What is the dictation theory?

But I do not allow that dictation (that is, the communication of words without the exercise of the mind of him who receives it) is the only means of this. God can wield a mind and a heart as He wields lips, and He can govern and produce impressions on them so entirely that the expression of them, while still that of the heart itself, shall be entirely and without mixture that of God's mind. So of the memory. The result is the same, with the difference, often very important, of making the heart and mind of the inspired person the vessel as well as communicator of it. Both may be true. He may teach the words (and that even at another moment from the first acquirement of the thoughts) exactly, but He may act in the mind, and make it His instrument in unfolding truth (or fact) as He means it to be unfolded.

Then, it is often urged, how can God allow the writers of the Scriptures to maintain their individuality, yet their writings be free from human defects and errors? Some have affirmed the mechanical theory of inspiration, that is, the writers wrote down the very words given them, and had no opportunity of expressing themselves in a style natural to them. We believe the mechanical theory is not upheld by Scripture, and yet, whilst the personality of the writers is expressed in their writings, the truth so expressed is God-breathed, and inerrant, and free from human imperfections.

Some have a difficulty as to what has been called the human element in inspiration. If the words of scripture are inspired, it has been asked, how is it that the style of the writer is so manifest? John's style, for instance, being clearly distinguishable from that of Paul. The simple answer is that it is as if one used, so to speak, different kinds of pens to write with. God made the mind of man as well as his body, and was surely able to use the mind of each of the writers He employed, and yet cause him to write exactly what He wished. God took possession of the mind of man to declare His own purposes with regard to man.

Here, too, we may see how far inspiration extends; concerning which many have vague thoughts. Some have taught that the doctrines of Scripture are inspired of God, but that the writers were allowed to express them in their own language; others, as Burnet, that the reasoning so often found, particularly in the epistles, was left to the writer; and yet others, as Paley, think them to have used their own illustrations, and to have selected their own O.T. references to confirm their words.

All such thoughts are below the truth, and the Scriptures are injured thus by those who sincerely desire to be its friends. The fact is, nothing was left to the vessel — the words, not merely the truths or doctrines, were given by the Holy Ghost. Were it otherwise, we could have no divine certainty. Where should we draw the line between the human and divine? And is it likely that all would agree as to the line to be drawn? Not that a human element is altogether denied. Paul has his style, and Peter his; for the Spirit took up the men as He found them; nevertheless, every word thus written was from Himself.

360 We read in Peter, Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 2 Peter 1:21 Here we have the source — the motive power in this work. The word of the Lord came to them. I have no theory as to the manner in which the New Testament writers were inspired. I recognize, in the fullest way, the diversities of style and the stamp of individuality in the different writers. The Lord was pleased to use men. But when I say that, it implies that He used them. I see the Lord declaring that He would use their memories. I see the apostle preferring an inspired communication in which his understanding had a part. But it is evident that if God recalled, by the Holy Ghost, certain events to the memory of a writer, He could recall them in such a way and form as He pleased; or as it had particularly struck the writer at the time the event happened; or while the facts were presented anew to his memory, with such additional apprehensions as the spiritual state of the writer made him capable of at the time of writing, and according to that peculiar form of apprehension wrought by His power and presence in the writer. He might recall these events to the writer's mind in the succession He thought fit, so as to produce a given order in the narration. But all this supposes the action and purpose — the will — of a divine Author, who acts with a plan and wisdom suited to its accomplishment. The wisdom of such an author might (by the combination of the events in a given order, and the selection of such as He recalled) produce a result from them, as a whole, which had a bearing and gave a witness to Christ entirely beyond the thoughts of the writer, though he might in every part be used according to the state of his own mind under the influence of the Spirit of God.

141 Mr. N. says, omniscience or dictation is necessary to infallibility. Neither has anything to say to it. Omniscience and inspiration are a contradiction in terms: for inspiration is the communication of truth or facts; omniscience supposes, or rather means, that all is known already. Nor is dictation necessary either. Suppose, as to historical scripture, if God acted on my mind or memory so as to call up facts He chose to have related, in the way, the connection, the order in which He chose them to be in my mind, and associated with the feelings which He thought proper to be produced in my soul by it, and the utterance of my memory and the expressions of my feelings to which they naturally gave rise when thus produced, to the exclusion of all distracting or modifying thoughts of any kind, to deteriorate what the Holy Ghost produced in my mind and soul — and that I write this down as thus formed and producing itself in my mind, being full of the Holy Ghost, so that no other idea whatever intruded itself, but such as the Holy Ghost had produced, and that He approved the necessary expression of it, acting on the mind, not on the lips — should not I have and give the perfect mind of God, only through the mind of a man?

