Chapter III. Inspiration Of The Scriptures.
I. Definition of Inspiration.
Inspiration is that influence of the Spirit of God upon the minds of the Scripture writers which made their writings the record of a progressive divine revelation, sufficient, when taken together and interpreted by the same Spirit who inspired them, to lead every honest inquirer to Christ and to salvation.
Notice the significance of each part of this definition: 1. Inspiration is an influence of the Spirit of God. It is not a merely naturalistic phenomenon or psychological vagary, but is rather the effect of the inworking of the personal divine Spirit. 2. Yet inspiration is an influence upon the mind, and not upon the body. God secures his end by awakening man's rational powers, and not by an external or mechanical communication. 3. The writings of inspired men are the record of a revelation. They are not themselves the revelation. 4. The revelation and the record are both progressive. Neither one is complete at the beginning. 5. The Scripture writings must be taken together. Each part must be viewed in connection with what precedes and with what follows. 6. The same Holy Spirit who made the original revelations must interpret to us the record of them, if we are to come to the knowledge of the truth. 7. So used and so interpreted, these writings are sufficient, both in quantity and in quality, for their religious purpose. 8. That purpose is, not to furnish us with a model history or with the facts of science, but to lead us to Christ and to salvation.
(a) Inspiration is therefore to be defined, not by its method, but by its result. It is a general term including all those kinds and degrees of the Holy Spirit's influence which were brought to bear upon the minds of the Scripture writers, in order to secure the putting into permanent and written form of the truth best adapted to man's moral and religious needs.
(b) Inspiration may often include revelation, or the direct communication from God of truth to which man could not attain by his unaided powers. It may include illumination, or the quickening of man's cognitive powers to understand truth already revealed. Inspiration, however, does not necessarily and always include either revelation or illumination. It is simply the divine influence which secures a transmission of needed truth to the future, and, according to the nature of the truth to be transmitted, it may be only an inspiration of superintendence, or it may be also and at the same time an inspiration of illumination or revelation.
(c) It is not denied, but affirmed, that inspiration may qualify for oral utterance of truth, or for wise leadership and daring deeds. Men may be inspired to render external service to God's kingdom, as in the cases of Bezalel and Samson; even though this service is rendered unwillingly or unconsciously, as in the cases of Balaam and Cyrus. All human intelligence, indeed, is due to the inbreathing of that same Spirit who created man at the beginning. We are now concerned with inspiration, however, only as it pertains to the authorship of Scripture.
[pg 197]Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; Ex. 31:2, 3—“I have called by name Bezalel ... and I have filled him with the Spirit of God ... in all manner of workmanship”; Judges 13:24, 25—“called his name Samson: and the child grew, and Jehovah blessed him. And the Spirit of Jehovah began to move him”; Num. 23:5—“And Jehovah put a word in Balaam's mouth, and said, Return unto Balak, and thus shalt thou speak”; 2 Chron. 36:22—“Jehovah stirred up the spirit of Cyrus”; Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd”; 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”; Job 32:8—“there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding.” These passages show the true meaning of 2 Tim. 3:16—“Every scripture inspired of God.” The word θεόπνευστος is to be understood as alluding, not to the flute-player's breathing into his instrument, but to God's original inbreathing of life. The flute is passive, but man's soul is active. The flute gives out only what it receives, but the inspired man under the divine influence is a conscious and free originator of thought and expression. Although the inspiration of which we are to treat is simply the inspiration of the Scripture writings, we can best understand this narrower use of the term by remembering that all real knowledge has in it a divine element, and that we are possessed of complete consciousness only as we live, move, and have our being in God. Since Christ, the divine Logos or Reason, is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9), a special influence of “the spirit of Christ which was in them” (1 Pet. 1:11) rationally accounts for the fact that “men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21).
