Inspiration is not the most fundamental of Christian doctrines, nor even the first thing we prove about the Scriptures. It is the last and crowning fact as to the Scriptures. These we first prove authentic, historically credible, generally trustworthy, before we prove them inspired. And the proof of their authenticity, credibility, general trustworthiness would give us a firm basis for Christianity prior to any knowledge on our part of their inspiration, and apart indeed from the existence of inspiration.
Warfield’s approach to inspiration and infallibility is resolutely a posteriori and historical. For it begins from the conviction, also established a posteriori, by an inductive procedure, that the Bible is historically reliable. If the Bible is historically reliable then what it tells us about Jesus is historically reliable, and what it tells us about its own inspiration is equally reliable. Warfield states that our procedure for establishing the doctrine rests at first
On the confidence which we have in the writers of the New Testament as doctrinal guides, and ultimately on whatever evidence of whatever kind and force exists to justify that confidence. In this sense, we repeat, the cause of distinctive Christianity is bound up with the cause of the Biblical doctrine of inspiration. We accept Christianity in all its distinctiveness on no other ground than the credibility and trustworthiness of the Bible as a guide to truth; and on this same ground we must equally accept its doctrine of inspiration.
‘Bound up with the cause of the Biblical doctrine of inspiration’: that is, there is parity between the distinctive doctrines of Christianity and the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Because we hold that the bible is trustworthy in its depiction of the deity of Christ, say, then we can similarly be confident about what it teaches regarding its own inspiration. Warfield is not saying that our confidence in Christ’s deity depends upon first accepting the inspiration of Scripture. Nor is he saying that the doctrine of inspiration is as important as the doctrine of the deity of Christ.
We do not adopt the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Scripture on sentimental grounds, not even, as we have already had occasion to remark, on a priori or general grounds of whatever kind. We adopt it specifically because it is taught us as truth by Christ and His apostles, in the Scriptural record of their teaching, and the evidence for its truth is, therefore, as we have also already pointed out, precisely that evidence in weight and amount, which vindicates for us the trustworthiness of Christ and His apostles as teachers of doctrine.
So the path begins as follows. First there is probable evidence, based upon the historical reliability of Scripture, that it teaches certain doctrines about God, Christ and mankind, and so on. Using the same procedure we also recognise that it teaches the doctrine that the Scriptures themselves are divinely inspired. This then enables us to draw the inference that the Scriptural account of God, Christ and man is not only probably true, but inspired, inerrant, because the account of such things is given in a book which is inspired and inerrant. This is ‘the last and crowning fact’ about Scripture, transforming a merely reliable record into an inspired record. Warfield goes on to say that strictly speaking such evidence is, from a logical point of view, probable evidence, incapable of producing demonstrative certainty, nevertheless it has so great a probability that ‘the strength of conviction is practically equal to that produced by demonstration itself’.
So the first question is, is the Bible reliable, and the second question is, what does this reliable document teach about its own divine inspiration? Warfield offers an answer to the second question in such articles as ‘God-Inspired Scripture’, ‘“It Says”: “Scripture Says:” “God Says”’, and ‘The Oracles of God’.
As we have already noted, there is an additional important feature about what the Bible teaches about its own inspiration. The view of inspiration in question is not ‘mechanical’. Rather, in inspiring the various authors of Scripture God preserved and employed their distinctive personalities, history and outlook as fallible human beings with limited knowledge, and nevertheless ensured that what they taught is infallible, inerrant.
The human agency, both in the histories out of which the Scriptures sprang, and in their immediate composition and inscription, is everywhere apparent, and gives substance and form to the entire collection of writings. It is not merely in the matter of verbal expression or literary composition that the personal idiosyncrasies of each author are freely manifested by the untrammelled play of all his faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities.
And, quite surprisingly, perhaps
It must be remembered that it is not claimed that the Scriptures, any more than their authors, are omniscient. The information they convey is in the forms of human thought, and limited on all sides. They were not designed to teach philosophy, science or human history as such. They were not designed to furnish an infallible system of speculative theology. They are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error. The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for the their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong. Nevertheless, the historical faith of the Church has always been that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or physical principle, are without error when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.
Nothing could be less mechanical than this.
So, in a manner that is distinct from the general concursus of divine providence, deeper and more mysterious, while nevertheless being a part of providence, God inspires fallible human authors, limited in knowledge and children of their time. While the words are their words, they are also, through the inspiring agency of God the Holy Spirit, God’s words as well. As such, when properly interpreted, the affirmations of Scripture are without error. Questions of genre are relevant to interpretation, and of course the importance of careful exegesis of Scripture is stressed. But this is not at the expense of the distinctive theological principle that a person who is fallible and whose thoughts have been formed by influences that contain elements of human error may nevertheless, in an inscrutable way, be capable of speaking infallible truth as a result of be borne upon by the Holy Spirit, while remaining fully himself. This does not mean that, by the wave of a magic wand, an error becomes a truth when it is inspired. Rather, it simply means that patterns of speech and thought that have an origin that is fallible and partly erroneous in character may be used to make infallibly true assertions.
It is true that according to Warfield and the other Princetonians the doctrine of inerrancy has to be nuanced and finessed in various ways. But then why does this, in I Howard Marshall’s phrase, quoted by McGowan, present the danger of the death of the doctrine ‘by a thousand qualifications’? If it does, then why may not finely nuanced accounts of, for example, the Incarnation, designed to avoid various heretical alternatives, Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, and so forth, result in the death of the doctrine of the Incarnation? The clarification of a doctrine does not result in its death so long as a substantial doctrinal thesis remains.
