24. Seeberg. Revelation and Inspiration
By Dr. Reinhold Seeberg. London and New York: Harper and Brothers. 1909. 1 rof. Reinhold Seeberg is one of the leaders of that school of recent
P German thought the object of whose research is a "Modern Positive Theology," or, as Prof. Grützmacher, another of its leaders, prefers to phrase it, a "Modern-positive Theology." We are happily relieved from all necessity of explaining to the readers of this Review the nature of this
"Modern Positive Theology," by the admirable exposition of it which was given by Dr. C. W. Hodge in the April number. It will suffice now to remind ourselves that, as its very name advises us, it attempts to be at once
"modern" and "positive." It wishes first of all to be "modern"; but in being "modern" it does not wish to break utterly with the historical faith of the Church—it wishes so far to remain "positive." In one word, its purpose is
—as Prof. Grützmacher's mode of phrasing its chosen self-designation perhaps most clearly suggests—to "modernize" the historical faith of the
Church. The particular elements of that faith which Prof. Seeberg undertakes to "modernize" in the booklet now before us, are the doctrines of Revelation and Inspiration. In its German form this booklet constitutes the seventh and eighth "Hefte" of the fourth series of the well-known
"Biblische Zeitund Streitfragen" which have been publishing for the last five or six years "zur Aufklärung der Gebildeten." Belonging to the fourth year of this publication, this booklet appeared in 1908, and is now (1909) offered afresh for the enlightenment of the English educated public. It would fain show them that "the opinion that the Bible is a religious book is compatible with strict historical criticism of its contents"; that it is possible
"to avoid the errors of the old doctrine" of Revelation and Inspiration "while not surrendering any of its material value." From the language of this statement it is already apparent that Prof. Seeberg is concerned to preserve the religious value of the Bible; but it is also apparent that he supposes that its "religious" can somewhat sharply be distinguished from its "historic" contents, and the one be taken and the other left.
The task which Prof. Seeberg has set before himself is not a new one. It is rather the task which everyone who has not liked "the old doctrine" of Revelation and Inspiration has set before himself for the last hundred years;
"the kernel and the husk" has been the watchword of a century's criticism and reconstruction of Christian doctrine. Anything new Prof. Seeberg has to offer must be sought, therefore, in the particular manner in which he attempts to separate the kernel from the husk, and in the particular elements in "the old doctrine" which he accounts respectively kernel and husk. Even here, however, diligent search will be needed for the detection of anything specifically new. He tells us certainly that he has "attempted to outline the main features of a new theory of Inspiration"; and there are, no doubt, new elements discoverable in the details of his treatment of the subject. But in essence this "new theory" proves to be just the old theory
which Richard Rothe set forth so winningly in his "Zur Dogmatik" a half century ago (1869) that it has infected the great body of subsequent thinking. The earnestness with which Prof. Seeberg works out his theory, however; the evident seriousness of his purpose to secure to Christianity a really revelatory character; and the modifications he has introduced into Rothe's theory for the furtherance of this end; will justify dropping out of sight for the moment the affiliation of his theory with Rothe's and seeking to learn from his own development of it how "the Modern Positive
Theology" would have us think of the Bible, and what it would have us understand by the two great terms, "Revelation" and "Inspiration."
Prof. Seeberg's purpose requires of him two tasks, a negative and a positive one. He must clear the ground by showing that "the old theory of inspiration" must be "definitely abandoned," "in all its forms and details."
And, then, on this cleared ground he must build up the structure of his "new theory of inspiration," "avoiding the errors of the old doctrine" but retaining all in it "of material value." In prosecuting the former of these two tasks he follows the ordinary lines of the destructive criticism with which we have long been only too familiar, and repeats all its most glaring faults.
The notions which have become traditional in so-called "critical circles" as to the formation of the Biblical Canon, the ground of the authority of the Bible, the trustworthiness of the Biblical record, are assumed, and "the old theory" condemned for its lack of accord with them. There is no need to dwell on this destructive side of the argument. There is nothing distinctive in it; it is conventional in the extreme. We pause only to advert briefly to a few isolated points.
The whole elaborate "critical" theory of the slow establishment of the New Testament books into a position of authority—the formation of a New Testament Canon—is here renewedly exploited, although it is already refuted by the innocent admission that these New Testament writings were
given to the Church by their authors as authoritative documents: "As the authors of the Epistles were apostles, or at least men gifted with the Spirit, these letters were also [the reference is to "the so-called Synoptic Gospels"] regarded as authoritative documents, as indeed they were intended to be (e.g.
