideas. Here on the one side what is known by inspiration along with what is learnt stands over against what is excogitated, the latter being that which proceeds entirely from a man’s own activity as contrasted with what is due to influence coming from without. On the other side, again, stands what is known by inspiration in contrast to what is learnt; the latter is derived from external communication, while the former, being as it is original in the eyes of others, depends for its emergence solely on inward communication. Hence the presentation of what has been learnt may approximate to any extent to the merely mechanical, whereas in the forthcoming of what is known by inspiration there may be manifested the whole freedom of personal productivity.

The general custom of calling Holy Scripture as such ‘Revelation,’ however, leads frequently to the two ideas being treated as interchangeable, which cannot fail to produce confusion. For if this is taken to mean that the sacred writers, being under inspiration, were informed of the content of what they wrote in a special divine manner, there is no foundation for any such statement, whether we consider the act of composing a sacred book itself or the excitation of thought preceding or underlying it. All that they teach derives from Christ; hence in Christ Himself must be the original divine bestowal of all that the Holy Scriptures contain—not, however, in isolated particulars, by way of inspiration, but as a single indivisible bestowal of knowledge out of which the particulars evolve organically. Thus the speaking and writing of the Apostles as moved by the Spirit was simply a communication drawn from the divine revelation in Christ.

Our paragraph, however, ascribes to the Holy Spirit not merely the composition of the individual books, but also their collection to form the New Testament Canon, and in referring to the latter point it employs a different expression. This distinction is primarily due to the fact that we regard the composition of a book as the voluntary act of an individual, whereas the formation of the Canon is the result of a many-sided collaboration and controversy within the Church; so that it becomes impossible to ascribe uniformly to the Holy Spirit all the factors contributing thereto. These two expressions will not be interpreted by everyone precisely in our sense; some will be content to assert merely a guiding influence of the Spirit even in the matter of composition; others will hold that even in the collection of the books the influence of the Spirit amounted to inspiration.

2. If now we go back to the conception of the Holy Spirit as the common spirit of the Church, and hence the source of all spiritual gifts and good works, it follows that all thinking, so far as it pertains to the Kingdom of God, must be traced back to and inspired by the Spirit. This holds good of the thinking of the Apostolic Age as inclusive of the two opposites—the apocryphal and the canonical; in this sense, that in the former only isolated traces of connexion with the common life of Christians derive from the Spirit, while in the latter His activity is merely more closely delimited by the individual in whom He is working, with scarcely any weakening or alteration; yet so that in no case the difference between the individual and Christ is cancelled. While the interval between the apocryphal and the canonical is filled by gradual stages, the action of the Spirit is most profound and concentrated within the circle of those singled out by Peter, with the assent of the whole community,⁴ as men who had companied with Christ from shortly after the start of His public life. For the individual members of this apostolic class, as we may call it, were so much regarded as being on an equality with each other that without offence to conscience the number of the original Apostles could be filled up from among them by simple lot; their steadfastness was a guarantee alike of the purity of their zeal and of their full understanding. But even within their circle no one can miss the important difference between aspects of personality that affect merely the private life of individuals and such as could be employed in the control of Christian affairs. It is with reference to the former that even in Apostles human nature most easily betrays itself, while in the latter sphere there could not but be a keener intention to let the Spirit of the whole exert an exclusive rule. Hence what is here spoken or done can be described as inspired in a much stricter and more definite sense. On the other hand, we should recklessly break up the unity of life characteristic of these apostolic men if, in order to bring out emphatically the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, we were to assert that they were less animated and moved by the Holy Spirit in other parts of their apostolic office than in the act of writing, or in the composition of writings (also concerned with the service of the churches) which were not destined to be included in the Canon; or again that they enjoyed His aid very much more in the public addresses or parts of addresses which were eventually preserved in the Acts of the Apostles than at any other time; or that this difference, with or without their knowledge, was to be explained by the fact that over and above their immediate purpose these writings were meant to have a bearing on all subsequent ages. Thus the peculiar inspiration of the Apostles is not something that belongs exclusively to the books of the New Testament. These books only share in it; and inspiration in this narrower sense, conditioned as it is by the purity and completeness of the apostolic grasp of Christianity, covers the whole of the official apostolic activity thence derived.

