A Binding Dogma: The Inspiration of Holy Scripture

Holy Scripture is the inspired Word of God. Whether we like it or not, this affirmation is a fundamental dogma of the Church universal. Christ him-left made it a doctrine binding on his Church when he accepted it from the synagogue (cf. Matt. 22:43; Mark 12:36). Inspiration of the Scriptures was proclaimed by the apostles (Acts 1:16; 3:21; 4:25; 28:25; 2 Cor. 3:14 ff.; 2 Tim. 3:16; Heb. 3:7; 9:8; 10:15; 2 Pet. 1:19 ff.). If was confessed by the Church in that great ecumenical creed which binds together all churches of Christendom. For the words of our “Nicene Creed,” (A.D. 381) concerning the Holy Spirit, “who spoke by the prophets,” not only refer to the historical fact of the oral preaching of the prophets in the past, but also to the prophetic books (which include in the Old Testament also the preexilic historical books), as the words “according to the Scriptures” in the passage on Christ’s ressurection (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3 f.) show. This scope is confirmed by both contemporary (Epiphanius) and later (for example, the Armenian) versions of the Creed; they contain formulas like “who spoke in the Law, and in the Prophets, and in the Apostles and in the Gospels.” With the Nicene Creed, all Eastern and Western Catholic churches accepted this doctrine, and all churches of the Reformation reaffirmed it. The doctrine of the divinely inspired Scriptures is so closely linked to the central doctrines of the Creed, namely the doctrines on the Trinity and the Person of Christ, that any decay in understanding the Holy Scripture as God’s Word leads necessarily to decay in believing in the God-Man Jesus Christ and in the Person of the Holy Spirit. The tragic history of modern Protestantism corroborates this relationship.

It is strange indeed that the common possession of all Christians should always be the center of disunity. All churches agree that the Bible is the Word of God. But what is the Bible? Not only the Canon but even the text of the Scriptures differs in East and West, in Rome and in the Protestant churches. This difference, incidentally, already existed in the Church of the New Testament, which used side by side the Septuagint and the Hebrew Old Testament.

But even where the same books and the same text are read, deep differences exist concerning crucial questions. Does God’s revelation come to us in the Scripture only, or also in the unwritten tradition of the Church and in an inner experience of the soul? Is Scripture its own interpreter or did Christ institute in his Church a teaching office which has to interpret Scripture with binding authority? These fundamental differences of opinion produce so many interpretations that the Bible has been called the book wherein everybody looks for his own views and finds them. Of what value, then, is the common conviction that the Bible is the Word of God?

The Great Unifying Factor

The Bible, despite all contradictory interpretations thereof, is the great unifying factor of Christendom. Christians have the content of Scripture in common. More than this, as long as they recognize the Scriptures as the Word of God they recognize a divine authority to which all must submit, an objective truth which transcends all subjective interpretations. Even Rome, which considers the teaching office of the Church (in the magisterium exercised by the Pope) as the divinely appointed, authoritative, and infallible interpreter of the Scriptures, could never subordinate the Scriptures to the Church in the manner that some modern Anglicans and Protestants are doing who regard the New Testament as a product of the Church. While the Church has created the canon by determining which books should be “canonical,” that is, recognized by the Church, she was not at liberty to select just any book. She could receive only the “sacred” books, those which “as written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit have God as their author and have been given as such to the Church,” as the Vatican Council declares (Denzinger 1787). The Church therefore is bound to the divinely inspired Scriptures. Whatever the coordination of “Scripture” and “Tradition” in the decree of Trent and the coordination of “Holy Writ” and “Holy Church” by modern Catholics may mean in practice for the authority of Holy Writ, the Vatican dogma of the inspiration of the Scriptures makes it a heresy for any Catholic to declare any authority higher than Scripture.