1 Cor. 7:40)" (p. 11; italics ours). The authoritative New Testament was imposed on the Church by its founders, not evolved by the Church in the course of its controversies; and the same is true mutatis mutandis of the Old Testament. The entire labored theory of the development of the Canon, of Old and New Testament alike, which has been worked out by the "critical" school is an invention which flies flat in the face of all the facts.
The old Protestant doctrine of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti to the authority of the Scriptures is, as is usual among the "critical" writers, misconceived in the interests of a merely subjective grounding of the authority of the Scriptures: "Calvin gave them Luther's subjective foundation" (p. 24). To students of Calvin it is needless to say he did nothing of the kind. What Prof. Seeberg, in common with the entire
"critical" school, has done is to confuse the testimonium Spiritus Sancti to the contents of Scripture with the testimonium Spiritus Sancti to the divine origin and authority of Scripture. Dropping out the latter altogether, he endeavors to represent Calvin and the Reformers in general as basing their absolute assurance of the divine origin and authority of Scripture on the former. That, closely related as these two testimonies of the Spirit are,
Calvin did not confuse them, the readers of this Review do not need to have pointed out to them afresh (see number for April, 1909, pp. 262 ff.). Suffice it to say that Calvin would have agreed with Prof. Seeberg's declaration that "it is sheer nonsense to say that the accuracy of a genealogical table, for instance, or of the number of years of a king's reign, or of a miraculous story, or of the date of the composition of a book is [immediately at least] guaranteed by that living witness of the Holy Spirit" in us which gives us
"inward assurance of the grace of God, of the Divine presence of Christ, of sin and forgiveness of sins, of virtuous impulses, in short, of the religious and moral truths of Scripture" (pp. 25–26). But Calvin also taught, what
Prof. Seeberg has not yet learned, that the Spirit witnesses also to the divine origin and authority of Scripture in all its extent, through the nöetic effects of His regenerating grace, by which the renewed spirit is enabled and led to perceive and estimate in their full validity the indicia of divinity in the Scriptures, and so to recognize the hand of God in the book of God. The odd thing is that the view which Prof. Seeberg wrongly attributes to Calvin and scores as absurd as Calvin's, proves to be very much his own view. In polemic against Calvin (wrongly interpreted) he declares (p. 26) that the "course of religious experience can never lead us to any certain conclusions with reference to the several historical facts related by Scripture." Unless we have greatly mistaken his meaning, however, it is precisely on the basis of the course of religious experience and on nothing else, that he himself rests our certainty with reference to the great facts of revelation (pp. 111–114).
His argument for their reality runs indeed expressly thus: we have a certain religious experience; this religious experience is the product of the teaching of Scripture; this teaching implies the reality of certain facts; "the reality of these facts and words is thereby guaranteed" (p. 112)—that is to say, they are guaranteed ultimately by our own religious experience, and everything is thus made to hang on an "analysis of the nature of religious experience" (p. vii.). Of this, however, more later.
Prof. Seeberg eases his task of refuting "the old theory of inspiration" by always speaking of this "theory" (it is the "theory" of Christ and of His apostles) in its least acceptable and, we may add, least accepted form. To him it is always the theory of "dictation," taking "dictation" in its most literal sense, in which revelation and inspiration are identified, and men are supposed to be employed by God as mere implements which contribute
absolutely nothing to the product, not even as much as a flute contributes to the tone of the music played on it. Accordingly he is able, appealing to 1
Cor. 1:16, to cry out: "No one would regard such a confession of ignorance as inspired by the Holy Spirit" (p. 27). Certainly no one could suppose ignorance to be the result of inspiration. But why should not confession of an ignorance which is real be made under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit? Is He not the Spirit of Truth? "To what purpose," he demands again, "should God inspire ideas which men already possessed" (p. 27). But why speak of "inspiring" ideas at all? Ideas are not "inspired" but "revealed," to employ Prof. Seeberg's distinction. Certainly ideas which are wrong could not be incorporated into an inspired body of teaching; but it is not so evident that only ideas which are directly revealed could be incorporated into such a body of teaching. Accordingly, it is only against the extremest theory of mechanical dictation that it is valid to argue that the use of sources by the inspired writers is fatal to inspiration (p. 31). The "hand of the writer may be held by the Holy Spirit" so that he writes only what the Spirit wills, and yet he proceed in his work precisely as an uninspired writer would, seeking the same ends. We have no intention, however, of following Prof. Seeberg into the details of his argument. We merely point out the serious fault in it that it is so framed as to give the impression that "the old theory of inspiration," with which the detailed credit of the Bible is bound up, is the theory of verbal dictation, rejecting which we are free to adopt some such theory as Prof. Seeberg's own. This is not the state of the case. Few have ever taught the theory of verbal dictation, though no doubt a Quenstedt, for example, did; it is certainly by no means characteristically the "old theory of inspiration"; and between it and such a theory as Prof. Seeberg proposes there stretches a great gulf, in our passage through which we shall encounter many other theories, which would need to be examined and set aside before such a one as his could come into
serious consideration. Prof. Seeberg eases his task unduly when he presents the theory of dictation (which practically nobody holds) and his own theory (which nobody ought to hold) as the alternatives between which his readers must choose.