If we consider the inspiration of Scripture in this context as a special portion of the official life of the Apostles which in general was guided by inspiration, we shall hardly need to raise all those difficult questions about the extent of inspiration which so long have been answered solely in a manner that removed the whole subject from the domain of experiential insight. Nothing but an utterly dead scholasticism could try to draw lines of demarcation anywhere on the pathway lying between the first impulse to write and the actually written word, or wish to represent the written word in its bare externality as a special product of inspiration. The natural standard here is the analogy of the doctrine of Christ’s Person; at least, if we start with the fact that in the vocational life of the Apostles the whole activity of the common spirit ruling in the Church approximated as closely as possible to the person-forming union of the Divine Essence with human nature which constituted the Person of Christ (this without prejudice to the specific difference that obtains between the two modes of union), and that only in the light of this standard can what is outward in the actions of the Apostles be regarded as partially different in origin from the inward it was meant to express. This being assumed, it at once follows that we must reject the suggestion that in virtue of their divine inspiration the sacred books demand a hermeneutical and critical treatment different from one guided by the rules which obtain elsewhere. This at the same time disposes of all other difficulties.

3. If the inspiration of Scripture be thus traced to the influence of the Holy Spirit on the official activities of the Apostles, it might easily appear as though this held good merely for the doctrinal but not for the historical books, since what is in question in the latter case is not the communication of the writer’s own thoughts; everything depends rather on the sifting and arrangement of exact recollections. But for one thing the thoughts of the Apostles were to be no more than developments of what Christ had said, and these sayings, being elicited by special circumstances, could only be fully understood in their historical context. And this clearly means that a pure and complete apprehension of the various aspects of Christ’s life is an essential precondition of the Apostles’ official action as a whole. At the same time it is impossible to conceive of any incident in Christ’s public life as wholly unaccompanied by quickening and instructive speech; all His actions were presentations of Himself, and as such were fruitful for His proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Yet these incidents could be interpreted in very different ways; they could be so interpreted by some observers that the resulting natural impression helped them to recognize Christ’s divine dignity; by others they could be interpreted so perversely as to yield an impression which was apocryphal and distorted and could even be used as proof against His Messianic position. Thus the correctest view of the facts of Christ’s life—traceable in a certain sense directly to the divine Spirit—we naturally find in just that circle of people who had followed Christ’s public life with the growing confidence that in Him they had found the Promised One, so that in the same circle both things are inseparably united—the right view of Christ and the right development of His teaching and precepts. For the same reason it was afterwards a matter of the utmost importance for the whole Church to ascertain and select the right memories of Christ’s life, asking how each supposed memory agreed with the view of the Kingdom of God He had brought. Hence we must conceive the memory of the Apostles subserviently to this general aim as also under the influence of the Holy Spirit; nor can we in this respect make any distinction between the apostolic teachings and the evangelical narratives; indeed, we find the Apostles themselves narrating both orally and in writing. Even though their teaching arose out of definite official relationships, that is to say, out of their vocational action in the narrower sense, yet narration too sprang from an effort to promote the good of the whole Church, i.e. from their vocational action in the wider sense. This has no bearing on the question whether evangelistic narration was a special Church function, whether co-ordinate with or subordinate to the preaching of the Apostles. But the reproduction of memories, be it oral or written, can never quite be separated from historical composition, as may be seen from the narration even of one isolated fact; and the effort to exhibit the Redeemer in His habit as He lived is also the work of the Spirit of truth, and only so far as it is so can such narrative have a place in Holy Scripture. If, on the other hand, we consider that what happened first was the communication of just such isolated narratives, their collection in wholes like our Gospels following later, we must concede both possibilities—that the narrator presents only what he himself had experienced in this or that connexion, and that with his personal experiences he mingles what he has heard credibly from others; nay more, that one who himself had had no experience in the matter might yet, moved by the same impulse and the same Spirit, put together material which he had derived from the pure and original knowledge of others as fruitfully as an original witness could have done. If what was principally needed was the right selection and arrangement of historical facts already to hand, the influence of the Holy Spirit in and throughout such work is entirely analogous to His influence in the selection of individual books for the Canon.