Again, if Christ had spoken, and the Holy Ghost recalled to my memory His words, or a particular part of His words, and I write down these words; so of facts. This would not be dictation. Supposing He formed in my soul the substance of what passed, and I wrote it down from the perfect spiritual apprehension of it, as He put it in my mind, to the exclusion of all else, I should have the perfect mind of God; yet the Holy Ghost acting in my mind would use it as an instrument, and the communication have the form of the mind it passed through. Why, if God has expressly formed the instrument, can He not then use it for the purpose for which He has formed it, according to what He has made it? Now that is style. To deny it, and declare dictation necessary, is merely to suppose that the Holy Ghost cannot use a man's mind, such as it is, and govern his words, without annihilating him mentally, and making use of his lips as of the dumb ass's to rebuke the prophet.

142 The apostle does not speak of the mere use of the organ without the intelligence as the highest kind of inspiration, but as the lowest, and that it was of a higher order when the man was mentally made partaker of what he communicated, and communicated therefore with his own thoughts and feelings engaged (which produces style), though the Holy Ghost produced those thoughts and feelings. The spout which gives a form to the current that flows from it may transmit the water as pure as it flows in. I do not say the Holy Ghost did not give the words; but that it was not necessarily dictation of them merely. Nay, if He did dictate them, He could do it in the form of mind and thought of the person He deigned to use, so that it should be his style. So that every part of the statement of Mr. N. is unfounded. The Holy Ghost gave the thoughts; and they were not left to the uncertainty of man's account of them. He caused them to be communicated in words He taught; but why should not He work in a mind according to the mind He had designedly given it? See 1 Cor. 2:12-14.

263 Next we have opposed an inspiration in which the inspired person is passive, and an inspiration which acts through the character of the sacred writer. But here there is no opposition. If God has formed the character as a vessel, He can use it so that the will should be in no exercise, and what sets the character in activity should be simply the Holy Ghost moving it, and it remaining as an instrument what it was, as I have no doubt was usually the case. There are different kinds of inspiration as to form recognized in scripture, closely connected with this remark. I may speak the words willed by God, and not understand them, or I may understand and speak them. This last, though a less apparently inspired and glorious form, the apostle prefers. But both were inspired. An example of one was tongues, or Old Testament prophecy; the other was prophecy under the New. So when the communication of the facts and ordinary knowledge of facts are contrasted, the contrast has no ground. The Spirit brought to their remembrance. It was the memory of things known when they had taken place, but recalled in the perfection proper to the mind of God to the memory of the inspired person, or, if needed, revealed if unknown. What I look for in inspiration is, that the words should be so ordered by the Spirit as to convey perfectly what it was the intention of the Spirit to communicate.

The Spirit of God in recording does not limit Himself to the bare words that Jesus spoke. This I hold to be a matter of no little importance in forming a sound judgment of the Scriptures. The notion to which orthodox men sometimes shut themselves up, in zeal for plenary inspiration, is to my mind altogether mechanical; they think that inspiration necessarily and only gives the exact words that Christ uttered. There seems to me not the slightest necessity for this. Assuredly the Holy Spirit gives the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The differences are owing to no infirmity, but to His design, and what He has given us is incomparably better than a bare report by so many hands, all meaning to give the same words and facts. … Matthew and Luke alike give us the parable of the sower, but Matthew calls it the word of the kingdom, while Luke calls it the word of God. The Lord Jesus may have employed both in His discourse at this time. … The Spirit of God did not give us to have both in the same Gospel, but acts with Divine sovereignty. He does not lower the Evangelists into mere literal reporters. … The mere mechanical system can never explain inspiration. It finds itself entirely baffled by the fact that the same words are not given in all the Gospels. Take Matthew "Blessed are the poor" (verse 3), and Luke (verse 20) "Blessed are ye poor." This is at once an embarrassing difficulty for the mechanical scheme of inspiration; it is none at all for those who hold to the Holy Spirit's supremacy in employing different men as the vessels of His various objects. The last paragraph has been drawn from "Lectures on the Gospels," pp. 287-289. See further note 13 in Appendix.