This dogma of Holy Scripture as the inspired Word of God, together with the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas, was the common possession of all Christendom at the time of the Reformation. What Luther said to Rome concerning these “sublime articles of the divine majesty” is true also of the doctrine of the Bible as the Word of God: it is not a matter of dispute and contention. This fact explains why the early Protestant confessions contain no article on Holy Scripture. Only after the Council of Trent’s doctrine of Scripture and Tradition and its definition of the Canon were the churches of the Reformation forced to speak on these issues. But even behind the controversies over the Sola Scriptura lies the common belief that Holy Scripture is the Word of God. However deep and irreconcilable are the doctrinal contrasts between Rome, Wittenberg, Zürich, Geneva, and Canterbury, these types of Christianity showed considerable agreement in their common acceptance of the teaching of the Nicene Creed including its doctrin of the Scriptures. Only from this perspective can we understand the various confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as attempts to interpret not define Holy Scripture. It is really moving to note how they all had “the aim,” as the Council of Trent puts it, “that errors may be removed and the purity of the Gospel be preserved in the Church.”

The Loss Of The Bible

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in Western Christendom has been, not the loss of unity in the sixteenth century, but rather the loss of what for generations still remained the common possession of even the separated churches. This tragedy began when Trent decided that the Gospel is contained both “in written books and in unwritten traditions, which were received by the apostles from the lips of Christ himself, or, by the same apostles, at the dictation of the Holy Spirit, and were handed on to us.” Both the Scriptures and the traditions must be received and venerated, therefore, “with equal pious affection and reverence.” Never before had the Western Church dared so to equate “traditions” and the Scriptures. Even when theologians like Hugh of St. Victor called the writings of the Fathers “Holy Scriptures,” they distinguished them clearly from the canonical books which alone merited absolute faith and which alone were the valid basis of a dogma. In referring to Augustine’s famous statement on the difference between canonical and all other writings, Aquinas makes very clear where Christian doctrine finds its authority: “… our faith rests on the revelation which has been made to the apostles and prophets who have written the canonical books” (Summa th. I, 1, 8). It is wrong to superimpose on medieval theology such a question as “Holy Writ or Holy Church?” which stems from a certain type of modern Catholic Dogmatics which removes the doctrine of the Church from its context in the Creed and puts it side by side with the doctrine of Holy Scripture into the “Fundamental Theology” which expounds the sources of revelation (for example, the new “Summa” of the Jesuits in Spain). The bishops at Trent who opposed the equation of “Scriptures” and “Traditions” saw the danger of just such a new dogma. They could hardly have realized the full extent of the tragedy that was to come. Since the content of tradition is never fully known, the teaching office of the Church responsible for interpreting tradition was bound to become a veritable new source of revelation. This danger has been corroborated by the development of modern Mariology into a counterpart to Christology. The dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption of Mary (1950) cannot be proved from Scripture. Nor do the first four centuries of the Church supply any foundation for such traditions. That such tradition extends back to the aposles is believed solely on the authority of the pope. When he defines these dogmas, he declares them “revealed by God, and therefor to be believed by all the faithful.” Those who reject these dogmas because they are found neither in the Scriptures nor in the old traditions of the Catholic Church “have suffered shipwreck concerning the faith and have fallen away from the unity of the Church.” To what extent the great Bible movement now asserting itself in Roman Catholicism can restore what has been lost of the authority of Holy Scripture remains to be seen.

Protestants have always recognized the tragic development of Roman theology since the juxtaposition of Scripture and Tradition by Trent in 1546. Have they realized, however, the corresponding tragedy that has overtaken the churches that call themselves Churches of the Reformation? Do we perhaps behold the mote in our brother’s eye but do not consider the beam in our own? That the mariological doctrines, which (as many Catholics expect) may some day be followed by the definition of a dogma of Mary as the co-redeemer and mediatrix of all graces, are not only unbiblical but also interfere with Christ’s honor as the only mediator is certainly true. But why, in 1950, was the protest against the dogma of the Assumption so unimpressive? Why do our modern Protestant criticisms of Rome all lack authority which characterized the doctrinal statements of our fathers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The answer is clear enough.