4. Lastly, we have to consider the part taken by the Holy Spirit in the collection of these books. Here the first difference which must strike everyone is this, that although all the particular books in the collection belong to the Apostolic Age, the actual collection of them certainly does not; we cannot therefore have had handed down to us any strictly apostolic indication of what is canonical and normative. In discriminating, therefore, we can hardly use any analogy but this, that we should conceive of the Spirit as ruling and guiding in the thought-world of the whole Christian body just as each individual does in his own. Every man knows how to distinguish his own noteworthy thoughts, and how so to preserve them that he can count on bringing them up later in his mind: the rest he puts aside partly for later elaboration; others he simply disregards and leaves it a matter merely of accident whether they ever again present themselves to his mind or not. Indeed, he may occasionally reject some of his ideas entirely, either just when they occur or later. Similarly, the faithful preservation of the apostolic writings is the work of the Spirit of God acknowledging His own products; He distinguishes what is to remain unchangeable from what has in many respects undergone transformation in the later development of Christian doctrine. On the other hand, He rejects the apocryphal in part immediately on its appearance, and partly He ensures that both this sort of product and the taste for it shall gradually disappear from the Church. The one apparent difficulty is this, that in history certain books underwent varying vicissitudes; at first they were accepted as canonical and later were rejected as uncanonical, or vice versa. But for one thing what changed here was not the judgment of the whole Church; rather a book which had been accepted in one region and rejected in another was later universally accepted or universally rejected. And much might well be thought worthy of rejection for the Church organized as a great unity or in combination with the other books, which was acceptable or the reverse in isolated communities and judged merely by its own influence. On the other hand, this proves no more than that Holy Scripture as a collection came into existence only gradually and by approximation. The same influence reveals itself even yet in the Church’s careful estimate of the different grades of normative authority to be conceded to particular portions of Scripture, as also in decisions regarding all sorts of lacunæ and interpolations; so that the judgment of the Church is only approximating ever more closely to a complete expulsion of the apocryphal and the pure preservation of the canonical. The influence directly stimulating this approximation guides also the whole course of procedure, and that influence is simply the Holy Spirit ruling in the Church. But all vacillations of judgment, everything that makes approximation more difficult, can have no other source than the influence which is exerted on the Church by the world.

Hence if it is sought to distinguish in this connexion between points that have been decided once for all and others which the Church might yet take up, we cannot be too cautious. As history shows, the sense for the truly apostolic is a gift of the Spirit that is gradually increasing in the Church; hence at an early stage much may, through the mistakes of individuals, have crept into the sacred books which a later age can recognize as uncanonical and definitely prove to be so. But even as regards the collection as a whole, the mere fact that ever since it has existed in the Church as a collection, and has always retained its identity as such, is no guarantee that its limits have been irrevocably fixed. Its fixation (which we have the less right to regard as an absolute miracle or an altogether isolated work of the Holy Spirit that we are not entirely ignorant of how it came about) must rather be viewed as but one incident in a process which can only be fully vindicated through its ever-renewed confirmation as the Church perseveres in its task of inquiry, but otherwise is liable to correction. Hence even though the Canon is fixed in many Confessions of our Church,⁵ this ought not to prevent further unrestricted investigation of the matter; critical inquiry must ever anew test the individual writings of Scripture with a view to decide whether they rightly keep their place in the sacred collection. Doubt of the genuine can only issue in ever greater certainty. Even the fact that writings undeniably apostolic and others approximately so have perished is no argument to the contrary, for we are entitled to believe that nothing essential to the preservation and well-being of the Church has thus been lost. We are at least equally entitled to believe that it can only promote the welfare of the Church if Holy Scripture be distinguished clearly from what does not belong to it.

§ 131. Second Theorem.—As regards their origin the New Testament Scriptures are authentic, and as a norm for Christian Doctrine they are sufficient.