A bogey has been made of plenary (verbal) inspiration by reason of ill-advised statements of extremists (see Ladd, vol. ii., pp. 182, 206 f., 218). To contend for the inerrancy of Hebrew vowel-points and accents (ii. 177), which tyros in that language at the present day know were invented only after the Canon of Scripture was closed, and to set up other like indefensible positions, have brought discredit on the phrase, from which there is difficulty in emancipating it. The "mechanical" view, so called, that God "took possession of every faculty, suspending and superseding it" (Thomson, "Introduction," p. lv.), is negatived by 1 Cor. 7:40, 2 Cor. 11:17. As the Archbishop rightly says, "the sacred writers were not machines. … If his mind was logical, he reasoned as Paul did; if emotional, he wrote as John wrote." That theory carried with it the idea of dictation, which was a mistake: it is, to begin with, inconsistent with reminiscence (John 14:26). As to style: "If God has expressly formed the instrument, He can use it for the purpose for which He has formed it. That is style" ("Irrationalism of Infidelity," p. 147). Of course, the Holy Spirit has no special language of His own: He did but use the particular writer's language, which none the less bears the impress of the Spirit. One may take 1 Cor. 15:2 in R.V.: "in what words I preached it unto you." A spiritualist will tell you that a "medium" gives him the spirit's words. Why not, then, God His own in the Bible? To say, as do advocates of the "illumination" theory (as to which see Farrar, "The Bible," etc., p. 111), that inspiration extends only to doctrine, not at all to the language of Scripture, traverses 1 Cor. 2:13. The word λαλεῖν used there is not applied by Biblical writers exclusively to oral speech (see Rom. 7:1, Heb. 4:8, 2 Peter 3:16, comparing Acts 28:25). Reference may here be made to the note below on Mark 14:9, in respect of which Wellhausen has tripped. Few will question the supernatural value of the Lord's own words on earth, and the claim they make upon His disciples. As a Synoptic passage we may take Mark 8:38, and compare 1 Tim. 4:6, 1 Tim. 6:3, where probably the Apostle speaks of his own utterances or communications as "words of our Lord Jesus Christ." That there is a difference between "the word" and "words" appears from John 8:43 (cf. Davidson, art. "Prophecy" in "Hastings' Dictionary" and note 69). That inspiration attaches to the ῥῆμα as used in Acts 28:25, where "one" such extends to verse 28, is beyond dispute. Dr. Clifford (p. 88) objects to the American sceptic Ingersoll's remark: "It will not do to say that it (the Bible) is not verbally inspired. If the words are not inspired, what is?" The infidel was perfectly right. It is not those who defend "plenary" inspiration that need any commiseration, but certainly those that deny it. Instead of such concessions conciliating infidelity, they do but encourage it, as the present writer found when concerned with intelligent workmen at Chatham, whose hostility to conventional religion has not been removed, but rather strengthened, by certain summer courses of cathedral sermons in the neighbourhood.

158 It is important that I should here point out a certain method of presenting inspiration (a method common to M. Godet and to all who oppose inspiration, but which serves to lead the simple astray). He speaks thus (Biblical Studies, p. 48): "To require a Bible dictated word for word from heaven would be requiring a book that would supplant human thought instead of fertilizing it; a book making a passive instrument of man, instead of calling his intelligent and free co-operation into request … Would that be more divine?" We must not expect M. Godet to agree with himself. At page 44 we read: "When it is granted to a man to confer directly with Jehovah, two things simultaneously take place in him. Every creature, himself included, disappears into nothingness. God remains before him as the Being who alone is great, alone real." This has certainly some appearance of "supplanting human thought" — has it not? Now, not being inspired myself, I do not intend to define inspiration; were I so, I do not imagine it would be possible for me to explain it to one who was not. What I seek is God's thought; I neither seek to "supplant" nor to "fertilize human thought." But to define inspiration as being "word for word dictated from heaven," is but a human idea of the subject. When it has been written, "Thus saith Jehovah," or "Jehovah said unto Moses," either He has said it, or words have been put into the mouth of Jehovah, words which are not His own. God Himself makes a distinction in the form, but not in the authority of revelation; Num. 12:6-8. Tongues were spoken which the person who used them could not understand. This was truly "supplanting human thoughts"; but Paul preferred to speak with his understanding. God could fill his heart with glorious and holy thoughts, and so keep him filled with them that nothing should be there, and consequently nothing be expressed, but that which God had placed there. These were the thoughts of God, but through the power of the Spirit became the thoughts, the joy, of a man, creating in him an intelligence, moulding his heart and divinely enlightening his conscience. God could in such sort possess Himself of the intelligence, the heart, and the conscience, that nothing could either enter in or flow out but what He had put there. This is also the highest character of inspiration, because all that is revealed belongs to us; whereas the prophets, in searching into their own prophecies, found it was not for themselves they ministered those things. Be it as it may, is it not wretched in the extreme to put "a Bible dictated word for word from heaven" in contrast with human thought, instead of discerning the operation of the Spirit of God, and man's mind formed by the communication of purely divine thoughts, they being adapted to man, and also received by him through the work of the Spirit of God?