It is time we turned, however, to Prof. Seeberg's positive construction.
This runs, as we have already had occasion to note, on fundamentally the same lines as Rothe's. According to Rothe God "manifests" Himself in a series of marvelous historical acts and dispositions; for the understanding of which He "inspires" chosen men by an internal action of His Holy Spirit on their heart and mind. Similarly, according to Prof. Seeberg, revelation consists in the series of the divine acts by which God redeems the world; in a word, in the "history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte)"; while inspiration consists in the operation of the Spirit of God on the hearts and minds of particular men, by means of which they are enabled to understand these divine acts and so to make them operative in the minds of men.
"Revelation," says he with concise directness, "is not the imparting of certain abstract ideas to the human race; revelation is history" (p. 39): and revelation being thus just history, the way "God reveals Himself to the human spirit" is "through His guidance of the course of historical evolution" (p. 41). Two things need, however, to be borne in mind here that we may not do injustice to the theory. It is not "the entire stream of historical development" which we have in mind when we speak of revelation, but the "small section of history which we call the history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte)" (p. 116). And words too may be deeds: "the thoughts and words evoked by God in the actors who are part of this history" are themselves elements in this history (p. 41), so that "utterances directly caused by God" may be counted in among "the historical facts caused by God" (p. 59) and prophecy becomes "itself direct revelation," introducing as it does, "new words of God into history" (p. 77). Revelation
remains thus, however, speaking generally, just the historical development of redemption; facts, not words. But facts must be understood and put into words to become operative. And this is the function of inspiration, which is
"simply the influence of the Spirit directed to produce the understanding of the given facts of revelation" (p. 59). "Revelation," we read, "itself consists of historical facts caused by God" (p. 59); "Inspiration consists in the fact that the Spirit of revelation creates in His first witnesses the right, sufficient and efficacious understanding of revelation" (p. 57). Again: "We understand, therefore, by inspiration … certain effects worked by the Spirit of God in the souls of the prophets and the first witnesses of Christ through which they were enabled to understand revelation—its facts and its words—and make it intelligible" (p. 69). Revelation, therefore, strictly taken as such (for the exact meaning of the term is not constant in Prof.
Seeberg's discussion), would remain inoperative if it were not supplemented by inspiration (p. 52). "The Spirit of God," we read (p. 57),
"produces, in the first place, the revelation or the facts of salvation (Heilstatsachen) in word and deed. Now this revelation is to become historically operative in humanity. For this purpose it is necessary that witnesses to it should arise who recognize and can express its nature in a way that will make it operative. It is the Spirit that works in revelation who, by special stimulus (Wirkung), brings forth in the first witnesses this understanding whereby revelation can be made historically operative. And it is the production of this understanding which we characterise as inspiration."
The chief thing we observe in this construction is that it provides only for the acquisition of divine truth, not at all for its communication.
"Revelation" and "Inspiration" are both absorbed in the attainment of truth by its chosen witnesses; nothing is left to safeguard its transmission to others. We have reached the prophet by their means; we have not reached
the Scriptures. For us, however, the prophet exists only in the Scriptures: the Scriptures lie between us and the prophets. What does it advantage us if God has revealed Himself in a series of redemptive acts and His Spirit has enabled chosen witnesses to understand and interpret these acts, unless these inspired interpretations and these revealing acts are trustworthily communicated to us? It may soothe us to be told that the Scriptures are
"the literary monument which tells us" of the divine "deeds which have led men to salvation" and of the divine "knowledge of salvation" to which certain men of old have attained; that they are "a special effect of revelation," "a literature precipitated, so to speak, by the process of revelation through history" and "thus indirectly themselves also revelation"
(p. 45). But will all this satisfy us? What we wish to know is whether these Scriptures are a trustworthy record of these revelations. And this question presses upon us with greater persistency since Prof. Seeberg, in clearing the ground of "the old theory of inspiration," has assured us and endeavored to prove to us, that the Scriptures are not always trustworthy either in their record of facts or in their inculcation of principles—that, for example, they contain statements which are "notoriously false," presuppose antiquated cosmologies, perpetuate popular errors (like the belief in demoniacal possession), set forth outgrown world-views and even present absurd interpretations of facts and prophecies (pp. 26–29). It is in his endeavor to meet this question that Prof. Seeberg is perhaps most individual.