But what are we to do when we encounter difficulties in our path? Warfield’s answer at this point is: the trustworthiness of the apostles as teachers of doctrine, the doctrine of inspiration, established on the historical ground that we have previously sketched, must mean that the difficulties take second place. They are nevertheless to be addressed. Once again, he draws a parallel between the apostolic doctrine of biblical inspiration and other apostolic doctrines, say, of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is clearly taught. We accept the apostolic testimony as we would accept, say, that Aristotle wrote the Nichomachean Ethics, and believe that the Incarnation is true doctrine. Are there difficulties with the understanding the Incarnation? Obviously so. Yet
We do not and we cannot wait until all these difficulties are fully explained before we yield to the testimony of the New Testament the fullest confidence of our minds and hearts. How then can it be true that we are to wait until all difficulties are removed before we can accept with confidence the Biblical doctrine of inspiration?
There is a difference, for Warfield, between a difficulty attending a doctrine and facts that are manifestly inconsistent with it. The impeccability of Christ is a difficult doctrine, (this is not Warfield’s example) but must not for that reason be surrendered. But if there are facts in Scripture manifestly inconsistent with it, if there is incontrovertible evidence that the biblical Christ was a transgressor of the law of God, say, then that is obviously inconsistent with the assertion of his impeccability. Allowing for the anachronism, Warfield pleads for Popperian rigour when it comes to testing the claims of Scripture about itself: ‘By all means let the doctrine of the Bible be tested by the facts and let the test be made all the more, not the less, stringent and penetrating because of the great issues that hang upon it. If the facts are inconsistent with the doctrine, let us all know it, and know it so clearly that the matter is put beyond all doubt.’
But what of such factors as the structure of Scripture, ‘especially as determined by some special school of modern research by critical methods certainly not infallible and to the best of our own judgment not even reasonable’, the identification of certain prima facie discrepancies, and the like? Warfield refers to such things, along with style and genre, as ‘the phenomena’, a term that Charles Hodge had used.
In response Warfield asserts that to modify the teaching of Scripture respecting its own character by reference to such phenomena would be a failure ‘to commit ourselves without reserve to the teaching of the Bible, either because that teaching is distrusted or already disbelieved…..by correcting the doctrine delivered by the Biblical writers, it discredits these writers as teachers of doctrine’.
If the Biblical facts and teaching are taken as co-factors in the induction, the procedure …...is liable to the danger of modifying the teaching by the facts without clear recognition of what is being done; the result of which would be the loss from observation of one main fact of errancy, viz., the inaccuracy of the teaching of the Scriptures as to their own inspiration. This would vitiate the whole result: and this vitiation of the result can be avoided only by ascertaining separately the teaching of the Scripture as to its own inspiration, and by accounting the results of this ascertainment one of the facts of the induction.
The ‘phenomena’, such as the presence of apparent contradictions in the text, the hypotheses of a ‘critical’ approach to the text, and the like, may be relevant to the exegesis of the texts of Scripture which teach inspiration. Attention to such facts may help us to interpret the assertions of Scripture.
Direct exegesis after all has its rights: we may seek aid from every quarter in our efforts to perform its processes with precision and obtain its results with purity; but we cannot allow its results to be ‘modified’ by extraneous considerations.
At this juncture, the logical order of the procedure, the character of the path, is vital to Warfield’s case. If, proceeding inductively, we were to begin with the phenomena of Scripture and the statements about inspiration together, giving to each of these data equal weight, we would be unable to challenge the phenomena by the statements. So the ‘real problem’ of inspiration, as Warfield understood it, is ‘whether we can still trust the Bible as a guide to doctrine, as a teacher of truth’. The presence of such trust means giving that teaching priority over every other fact about Scripture which our inductions may lay bare. So the declarations of Scripture, and the phenomena, are distinct kinds of fact about it. One is logically subordinate to the other. Once again we can see how grossly inaccurate and unfair it is to describe the Hodge-Warfield theological method as ‘often giving the impression’ that the whole Bible can be reduced to a set of propositions that can then be demonstrated as ‘true’. To whom does it give that impression, one wonders, and how often? The logic is clear. It’s not ‘there are discrepancies and the presence of phenomena that present difficulties, therefore there cannot be an inerrant text’, but ‘There is an inerrant text and therefore the discrepancies and difficult phenomena are no more nor less than that – copyists’ errors or unresolved puzzles’.
The second thing that Warfield’s procedure implies is that, as we noted earlier, there is an epistemic parity between the biblical doctrine of Scripture and the biblical doctrine concerning any other Christian teaching. Warfield himself brings out this point:
Let it not be said that we thus found the whole Christian system upon the doctrine of plenary inspiration. We found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of plenary inspiration as little as we found it upon the doctrine of angelic existences.
All the doctrines of our faith, including the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures, are established in the same way from the same Scriptures. These doctrines differ in importance, in the extent to which they reach to the heart of the Christian faith, and the doctrine of divine inspiration (and inerrancy) is not the most important of these. It is certainly not a ‘foundational’ doctrine in the way some critics of Warfield believe, who think that his doctrine of biblical infallibility or inerrancy is evidence that he was in thrall to some version of Enlightenment ‘foundationalism’.
So much for Warfield’s method, and the pathway he constructs with it.