It may help our understanding of terms above employed if we adduce instances of
Other definitions are those of Park: “Inspiration is such an influence over the writers of the Bible that all their teachings which have a religious character are trustworthy”; of Wilkinson: “Inspiration is help from God to keep the report of divine revelation free from error. Help to whom? No matter to whom, so the result is secured. The final result, viz.: the record or report of revelation, this must be free from error. Inspiration may affect one or all of the agents employed”; of Hovey: “Inspiration was an influence of the Spirit of God on those powers of men which are concerned in the reception, retention and expression of religious truth—an influence so pervading and powerful that the teaching of inspired men was according to the mind of God. Their teaching did not in any instance embrace all truth in respect to God, or man, or the way of life; but it comprised just so much of the truth on any particular subject as could be received in faith by the inspired teacher and made useful to those whom he addressed. In this sense the teaching of the original documents composing our Bible may be pronounced free from error”; of G. B. Foster: “Revelation is the action of God in the soul of his child, resulting in divine self-expression there: Inspiration is the action of God in the soul of his child, resulting in apprehension and appropriation of the divine expression. Revelation has logical but not chronological priority”; of Horton, Inspiration and the Bible, 10-13—“We mean by Inspiration exactly those qualities or characteristics which are the marks or notes of the Bible.... We call our Bible inspired; by which we mean that by reading and studying it we find our way to God, we find his will for us, and we find how we can conform ourselves to his will.”
Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 496, while nobly setting forth the naturalness of revelation, has misconceived the relation of inspiration to revelation by giving priority to the former: “The idea of a written revelation may be said to be logically involved in the notion of a living God. Speech is natural to spirit; and if God is by nature spirit, it will be to him a matter of nature to reveal himself. But if he speaks to man, it will be through men; and those who hear best will be most possessed of God. This possession is termed ‘inspiration.’ God inspires, man reveals: revelation is the mode or form—word, character, or institution—in which man embodies what he has received. The terms, though not equivalent, are co-extensive, the one denoting the process on its inner side, the other on its outer.” This statement, although approved by Sanday, Inspiration, 124, 125, seems to us almost precisely to reverse the right meaning of the words. We prefer the view of Evans, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 54—“God has first revealed himself, and then has inspired men to interpret, record and apply [pg 198]this revelation. In redemption, inspiration is the formal factor, as revelation is the material factor. The men are inspired, as Prof. Stowe said. The thoughts are inspired, as Prof. Briggs said. The words are inspired, as Prof. Hodge said. The warp and woof of the Bible is πνεῦμα: ‘the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit’ (John 6:63). Its fringes run off, as was inevitable, into the secular, the material, the psychic.” Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:351—“If the true revelation of God is in Christ, the Bible is not properly a revelation, but the history of a revelation. This is not only a fact but a necessity, for a person cannot be revealed in a book, but must find revelation, if at all, in a person. The centre and core of the Bible must therefore be the gospels, as the story of Jesus.”
Some, like Priestley, have held that the gospels are authentic but not inspired. We therefore add to the proof of the genuineness and credibility of Scripture, the proof of its inspiration. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 11—“Priestley's belief in supernatural revelation was intense. He had an absolute distrust of reason as qualified to furnish an adequate knowledge of religious things, and at the same time a perfect confidence in reason as qualified to prove that negative and to determine the contents of the revelation.” We might claim the historical truth of the gospels, even if we did not call them inspired. Gore, in Lux Mundi, 341—“Christianity brings with it a doctrine of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it.” Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“While the inspiration of the Scriptures is true, and being true is fundamental to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental to the truth of the Christian religion.”
On the idea of Revelation, see Ladd, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:156-178; on Inspiration, ibid., Apr. 1883:225-248. See Henderson on Inspiration (2nd ed.), 58, 205, 249, 303, 310. For other works on the general subject of Inspiration, see Lee, Bannerman, Jamieson, Macnaught; Garbett, God's Word Written; Aids to Faith, essay on Inspiration. Also, Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:205; Westcott, Introd. to Study of the Gospels, 27-65; Bib. Sac., 1:97; 4:154; 12:217; 15:29, 314; 25:192-198; Dr. Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 1867:593; 1872:428; Farrar, Science in Theology, 208; Hodge and Warfield, in Presb. Rev., Apr. 1881:225-261; Manly, The Bible Doctrine of Inspiration; Watts, Inspiration; Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 350; Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136; Hastings, Bible Dict., 1:296-299; Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration.