He assures us that despite their many faults as a general historical record—let "criticism" do its worst as to that—the Scriptures can be fully trusted precisely as a record of revelation; so fully trusted that, possessing as we do no other understanding of the revelation-history and its thoughts than that deposited in the Scriptures, we may safely take the contents of the Scriptures as the expression of the divine revelation for us (p. 45). The ground on which this assurance is based has a sufficiently Pragmatistic
appearance. It is in brief that Scripture serves all the purposes of revelation to us and therefore is revelation. The complex of ideas presented to us by the Scriptures works in us a remarkable inward experience, in which we find ourselves in the living presence of God. And "since we experience in the thoughts of Scripture a Divine effect, we characterise it on the ground of experienced faith as Divine revelation" (p. 48). It is "a judgment of our faith" to which we thus give expression; and this judgment carries us very far. It not only assures us that the Bible is a revelation, but it guarantees to us the historical character of the facts of which this revelation is an interpretation. When we experience the ideas based on these facts as true, this assuredly should carry with it the reality of the facts on which these ideas are based (p. 49). To the elucidation of this point a whole section is given (pp. 111–114). "Inspiration," we are told (p. 112), "was an effect of the operation of the Spirit of God, through which a man learned to understand the nature of the facts given him. From this it follows, however, that so far as inspired knowledge can be gained from a fact or a word, this fact and this word are guaranteed as actual. If God produces knowledge by means of certain particular facts, these facts must needs also be produced by God. The more paradoxical and miraculous these facts are the more certain is this conclusion. If then the apostles through God's Spirit gained inspired knowledge from the resurrection of Christ, the actuality of the resurrection is thereby established for everyone who feels the witness of the Spirit in the Bible. If the words of Jesus and the oracles spoken through the prophets have become the object of inspired understanding, then for the religious view their reality is proved thereby." We need only bear in mind that this guarantee does not extend to the minute details of historical occurrence, or to the verbal accuracy of texts, but is available only for the establishment of the reality of the great facts of salvation (Heilstatsachen) and ideas of
revelation (Offenbarungsgedanken) to feel assured that we have in it a thoroughly satisfactory criterion of reality.
It can scarcely escape us that precisely what we have here is an attempt to discover a basis for confidence in the great facts recorded in the Bible and the great ideas set forth in it without implication of the historical trustworthiness or of the authority of the Bible itself. The basis of confidence is shifted from the Bible to Christian experience, or what we used to call "the Christian Consciousness," and the Bible is made to play the rôle only of vehicle of transmission. The whole conception of an authoritative book is set aside and we are to accept in the Bible only what
Christian experience validates. It is asserted on the other hand, however, that Christian experience validates all the great "salvation facts" and "revelation ideas" brought to us by the Bible. There is of course nothing new in this general position; but it is well worth carefully noting as indicatory of the place in the history of thought of the Modern-positive
Theology. By it the Modern-positive Theology takes its place as only a part of that general tendency which has been long operative in the German churches, to substitute, as the seat of authority for the Christian man, his own inner experience for the infallible book which the Reformers substituted for the infallible Church: in other words it is only the latest outcome of that great subjectivistic movement of thought inaugurated by Schleiermacher.
Nothing could be further from our wish, of course, than to deny or doubt the validity of "the argument from experience," which at its height is only another name for the testimonium Spiritus Sancti to the contents of revelation. There is such a thing as the "assurance of salvation"; and this assurance of salvation does validate the great "salvation facts" and "revelation ideas" brought to us by the Bible, and is not dependent on a precedent confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible: to the Spirit-
prepared heart these great facts and ideas are their own credentials. But this is not to say we can get along very well, then, without a Bible. After all it was from the Bible that we got these great facts and ideas to which our
"Christian experience" sets its seal that they are real and true; and the authoritative Bible, if it is not the prius of this "Christian experience," may well prove to be its posterius. In point of fact, no one doubts that the doctrine of the detailed authority of the Scriptures—their "inspiration" in the old sense—belongs to the "high doctrines" of Christianity, and does not underlie our first confidence in its fundamental facts, which rests rather on the general historical trustworthiness of the Biblical record. But it is another question whether Christianity, as a system of truth, can dispense with this "high doctrine," and can even get along without the general historical trustworthiness of the Bible record, abandoning it to a naturalistic "historical criticism" and contenting itself meanwhile with an appeal to "Christian experience." For one thing, this were to shift the Christianity which we are to teach from an objective to a subjective foundation, and to limit its content to the few "vital" truths which "find" us, with the ultimate elimination of all objective basis for these "vital" truths themselves and the relegation of them for their content as well as for their validation to the subjective experience itself. For we must not conceal from ourselves, for another thing, that a procedure such as is proposed will necessarily introduce a schism into our mental life which cannot be permanent and which can have but one issue. What is the use of our telling ourselves that our experience of religious effects arising from the ideas gained by the apostles in fellowship with the risen Christ, guarantees for us the fact of His resurrection "for the religious point of view" (p. 112, cf. p.
