Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/78

 INSPIRATION

INSPIRATION

forthcoming in the Encyclical "Providcntissimus Deus" of the same year. In that Encyclical Leo XIII said; " It will never be lawful to restrict inspira- tion merely to certain parts of the Holy Scriptures, or to grant that the sacred writer could have made a mistake. Nor may the opinion of those be tolerated, who, in order to get out of these difficulties, do not hesitate to suppose that Divine inspiration extends only to what touches faith and morals, on the false plea that the true meaning is sought for less in what God has said than in the motive for which He has said it" (Denz., 1950). In fact, a limited inspira- tion contradicts Christian tradition and theological teaching.

B. Verbal Inspiration. — Theologians discuss the question, whether inspiration controlled the choice of the words used or operated only in what concerned the sense of the assertions made in the Bible. In the sixteenth century verbal inspiration was the current teaching. The Jesuits of Louvain were the first to react against this opinion. They held "that it is not necessary, in order that a text be Holy Scripture, for the Holy Ghost to have inspired the very material words used". The protests against this new o]iinion were so violent that Bellarniine and Suarcz thought it their duty to tone down the formula by declaring "that all the words of the text have been dictated by the Holy Ghost in what concerns tlie substance, but differently according to the diverse conditions of the instruments". This opinion went on gaining in precision, and little by little it disentangled itself from the terminology which it had borrowed from the adverse opinion, notably from the word "dicta- tion ". Its progress was so rapid that at the begin- ning of the nineteenth century it was more commonly taught than the theory of verbal inspiration. Cardinal Franzelin seems to have given it its definite form. During the last quarter of a century verbal inspira- tion has again found partisans, and they become more numerous every day. However, the theologians of to-day, whilst retaining the terminology of the older school, have profoundly modified the theory itself. They no longer speak of a material dictation of words to the ear of the writer, nor of an interior revelation of the term to be employed, but of a Divine motion extending to every faculty and even to the powers of execution of the writer, and in consequence in- fluencing the whole work, even its editing. Thus the sacred text is wholly the work of God and wholly the work of man, of the latter by way of instrument, of the former by way of principal cause. Under this rejuvenated form tlie theory of verbal inspiration shows a marked advance towards reconciliation with the rival opinion. From an exegetical and apolo- getical point of view it is indifferent which of these two opinions we adopt. All agree that the charac- teristics of style as well as the imperfections affect- ing the subject matter itself, belong to the inspired writer. As for the inerrancy of the inspired text it is to the Inspirer that it must be finally attrib- uted, and it matters little if God has insured the truth of His Scripture by the grace of inspiration itself, as the adherents of verbal inspiration teach, rather than by a providential assistance.

IV. PUOTESTANT VlKW.S ON THE InsPIHATION OF

THE Bible. — A. At the lieginnint/ of the Reformation. — (1) As a neces.sary cons('uence of their attitude towards the Bible, which I hey had taken as their only rule of Faith, the I'rotestants were led at the very outset to go beyond the idea of a merely passive inspiration, which was commonly received in the first half of the sixteenth century. Not only did they make no distinction between in.spiration and revela- tion, but Scripture, both in its matter and style, was consideri'd as revelation itself. In it God spoke to the reader just as He did to the Israelites of old from the mercy-Bcat. Hence that kind of cult which some

Protestants of to-day call "Bibliolatry ". In the midst of the incertitude, vagueness, and antinomies of those early times, when the Reformation, like Luther himself, was trying to find a way and a symbol, one can discern a constant preoccupation, that of indissolubly joining religious belief to the very truth of God by means of His written Word. The Lutherans who devoted themselves to compos- ing the Protestant theory of inspiration were Me- lanchthon, Chemnitz, Quenstedt, Calov. Soon, to the inspiration of the words was added that of the vowel points of the present Hebrew text. This was not a mere opinion held by the two Buxtorfs, but a doctrine defined, and imposed under pain of fine, imprisonment, and exile, by the Confession of the Swiss Churches, promulgated in 1675. These dis- positions were abrogated in 1724. The Purists held that in the Bible there are neither barbarisms nor solecisms; that the Greek of the New Testament is as pure as that of the classical authors. It was said, with a certain amount of truth, that the Bible had become a sacrament for the Reformers.

(2) In the seventeenth century began the con- troversies which, in cour.se of time, were to end in the theory of inspiration now generally accepted by Protestants. The two principles which brought about the Reformation were precisely the instruments of this revolution: on the one side, the claim for every human soul of a teaching of the Holy Ghost, which was immediate and independent of every exterior rule; on the other, the right of private judgment, or autonomy of individual reasoning, in reading and studying the Bible. In the name of the first prin- ciple, on which Zwingli had insisted more than Luther and Calvin, the Pietists thought to free themselves from the letter of the Bible which fettered the action of the Spirit. A French Huguenot, Seb. Castellion (d. 1563), had already been bold enough to dis- tinguish between the letter and the spirit; according to him the spirit only came from God, the letter was no more than a "case, husk, or shell of the spirit ".

The Quakers, the followers of Swedenborg, and the Irvingites were to force tliis theory to its utmost limits; real revelation — the only one which instructs and sanctifies — was that produced luider the imme- diate influence of the Holy tihost. While the Pietists read their Bilile with the help of interior illumination alone, others, in even greater niunliers, tried to get some light from philological and historical researches, which had received their decisive impulse from the Renaissance. Every facility was assuretl to their investigations by the principle of freedom of private judgment; and of this they took advantage. The conclusions obtained by this method could not but be fatal to the theory of inspiration by revelation. In vain did its partisans say that God's will had been to reveal to the Evangelists in four different ways the words which, in reality, Christ had uttered only once; that the Holy Ghost varied His style according as He was dictating to Isaias or to Amos — such an explanation was nothing short of an avowal of in- ability to meet the facts alleged against them. As a matter of fact, Faustus Socinus (d. 1562) had al- ready held that the words and, in general, the style of Scripture were not inspired. Soon afterwards, (ieorgc Calixtus, Episcopius, and Grotius made a clear distinction between inspiration and revelation. -According to the last-named, nothing was revealed but the iirophecies and the' words of Jesus Christ, everytliiiig else was only inspired. Still further, he reduces inspiration to a pious motion of the .soul [see " Votum pro pace Ecclcsia?" in his complete works. III (l(i7!)), 672). The Dutch Arminian school, then represented by J. LeC'Ierc, and, in France, by L. Capelle, DaillC', Blondel, and others, followed the same course. Although they kept current terminology.