II. Proof of Inspiration.
1. Since we have shown that God has made a revelation of himself to man, we may reasonably presume that he will not trust this revelation wholly to human tradition and misrepresentation, but will also provide a record of it essentially trustworthy and sufficient; in other words, that the same Spirit who originally communicated the truth will preside over its publication, so far as is needed to accomplish its religious purpose.
Since all natural intelligence, as we have seen, presupposes God's indwelling, and since in Scripture the all-prevailing atmosphere, with its constant pressure and effort to enter every cranny and corner of the world, is used as an illustration of the impulse of God's omnipotent Spirit to vivify and energize every human soul (Gen. 2:7; Job 32:8), we may infer that, but for sin, all men would be morally and spiritually inspired (Num. 11:29—“Would that all Jehovah's people were prophets, that Jehovah would put his Spirit upon them!” Is. 59:2—“your iniquities have separated between you and your God”). We have also seen that God's method of communicating his truth in matters of religion is presumably analogous to his method of communicating secular truth, such as that of astronomy or history. There is an original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be given to mankind. Sanday, Inspiration, 140—“There is a ‘purpose of God according to selection’ (Rom. 9:11); there is an ‘election’ or ‘selection of grace’; and the object of that selection was Israel and those who take their name from Israel's Messiah. If a tower is built in ascending tiers, those who stand upon the lower tiers are yet raised above the ground, and some may be raised higher than others, but the full and unimpeded view is reserved for those who mount upward to the top. And that is the place destined for us if we will take it.”
If we follow the analogy of God's working in other communications of knowledge, we shall reasonably presume that he will preserve the record of his revelations in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom these revelations were first communicated, and we may expect that these documents will be kept sufficiently [pg 199]correct and trustworthy to accomplish their religious purpose, namely, that of furnishing to the honest inquirer a guide to Christ and to salvation. The physician commits his prescriptions to writing; the Clerk of Congress records its proceedings; the State Department of our government instructs our foreign ambassadors, not orally, but by dispatches. There is yet greater need that revelation should be recorded, since it is to be transmitted to distant ages; it contains long discourses; it embraces mysterious doctrines. Jesus did not write himself; for he was the subject, not the mere channel, of revelation. His unconcern about the apostles' immediately committing to writing what they saw and heard is inexplicable, if he did not expect that inspiration would assist them.
We come to the discussion of Inspiration with a presumption quite unlike that of Kuenen and Wellhausen, who write in the interest of almost avowed naturalism. Kuenen, in the opening sentences of his Religion of Israel, does indeed assert the rule of God in the world. But Sanday, Inspiration, 117, says well that “Kuenen keeps this idea very much in the background. He expended a whole volume of 593 large octavo pages (Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, London, 1877) in proving that the prophets were not moved to speak by God, but that their utterances were all their own.” The following extract, says Sanday, indicates the position which Dr. Kuenen really held: “We do not allow ourselves to be deprived of God's presence in history. In the fortunes and development of nations, and not least clearly in those of Israel, we see Him, the holy and all-wise Instructor of his human children. But the old contrasts must be altogether set aside. So long as we derive a separate part of Israel's religious life directly from God, and allow the supernatural or immediate revelation to intervene in even one single point, so long also our view of the whole continues to be incorrect, and we see ourselves here and there necessitated to do violence to the well-authenticated contents of the historical documents. It is the supposition of a natural development alone which accounts for all the phenomena” (Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, 585).