Art. Smalc. ii.: Regulam autem aliam habemus, ut videlicet verbum Dei condat articulos fidei et praeterea nemo, ne angelus quidem.— Conf. Gall. iv.: Hos libros agnoscimus esse canonicos, id est, ut fidei nostrae normam et regulam habemus, idque non tantum ex communi ecclesiae consensu, sed etiam multo magis ex testimonio et intrinseca Spiritus sancti persuasione.— Expos. simpl. i.: Credimus … scripturas canonicas … ipsum verum esse verbum Dei, et auctoritatem sufficientem ex semetipsis non ex hominibus habere… . Et in hac scriptura … habet … ecclesia plenissime exposita, quaecunque pertinent cum ad salvificam fidem tum ad vitam Deo placentem recte informandam.— Conf. Angl. vi.: Scriptura sacra continet omnia quae ad salutem sunt necessaria, ita ut quicquid in ea nec legitur, neque inde probari potest, non sit a quoquam exigendum ut tamquam articulus fidei credatur.— Conf. Belg. vii.: Credimus sacram hanc scripturam Dei voluntatem perfecte complecti, et quodcunque … credi necesse est, in illa sufficienter edoceri… . Idcirco toto animo reiicimus quicquid cum certissima hac regula non convenit.— Conf. March. ii.: ‘At the beginning … they confess that they hold … the true infallible and solely saving Word of God as it … is contained in the Holy Bible, which is and ought to be the one standard for all believers … which is perfect and sufficient for salvation and for the decision of all religious controversy, and abides for ever.’ 1. From the foregoing explanation it follows that the authoritative character of Scripture does not in the least depend on each book having been written by the particular person to whom it is ascribed. A book might, owing to a later judgment, be wrongly attributed to a certain author in all the surviving MSS., and in this sense be unauthentic, and yet it might belong to the circle where alone we can expect to find canonical writings and hence would none the less remain an integral part of Holy Scripture. Nay more, at its very first appearance a writing (owing to a fiction permitted by the author’s moral sense and sanctioned by the feeling of his contemporaries) might have borne in its title the name of someone other than its real author, and yet a book of this character might be an authentic part of the Bible. It is only if such a self-description were positively intended to mislead that the book could not be recognized as fitted to supplement the normative presentation of Christianity. Hence even if many of the doubts that have been raised as to the correct statement of authors’ names should be confirmed, we should have no right, much less would it be our duty, to expel those books from the Canon.

There is, however, no way of forming a list of authors to whom particular books must belong in order to be canonical, or of indicating a class of persons all of whose productions would have a right to canonicity. On the contrary, if even now writings should be discovered which were attributable with the highest degree of human certainty to an immediate disciple of Christ or even to an Apostle, we should not without more ado incorporate them in the New Testament, but at most attach them to it as an appendix. Not even the early Church—especially as it is unable to prove apostolic sanction for the separate books⁶—can bind us by its decisions, even had such decisions about the Canon been unanimous; hence the first part of our theorem can scarcely be taken as expressing anything more precise than what is indicated in the confessional statements quoted above, namely, that we trust universal Christian experience as the testimony of the Holy Spirit that the Canon we have received from Church tradition has not by deceit or ignorance had introduced into it such constituent parts as belong to either an apocryphal or an heretically suspect zone of Christianity, to which such pre-eminent dignity could not be ascribed without danger. But in saying so we concede that not all the books of the New Testament are equally fitted, by content and form, to vindicate their place in the Canon.

Since, however, this fixation of the Canon was arrived at only gradually, and we know besides that the imperfections and errors present in the Church could only gradually be brought to light and removed by the action of the Holy Spirit, we must show our trust by practising the greatest freedom as well as the strictest conscientiousness in our treatment of the Canon. This means, first, that all inquiries intended to ascertain the authors of the books we have, and the genuineness or the reverse of particular passages, must pursue an unhampered course, and that no doubts which may arise should either be accepted by unfriendly prejudice or rejected without scrutiny. Not only is this a part of a complete knowledge of Scripture; it is not without influence on the interpretation and the use of individual passages. It means, secondly, that we refuse to be perverted from the purest hermeneutical methods, as would be the case if we knowingly preferred to put an artificial interpretation on a passage rather than construe it in a sense suggestive of a less pure view of Christian faith. Under no other circumstances could we take the credit of being as actively engaged (though within a smaller field of controversial questions and with better equipment and a more cultivated sense) in the discrimination of Scripture as those were who first made the decisive selection of Holy Scripture out of the whole mass of early Christian writings.

