THE BISHOP OF OXFORD IN DIFFICULTIES.
THE Bishop of Oxford has plunged into a sea of difficulties. He and his party had declared in the Oxford Declaration that the Bible not only contains but is the Word of God, and had declared this with the special intent to repudiate the heresy, as they consider it, which notes unconscious and uncorrected error, scientific, historical, and at times even moral, in the sayings and doings of those who have nevertheless been the means of transmit. ting to us the revelation of God to the Jewish nation and the Apostles of Christ. Holding these views it was perhaps unwise of the Bishop to plunge into the philosophy of inspiration. If it be assumed from the first that the Bible not only contains but is the Word of God, the philosophy of inspiration does not seem to have much to do with the matter. Inspiration is, we suppose, the breathing of God over the spirit of man, and is therefore a meet- ing of the Divine and the human in which both must exert an influence. But that which " not only contains but is the Word of God" has morally nothing to do with man, except indeed that he may have been chosen as the mechanical recorder of it. If the Bishop's words at the Conference had been set down verbatim as spoken, they would be the Bishop's words and nothing else, even though the short- hand reporter were the mechanical agent who recorded them. Only where the Bishop's words have been transmitted through another mind and reflected, or it may be refracted, by that other mind—as, for example, that of the " Oxfordshire Rector," or Mr. W. R. Free- mantle, who have reproduced quite differently and even inconsist- ently the drift of the Bishop's remarks in rival letters to the Record newspaper,—can we begin to philosophize on the co-ordinate influ- ences of the Bishop's inspiring thought and the receptive capacity of the minds into which it was received. If the Bible not only contains but is the Word of God, the philosophy of inspiration cannot in any way affect it,—just as the actual words of the Bishop of Oxford, once known to be his actual words, can raise no question of the reciprocal influence of his mind and that of his hearers on the report,—simply because his hearers' minds do not affect that report at all. When therefore the Bishop begins to discuss how the Scriptures may have been inspired, how much is due to the human reporter, and how much to the Holy Spirit, he givesupwholly and absolutely the proposition that the Bible not only contains but is the Word of God. If the lessons of the Bible be inspired through human spirits, and not dictated to human ears, then they are not absolutely and simply the Word of God, but the Word of God re- flected, and perhaps refracted, through one or the other human character. They may not be less, nay, they may be much more efficient for their purpose of revealing God, on that very account. It may be that when the Word has become also a work, even though it be limited by the very condition of its efficiency, it will help to reveal God to us far more clearly than if it had remained a Divine voice pure and simple. The Word of God inspiring Paul becomes Pauline, and then issues in grand, vehement, involved, some- times paradoxical, flashes of truth, now rapt into the Divine glory, now burning with apostolic passion, now trembling with human tenderness, now ranging into speculative reverie. The Word of God inspiring Peter becomes Petrine, and then issues in practical fervour, sometimes wavering and timid, sometimes rising again into the full height of personal love. In each case, we take it, the revelation is far more efficient than if the whole Bible had been pure Divine utterances such as the Bishop of Oxford notes in the Tables of the Law ; but still no one can say that Paul's words and Peter's words are God's Word. When Paul says, " Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil, the Lord reward him according to his works,"—we have a very different sentiment from " Father forgive them, they know not what they do, "—but we are not more sure that it is Paul who gives the colour, and form, and mould- ing to the former thought than we are in the divinest sentences which the spirit of Christ speaks through Paul. The moment the Bishop of Oxford begins to discuss the philosophy of inspiration, he gives up the Oxford Declaration.
The Bishop is half-conscious of his own temerity. The theory of dictation alone suits his Declaration, and yet he feels that the Church means by inspiration something much higher than dictation. He feels his way first over a theory of dictation :- " A message might bo sent in one of two ways,—by a messenger who knows nothing of what information he bears, but who simply boars the words of the message ; and every message so sent is in some sense mere hearsay, by the ignorance of the messenger, because there is the less opportunity of the messenger carrying it according to his own 'views, but he gives it you as a warranty for the fidelity of the mes- sage."
That, we think, the Bishop will scarcely venture to call inspira- tion. If he makes an ignorant lad learn a Greek sentence by rote and deliver it to another,—that lad is assuredly not inspired. No spiritual breath has passed over him The Bishop hesitates between a dim feeling that " plenary inspiration" would be safer if the Bible were all written in this way, and the clear common sense of the matter that it was not, and accordingly goes on :—" And another thing,—I may tell him what I wish to be done,—in one case it is subjective in the mind of the messenger, in the other it is ob- jective, and comes straight from the man who sent it to the man who received it ; " and on the whole he has to admit that the greater part of the Bible is coloured by the feelings and thoughts of the individual authors:— "And let me take the other illustrations, that of leaving it to the mind of the messenger what he had to say. If you refer to the 51st 'Psalm, for instance, David fell into sin ; so, with the only possibility of delivery from sin, he pours out the wailing of his own soul under the Divine spirit, in his own personal recovery from the depth of evil into which he had fallen. I believe the messenger's own mind was that which his human soul poured out for himself, whilst it was also that which God intended to be written to the end of time, and it was what
' ought to be David's own personal feelings in the presence of God."