2. Jesus, who has been proved to be not only a credible witness, but a messenger from God, vouches for the inspiration of the Old Testament, by quoting it with the formula: “It is written”; by declaring that “one jot or one tittle” of it “shall in no wise pass away,” and that “the Scripture cannot be broken.”
Jesus quotes from four out of the five books of Moses, and from the Psalms, Isaiah, Malachi, and Zechariah, with the formula, “it is written”; see Mat. 4:4, 6, 7; 11:10; Mark 14:27; Luke 4:4-12. This formula among the Jews indicated that the quotation was from a sacred book and was divinely inspired. Jesus certainly regarded the Old Testament with as much reverence as the Jews of his day. He declared that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law” (Mat. 5:18). He said that “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) = “the normative and judicial authority of the Scripture cannot be set aside; notice here [in the singular, ἡ γραφή] the idea of the unity of Scripture” (Meyer). And yet our Lord's use of O. T. Scripture was wholly free from the superstitious literalism which prevailed among the Jews of his day. The phrases “word of God” (John 10:35; Mark 7:13), “wisdom of God” (Luke 11:49) and “oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2) probably designate the original revelations of God and not the record of these in Scripture; cf. 1 Sam. 9:27; 1 Chron. 17:3; Is. 40:8; Mat. 13:19; Luke 3:2; Acts 8:25. Jesus refuses assent to the O. T. law respecting the Sabbath (Mark 2:27 sq.), external defilements (Mark 7:15), divorce (Mark 10:2 sq.). He “came not to destroy but to fulfil” (Mat. 5:17); yet he fulfilled the law by bringing out its inner spirit in his perfect life, rather than by formal and minute obedience to its precepts; see Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:5-35.
The apostles quote the O. T. as the utterance of God (Eph. 4:8—διὸ λέγει, sc. θεός). Paul's insistence upon the form of even a single word, as in Gal. 3:16, and his use of the O. T. for purposes of allegory, as in Gal 4:21-31, show that in his view the O. T. text was sacred. Philo, Josephus and the Talmud, in their interpretations of the O. T., fall continually into a “narrow and unhappy literalism.” “The N. T. does not indeed escape Rabbinical methods, but even where these are most prominent they seem to affect the form far more than the substance. And through the temporary and local form the writer constantly penetrates to the very heart of the O. T. teaching;” see Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 87; Henderson, Inspiration, 254.
3. Jesus commissioned his apostles as teachers and gave them promises of a supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit in their teaching, like the promises made to the Old Testament prophets.
[pg 200]Mat. 28:19, 20—“Go ye ... teaching ... and lo, I am with you.” Compare promises to Moses (Ex. 3:12), Jeremiah (Jer. 1:5-8), Ezekiel (Ezek. 2 and 3). See also Is. 44:3 and Joel 2:28—“I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed”; Mat. 10:7—“as ye go, preach”; 19—“be not anxious how or what ye shall speak”; John 14:26—“the Holy Spirit ... shall teach you all things”; 15:26, 27—“the Spirit of truth ... shall bear witness of me: and ye also bear witness” = the Spirit shall witness in and through you; 16:13—“he shall guide you into all the truth” = (1) limitation—all the truth of Christ, i. e., not of philosophy or science, but of religion; (2) comprehension—all the truth within this limited range, i. e., sufficiency of Scripture as rule of faith and practice (Hovey); 17:8—“the words which thou gavest me I have given unto them”; Acts 1:4—“he charged them ... to wait for the promise of the Father”; John 20:22—“he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit.”Here was both promise and communication of the personal Holy Spirit. Compare Mat. 10:19, 20—“it shall be given you in that hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.” See Henderson, Inspiration, 247, 248.
Jesus' testimony here is the testimony of God. In Deut. 18:18, it is said that God will put his words into the mouth of the great Prophet. In John 12:49, 50, Jesus says: “I spake not from myself, but the Father that sent me, he hath given me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life eternal; the things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto me, so I speak.” John 17:7, 8—“all things whatsoever thou hast given me are from thee: for the words which thou gavest me I have given unto them.” John 8:40—“a man that hath told you the truth, which I heard from God.”