2. To understand the second half of our paragraph in its whole range, we must first go back to the influence originally exerted by the writings of the New Testament. The doctrinal books were meant to bear upon the actual circumstances of Christian people, so that the utterances of the Apostles went to form both the dominant ideas and the purposes of believers; the historical books were meant simply to rehearse the similarly influential words and deeds of Christ and the Apostles. Hence they must become the regulative type for our religious thinking, from which it is not of its own motion to depart. And when Holy Scripture is described as ‘sufficient’ in this regard, what is meant is that through our use of Scripture the Holy Spirit can lead us into all truth, as it led the Apostles and others who enjoyed Christ’s direct teaching. So that if one day there should exist in the Church a complete reflection of Christ’s living knowledge of God, we may with perfect justice regard this as the fruit of Scripture, without any addition of foreign elements having had to come in. Of course the effects of what was due to the previous action of Scripture are here reckoned to the account of Scripture itself. Thus it is as representing each individual’s personal understanding of Scripture that, in the measure of his command of thought and speech, his true expressions of Christian piety take shape. And the interpretation of Christian faith which validates itself in each age as having been evoked by Scripture is the development, suited to that moment, of the genuine original interpretation of Christ and His work, and constitutes the common Christian orthodoxy for that time and place.

To this constitutive influence of Scripture, the second or critical influence—and when we speak of the normative place of Scripture, it is often this alone we have in view—is related in a merely subordinate way; almost, so to speak, as its shadow. True, we can imagine thinking which is independent of the action of the Holy Spirit through Scripture and yet is religious in its content as well as Christian in its original roots, yet the results of which are trivial and infertile, or erroneous and all but heretical. All such thinking, originating as it does in the immature or confused state of mind of those who receive and develop it, must be tested by Scripture, and can only prove that at least it means to be Christian by seeking to base itself on Scripture and so acknowledging the test. But clearly this critical aspect of the normative use of Scripture must decrease as the productive increases, and as the perfected understanding of Scripture renders its misinterpretation more difficult.

As regards the scientific expression of Christian faith in Dogmatic proper, it is no doubt undertaken solely by persons of a scientific turn; but they are always persons who desire to be instruments of the Spirit that acts in and through Scripture, in systematizing what is fragmentary in scriptural expressions and in harmonizing different presentations—the original ones and those directed against Judaism and Paganism—with each other, and in supplementing one by another. Here too, therefore, the productive, normative power of Scripture is shown, although in itself Scripture scarcely even suggests the distinction between a more popular and a more scientific terminology. On the other hand, strong suspicion cannot but be felt of a Dogmatic which, after pursuing its own line all along, objects to anything more than a critical use of Scripture for the purpose of proving that certain isolated details in its structure can be paralleled from the Bible and that no part of the system contradicts the language of Scripture properly understood. Only, it ought not to be demanded even in the former case that each individual dogmatic locus must be represented in Scripture by a passage specially devoted to it.

3. If we take strictly the phrase that Scripture as norm is sufficient, it follows that Scripture can contain nothing superfluous. What is superfluous is confusing and hence of no more than negative value; also it tempts the mind into comparisons that lead nowhere. But Scripture does contain much that is little more than repetition, indeed frequent repetition, of what is said elsewhere, and this appearance of superfluity is all the more curious when contrasted with the lack of it in a dogmatic system apparently just as incomplete. This, however, is to be expected from the nature of the case, for Scripture did not come into existence all at once; and in this regard our paragraph gives expression to the conviction, which is fundamental to the right use of Scripture and is ever anew confirmed by a sound hermeneutical method, that repetitions in the historical books are all the better guarantee of the authenticity of tradition, while quite possibly they may supplement each other. The same holds of repeated discussions of the same topics in the doctrinal books. For, even assuming that in different passages the writer was not dealing with different situations and relationships, the identity of the Spirit in varied circumstances and individuals is thereby attested all the more powerfully.