A Scriptural Witness

The Protestantism of those days was not a negative protest against Roman errors. Rather, it was a positive witness to the authority of Holy Scripture as the only source and rule of all doctrines of the Church. To these Protestants Holy Scripture was the Word of God. We must recognize that the Sola Scriptura of the Reformation depends on the firm belief that the Bible is the Word of God. Where this belief is shaken or even abandoned, the authority of Scripture collapses. This is the tragedy of modern Protestantism. We cannot deal here with the process of this collapse. We only note that first the theologians and then one after another of the churches severed Scripture from the Word in their official statements of faith. They were satisfied with the assumption that this Word is only contained somewhere in the Scriptures, or that the Scriptures are only a record of a past revelation in the mighty acts of God which were the true Word of God. Or we hear that under certain circumstances the Bible can become the Word of God.

Because it is no longer understood, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture has been abandoned by the theologians in the majority of the Protestant churches. It is regarded as untenable. But the biblical doctrine of the fact of inspiration must not be confused or equated with Augustine’s and Gregory’s theories of the method of inspiration. Unfortunately, the psychological speculations of the Fathers have been accepted uncritically by theologians of the older Protestant groups. Strangely enough, it is a theological tradition of the Western Church that has prevented the churches of the Reformation from understanding the inspiration of Scripture as a work of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, a work which defies all psychological explanations.

Authoritative Doctrine

This loss of the authority of the Scriptures deprives modern Protestantism of its power to discuss doctrine with Rome. Roman Christians ask their “separated brethren” in the Protestant churches, if you reject the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception as unscriptural, then why do so many of you reject also Christ’s virgin birth, a doctrine which your fathers confessed with the Church of all ages and which undoubtedly is based on Holy Scripture? You reject the assumption of Mary as unbiblical legend, but you reject also the ascension of Jesus as myth even though it is taught in the Bible. You deny the right of the pope to interpret Holy Scripture authoritatively. But the great miracles of the virgin birth and of Christ’s bodily resurrection, which are so inseparably linked to the incarnation of the eternal Son of God, the pope would never dare to interpret as legends and myths. Such liberty seems to be the privilege of Protestant professors of exegesis!

Bishop Harms Lilje recently noted the significance of the conversion to Rome of Professor Heinrich Schlier of Bonn. This outstanding disciple of Bultmann, one of the most learned New Testament scholars in Germany, confessed that it was Bultmann’s approach to the New Testament that led him in this direction. “What tribunal is to make decisions about these various strata of tradition which have been worked out, and who is to decide about their relative value? He preferred to attach himself to a tradition historically established as that of the Church of Rome rather than to trust himself to the unsure path of conflicting human opinions” (Lutheran World, Sept. 1961, p. 135). We do not expect many to follow Schlier. It is far easier and more respectable for a Protestant scholar to accept the authority of Bultmann, of Tillich, or of whatever other leader may arise. But Schlier’s conversion reminds us of his predecessor’s at Bonn; Erick Peterson also had turned to Rome. Such facts point up the sad condition of modern Protestant theology which has lost the Bible as the Word of God. The Church of the Reformation lives and dies with the Sola Scriptura.

One wonders which tragedy is greater: to add another source of revelation to the inspired Scriptures, as in Roman Catholicism; or to lose the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God, as in modern Protestantism? Which is worse: to add a mediatrix of all graces to the only true Mediator between God and man; or to lose Christ as the Mediator entirely? Of Jesus’ earthly existence, the Church of all ages confesses “Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary … the third day He rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven.” If this statement is mere myth and legend, then the incarnation becomes mere “symbol.” Then the man Jesus was not the eternal Son of God. Then we have no Saviour. Paul long ago recognized these implications (1 Cor. 15:17). What we previously stated about the connection between the doctrines of inspiration, of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ, is true.

Which error is worse, that of Rome or that of modern Protestantism? However we answer, one thing is clear: Rome can interpret but not revoke one of its doctrines; they are “irreformable” and must abide until the Last Judgment. But what of Protestantism? A Church of the Reformation is, or ought to be, a repenting church. Can our churches still repent? Or is their day for repentance forever past? Thank God, if they will “hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches,” they can yet return, by His grace, to the Word of God.

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