4. The apostles claim to have received this promised Spirit, and under his influence to speak with divine authority, putting their writings upon a level with the Old Testament Scriptures. We have not only direct statements that both the matter and the form of their teaching were supervised by the Holy Spirit, but we have indirect evidence that this was the case in the tone of authority which pervades their addresses and epistles.
Statements:—1 Cor. 2:10, 13—“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.... Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth”; 11:23—“I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you”; 12:8, 28—the λόγος σοφίας was apparently a gift peculiar to the apostles; 14:37, 38—“the things which I write unto you ... they are the commandment of the Lord”; Gal. 1:12—“neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ”; 1 Thess. 4:2, 8—“ye know what charge we gave you through the Lord Jesus.... Therefore he that rejecteth, rejecteth not man, but God, who giveth his Holy Spirit unto you.” The following passages put the teaching of the apostles on the same level with O. T. Scripture: 1 Pet. 1:11, 12—“Spirit of Christ which was in them” [O. T. prophets];—[N. T. preachers] “preached the gospel unto you by the Holy Spirit”; 2 Pet. 1:21—O. T. prophets “spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; 3:2—“remember the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets” [O. T.], “and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles” [N. T.]; 16—“wrest [Paul's Epistles], as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” Cf. Ex. 4:14-16; 7:1.
Implications:—2 Tim. 3:16—“Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable”—a clear implication of inspiration, though not a direct statement of it = there is a divinely inspired Scripture. In 1 Cor. 5:3-5, Paul, commanding the Corinthian church with regard to the incestuous person, was arrogant if not inspired. There are more imperatives in the Epistles than in any other writings of the same extent. Notice the continual asseveration of authority, as in Gal. 1:1, 2, and the declaration that disbelief of the record is sin, as in 1 John 5:10, 11. Jude 3—“the faith which was once for all (ἅπαξ) delivered unto the saints.” See Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:122; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 34, 234; Conant, Genesis, Introd., xiii, note; Charteris, New Testament Scriptures: They claim truth, unity, authority.
The passages quoted above show that inspired men distinguished inspiration from their own unaided thinking. These inspired men claim that their inspiration is the same with that of the prophets. Rev. 22:6—“the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass” = inspiration gave them supernatural knowledge of the future. As inspiration in the O. T. was the work of the pre-incarnate Christ, so inspiration in the N. T. is the work of the ascended and glorified Christ by his Holy Spirit. On the Relative Authority of the Gospels, see Gerhardt, in Am. Journ. Theol., Apl. 1899:275-294, who shows that not the words of Jesus in the gospels are the final revelation, but rather the teaching of the risen and glorified Christ in the Acts and the Epistles. The Epistles are the posthumous works of Christ. Pattison, Making of the Sermon, 23—“The apostles, believing themselves to be inspired [pg 201]teachers, often preached without texts; and the fact that their successors did not follow their example shows that for themselves they made no such claim. Inspiration ceased, and henceforth authority was found in the use of the words of the now complete Scriptures.”
5. The apostolic writers of the New Testament, unlike professedly inspired heathen sages and poets, gave attestation by miracles or prophecy that they were inspired by God, and there is reason to believe that the productions of those who were not apostles, such as Mark, Luke, Hebrews, James, and Jude, were recommended to the churches as inspired, by apostolic sanction and authority.
The twelve wrought miracles (Mat. 10:1). Paul's “signs of an apostle” (2 Cor. 13:12) = miracles. Internal evidence confirms the tradition that Mark was the “interpreter of Peter,” and that Luke's gospel and the Acts had the sanction of Paul. Since the purpose of the Spirit's bestowment was to qualify those who were to be the teachers and founders of the new religion, it is only fair to assume that Christ's promise of the Spirit was valid not simply to the twelve but to all who stood in their places, and to these not simply as speakers, but, since in this respect they had a still greater need of divine guidance, to them as writers also.