§ 132. Postscript to this Doctrine.—The Old Testament Scriptures owe their place in our Bible partly to the appeals the New Testament Scriptures make to them, partly to the historical connexion of Christian worship with the Jewish Synagogue; but the Old Testament Scriptures do not on that account share the normative dignity or the inspiration of the New.

1. Our exposition of this doctrine diverges from custom in this respect, that in the two theorems the New Testament writings alone were treated of; and this postscript has to justify this divergence and give it clear expression. Intentionally, however, it is announced as a postscript, because it is merely polemical and therefore will have lost its relevance as soon as the difference between the two Testaments is generally recognized. That time is as yet apparently distant, and in a Church system it would be correspondingly hazardous to include, as a theorem proper, a proposition of so dissentient a character. Especially as the same view is dominant outside the Schools; very often, and sometimes even by emphatic preference, Old Testament passages are made the basis of Christian exhortation, and the New Testament seemingly is allowed an influence merely proportional to its size. This is done from opposite motives alike by people who attach less value to the distinctive features of Christianity and by those who recognize it alone and exclusively as charged with redemptive power. It is only to the latter that we seek to justify our position; the former are outside our province.

2. As regards the inspiration of the Old Testament writings, we must first of all distinguish between the Law and the Prophets. If the Apostle is right in representing the Law as, although a divine ordinance, yet something that came in between the promise to Abraham’s seed and its fulfilment⁷ and in asserting further that the Law lacks the power of the Spirit from which the Christian life must flow⁸ then it cannot well be maintained that the Law was inspired by the same Spirit of which the same Apostle says that it is no longer communicated through the Law and its works⁹ but God sends it into our hearts only through our connexion with Christ. Similarly, nowhere and in no sense does Christ represent the sending of the Spirit, with whose witness He combines the witness of the disciples¹⁰ as the return of what had been there already and had merely disappeared for a while. But on the Law there depend all the historical books subsequent to its being given. For if Messianic prophecy as that which has most affinity with Christianity be confronted with the Law as that which has least, no one will venture to hold that what the Jewish historical books contain is the history of Messianic prophecy rather than of the Law. Nay, even in the prophetic books most of the contents relate to the legal dispensation and the circumstances of the people as such, and the Spirit in which they originate is simply the spirit of the people; it is therefore not the Christian Spirit, which as One Spirit was to break down the wall of partition between this people and all others. So that only Messianic prophecy would remain as capable of sharing in inspiration in our sense. But if we consider that it is only at isolated moments that the prophets rise to inspiration, and that it is only in this reference that the Spirit moving and animating them is called holy,¹¹ our conclusion surely must be that this title is merely given in an inexact sense, to indicate that this common spirit, bound up as it was with a conscious need of redemption, and revealing itself in the premonition of a more inward and spiritual Reign of God, carried in itself, and could kindle and sustain even outside itself, the highest receptivity for the Holy Spirit.

Let us inquire, secondly, as to the normative dignity of the Old Testament, first of all in the productive sense. Here it cannot on the whole be denied that the religious sense of Evangelical Christians recognizes in the main a great difference between the two Testaments. Even the noblest Psalms always contain something which Christian piety is unable to appropriate as a perfectly pure expression of itself, so that it is only after deluding ourselves by unconscious additions and subtractions that we can suppose we are able to gather a Christian doctrine of God out of the Prophets and the Psalms. On the other hand, a strong inclination to the use of Old Testament texts in expressing pious feeling is almost invariably accompanied by a legalistic style of thought or a slavish worship of the letter. Lastly, as regards the critical aspect of the normative use of Scripture, probably there are few Christian doctrines which at a certain period it was not attempted to prove by Old Testament passages. But how was it really possible that in an age merely of premonition any truth connected with the doctrine of redemption through Christ could have been set forth so clearly that it could be used with advantage side by side with what was said by Christ Himself, and, after the completion of His redeeming work, by His disciples? Or if it be thought that inspiration does make this possible, would not in consequence an entirely different reception of the Saviour and the form in which He preached the Kingdom of God have been prepared for among the Bible-reading part of His nation? The effect is in no sort of keeping with the cause to which it is ascribed. Further, the history of Christian theology shows only too clearly on the one hand how gravely this effort to find our Christian faith in the Old Testament has injured our practice of the exegetical art, and how on the other it has submerged the later development of doctrine and the controversies regarding its more exact definition under a flood of useless complications. Thus a thoroughgoing improvement is only to be looked for when we utterly discard Old Testament proofs for specifically Christian doctrines, preferring to put aside what chiefly rests on such support.