Here no doubt the Bishop is speaking of real inspiration ; but lie fees that in doing so he is abandoning the thesis that the - Bible not only contains but is the word of God, for he has to take
= -refuge in the arbitrary and purely capricious assumption that David while pouring forth his human soul poured forth only " what ought to be David's own personal feelings in the presence of God," as if " Oh ! daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones," could by any possibility be supposed to have been " what ought to be David's own personal feelings in the presence of God." Directly the Bishop has admitted the " human element " which all inspiration implies, he has to take the most absurd and arbitrary hypothesis to guard himself against the results of his own admission. What writer in the Bible ever claimed, or thought of claiming, that the thoughts of man towards God which are so wonderfully depicted there are all filtered free from human passion and misconception ? As if one of the greatest parts of the revelation were not the grand and vivid picture of the chronic conflict going on in all the servants of God between His truth and their own passions !
So deeply was the Bishop plunged in the contradictions between his party's declaration and his own groping theory, that he seems first to have admitted all the premisses of his opponents and then deduced from them the conclusions of his allies. He is reported to have said :- "As under the first message that was inscribed on stone, or that was spoken by the prophet in a state of rhapsody, there would be the simple communication from God to the receiver, but in the other cases in which the messenger was to deliver the message, there was room for admitting the presence of the human essence in a way that, while it had the authority of God, leaves room for the surrounding human element in which there might be direct error, without touching the slightest truth of inspiration. For instance, I send my son to a friend respecting what I wish my friend to do ; he delivers the message in its completeness, but my friend asks him something respecting the message, and he then tells him something I never told him to say, but which he has gathered from his own con- clusions. Now, is there room for any such presence in the inspired Word of God ?"
And, according to the correspondents of the Record, the Bishop decided on the second day of the Congress that though there was room for this human element of " direct error" in some of the Scripture writings,—in matter of fact there was no such error, unless perhaps Paul might have been mistaken in saying that he had left his cloak at Troas ! We will give the very words of Mr. Fremantle, who reports this, and reports it in so uncertain and almost self-contradictory a fashion that we hardly know how to interpret him:— " What I understood the Bishop to say was that the whole Scripture had been written under the superintendence of the Holy Ghost, so that all and every part of it was absolutely free from error. That no error has as yet been found in it, and he believed no error ever would be found in it. He believed the Bible, not because it contained the truth, but because it was given to us by inspiration of God. Then, in speaking of the two forms of inspiration referred to by the Oxfordshire Rector,' the Bishop said that as regards the human element, he thought there were some points in which a man's natural reason and memory would suffice without a supernatural revelation, as, for example, St. Paul referring to his cloak being left at Treas."
—which amounts, we think, to this,—that the Scripture writers were no doubt liable to passion and error, but that the Holy Spirit cancelled for the moment, and only for the moment, the operation of those defects in their intellects or characters which would have actually led them into it as writers of Scripture,— except perhaps on a few secular matters on which they may have been allowed to have defective memories like other men. That is, their characters and faculties were held in suspense while they wrote of the highest topics, and only allowed to resume their natural forms when they returned to the lowest.
It is a most melancholy spectacle to see an able man floundering so hopelessly in seas of contradiction, and-all for the purpose not of securing directly any clearer vision of God, any more distinct removal of the veil from His countenance, but for a human platform of verbal accuracy from which to begin, as it is supposed at some advantage, the approach to this clearer vision. If we could prove that the whole Bible were verbally dictated by God, we do not see that we should be any nearer or so near to that real taking away of the veil which is the only purpose of the Bible. The knowledge of God would be in no way facilitated by verbal infallibility. The picture of a conflict between divine truth and human evil may often remove the veil, where the voice of divine truth alone would fail to do so because it would be leas real to us. And yet the Bishop of Oxford can writhe intel- lectually into the most alarmingly opposite postures in order to reconcile dictation and inspiration. He fails to recognize that the highest inspiration brings out, almost in an extreme form, the individual features and colouring of inspired minds,—that no- where is St. Paul's style, for instance, more peculiarly, more breathlessly Pauline, more rapid, more full of overlapping thoughts, more difficult to interpret clearly or discriminate finely, than when he rises into the highest region of divine truth. The prin- ciple of dictation and that of inspiratilollities, the other into the inspiration can never be reconciled. The one turns the Bible into dead infallibilities,
fallible thoughts and records of passionate and often inaccurate men,—but nevertheless of men who lived in communion with God and Christ,—who felt the breath of the Holy Spirit upon them, and who help us to see, sometimes, nay not unfrequently, by their errors and passions no less than by their visions of truth and righteousness, the very face of the God who was leading and correcting them.
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