The epistle to the Hebrews, with the letters of James and Jude, appeared in the lifetime of some of the twelve, and passed unchallenged; and the fact that they all, with the possible exception of 2 Peter, were very early accepted by the churches founded and watched over by the apostles, is sufficient evidence that the apostles regarded them as inspired productions. As evidences that the writers regarded their writings as of universal authority, see 1 Cor. 1:2—“unto the church of God which is at Corinth ... with all that call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place,” etc.; 7:17—“so ordain I in all the churches”; Col. 4:16—“And when this epistle hath been read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans”; 2 Pet. 3:15, 16—“our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote unto you.” See Bartlett, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1880:23-57; Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:204, 205.
Johnson, Systematic Theology, 40—“Miraculous gifts were bestowed at Pentecost on many besides apostles. Prophecy was not an uncommon gift during the apostolic period.” There is no antecedent improbability that inspiration should extend to others than to the principal leaders of the church, and since we have express instances of such inspiration in oral utterances (Acts 11:28; 21:9, 10) it seems natural that there should have been instances of inspiration in written utterances also. In some cases this appears to have been only an inspiration of superintendence. Clement of Alexandria says only that Peter neither forbade nor encouraged Mark in his plan of writing the gospel. Irenæus tells us that Mark's gospel was written after the death of Peter. Papias says that Mark wrote down what he remembered to have heard from Peter. Luke does not seem to have been aware of any miraculous aid in his writing, and his methods appear to have been those of the ordinary historian.
6. The chief proof of inspiration, however, must always be found in the internal characteristics of the Scriptures themselves, as these are disclosed to the sincere inquirer by the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy Spirit combines with the teaching of the Bible to convince the earnest reader that this teaching is as a whole and in all essentials beyond the power of man to communicate, and that it must therefore have been put into permanent and written form by special inspiration of God.
Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 105—“The testimony of the Spirit is an argument from identity of effects—the doctrines of experience and the doctrines of the Bible—to identity of cause.... God-wrought experience proves a God-wrought Bible.... This covers the Bible as a whole, if not the whole of the Bible. It is true so far as I can test it. It is to be believed still further if there is no other evidence.”Lyman Abbott, in his Theology of an Evolutionist, 105, calls the Bible “a record of man's laboratory work in the spiritual realm, a history of the dawning of the consciousness of God and of the divine life in the soul of man.” This seems to us unduly subjective. We prefer to say that the Bible is also God's witness to us of his presence and working in human hearts and in human history—a witness which proves its [pg 202]divine origin by awakening in us experiences similar to those which it describes, and which are beyond the power of man to originate.
G. P. Fisher, in Mag. of Christ. Lit., Dec. 1892:239—“Is the Bible infallible? Not in the sense that all its statements extending even to minutiæ in matters of history and science are strictly accurate. Not in the sense that every doctrinal and ethical statement in all these books is incapable of amendment. The whole must sit in judgment on the parts. Revelation is progressive. There is a human factor as well as a divine. The treasure is in earthen vessels. But the Bible is infallible in the sense that whoever surrenders himself in a docile spirit to its teaching will fall into no hurtful error in matters of faith and charity. Best of all, he will find in it the secret of a new, holy and blessed life, ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3). The Scriptures are the witness to Christ.... Through the Scriptures he is truly and adequately made known to us.” Denney, Death of Christ, 314—“The unity of the Bible and its inspiration are correlative terms. If we can discern a real unity in it—and I believe we can when we see that it converges upon and culminates in a divine love bearing the sin of the world—then that unity and its inspiration are one and the same thing. And it is not only inspired as a whole, it is the only book that is inspired. It is the only book in the world to which God sets his seal in our hearts when we read in search of an answer to the question, How shall a sinful man be righteous with God?... The conclusion of our study of Inspiration should be the conviction that the Bible gives us a body of doctrine—a ‘faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints’ (Jude 3).”