3. But if a practice which has so long been prevalent in the Church is to be reformed, it is necessary to show how the practice arose. There are two grounds on which this external equating of both Testaments rests. In the first place, not only did Christ Himself and the Apostles give instruction on portions of the Old Testament that had been read aloud, but the same custom was perpetuated in Christian public gatherings, before the New Testament Canon had been formed and even later. But from this it by no means follows that a similar homiletical use of the Old as well as of the New Testament ought still to be continued, or that we must put it down to the corruption of the Church that the Old Testament is not so much read by Christians of our time as the New. On the contrary, the ecclesiastical status of the Old Testament was due to its historical connexions, so that its gradual retirement into the background lies in the nature of the case; and these historical connexions are very far from vouching adequately for the normative dignity or the inspiration of the books of the Old Testament. The Pauline passages which testify to the value of the Old Testament¹² relate chiefly to the usage above described; and the freedom with which the Apostle employs it is in perfect agreement with our contention, so that we might well call him as a witness in support of the position that Old Testament proofs are no longer required.

The second ground is that Christ and the Apostles themselves refer to the books of the Old Testament as divine authorities favourable to Christianity. But from this it does not in the least follow that for our faith we still need these earlier premonitions, since we have actual experience; and the New Testament approves of men ceasing to believe on the ground of such witness when once they have gained immediate certainty through their own perception.¹³ Only, for that very reason historical fidelity and completeness of view demand that what Christ and His first preachers appealed to should be preserved. This, however, scarcely covers more than the prophetic books and the Psalms; which would justify the practice of adding these to the New Testament as an appendix. But in the time of Christ these books did not exist separately, but only as parts of the sacred collection; they are often cited exclusively in that character; certain quotations, moreover, occur from other books. Hence, although for us the Old Testament cannot be an indivisible whole as it was for the Jews, there can be no objection to its being added in its entirety to the New Testament. None the less, the real meaning of the facts would be clearer if the Old Testament followed the New as an appendix, for the present relative position of the two makes the demand, not obscurely, that we must first work our way through the whole of the Old Testament if we are to approach the New by the right avenue.

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Footnotes

1. Cf. Gal. 2¹¹ff. ↩

2. 2 Tim. 3¹⁶. ↩

3. 2 Pet. 1²¹. ↩

4. Acts 1²¹ff.; cf. John 15²⁷. Paul does not belong to this circle, and if the Church has never regarded him as the inferior of the other Apostles in respect of inspiration, it thereby ascribes to him the same prerogatives as to them, although in a sense he had acquired them in a different way. ↩

5. Conf. Gall. iii,; Conf. Angl. vi.; Conf. Belg. iv. ↩

6. The accounts given by Irenæus, iii. 1, and Eusebius, H.E. ii. 15, iii. 24, 39, v. 8, and elsewhere, are bound, as time goes on, to be less and less regarded as based on trustworthy information. ↩

7. Gal. 3¹⁹. ↩

8. Rom. 7⁶ᶠᶠ. and 8³. ↩

9. Gal. 3². ↩

10. John 14²⁶ and 15²⁶. ²⁷. ↩

11. 2 Pet, 1²¹. ↩

12. Rom. 15⁴, 1 Cor. 10¹¹, 2 Tim. 3¹⁶. ↩

13. John 4⁴². ↩