49), if our critical examination of the historical record convinces us that in point of fact Christ did not rise from the dead, for the scientific point of view? We cannot continue to believe on the warrant of our religious
experience what we know to be contrary to fact on the verdict of our scientific investigation. Unless we are prepared to accept the validation of the facts and ideas brought to us by the Bible on the faith of "religious experience" as the validation of the trustworthiness of the Bible as a record of facts and ideas, we shall be driven for our entire Christianity into the most unreal subjectivism. But so soon as we adopt the former attitude, our
"religious experience" becomes a testimony not only to the facts and ideas which "find" us but to the trustworthiness of the Biblical record which brings us these facts and ideas, and the first step is taken in the validation of an authoritative Bible. This first step taken, others will necessarily follow, and we shall soon find ourselves in the possession of an objectively and not merely subjectively established Christianity. And we shall find ourselves in possession of this objectively established Christianity ultimately precisely because we shall find in our hands an authoritative Bible, and for no other reason whatever. What the ground of the Bible's authority is, what is the nature of the divine operations by which it is communicated to the Bible, what is its extent, and what is its degree—such questions as these may still remain open to investigation. But the Bible's authority having been once established we may be disposed and indeed required to listen to its own testimony on these subsequent matters; and if its own testimony is followed we shall have as a result nothing other than the "old Protestant theory" of inspiration. It really admits of no question that the Bible conceives itself the product of the Divine Spirit in such a sense that it is the pure expression of His mind and will. And nothing is more certain than that the Bible stands forth in the world at once as a great spiritual fact, and an interpretation of this fact; that this is a fact which "finds" us and produces in our hearts spiritual effects. Does not the maxim hold here too that unique spiritual effects infer unique spiritual causes? And if our religious experience quickened by the Scriptures and their message fails to validate the great fact
of the Bible, how can we plead it as the validation of other facts implicated in it?
What Prof. Seeberg has sought to do, it will be observed, is to supply a reasoned basis for the common notion that the Scriptures are authoritative only in spiritual matters—"for faith and practice" as the phrase goes—and for all else may be freely delivered over to the hand of the destroyer. Our confidence in what the Scriptures transmit to us, he says, is grounded in our religious experience; and therefore, he seems to say, we have ground for confidence only in that element of Scripture which religious experience directly validates. There are therefore two sides to Prof. Seeberg's argument, a positive and a negative side, and the trouble is that the negative side fits ill in with the positive side. Conceived as an attempt to show that in Christian experience we have a basis for confidence in the great Christian facts and ideas which underlie and give form to that experience, we may find help and comfort in it. Conceived as an attempt to show that, having in Christian experience this basis for confidence in the great Christian facts and ideas, we may dispense with an authoritative Bible, we can look upon it only as an assault upon the foundations of the Christian faith. The former element is the "Positive," the latter the "Modern" element in the "Modern
Positive Theology"; and they do not agree together. The one is fundamentally Supernaturalistic and the other fundamentally Naturalistic; and a Supernaturalistic Naturalism or Naturalistic Supernaturalism is a contradiction no less in fact than in terms. If in a supernaturalistically created Christian experience we have a guarantee of the truth of the great revelation-ideas brought to us by the Bible and constituting its substance, and of the reality as well of the great salvation-facts with which these ideas are connected in the Bible as their interpretation, then we have in this
Christian experience a guarantee of the trustworthiness and authority of the Bible which records these facts and develops their meaning. And if we
will not admit the validity of this guarantee in the one case, we cannot put confidence in it in the other: the "scientific" considerations which lead us to reject it in the one may compel our rejection of it in the other also. The question which really faces us in both cases alike is, What is the real state of the evidence? Not abstractly, Is the positive evidence of religious experience or the negative evidence of "scientific" investigation most conclusive? But concretely, Is the positive evidence of religious experience or the negative evidence of "scientific" investigation most conclusive in this case? We cannot set each off by itself and follow both, each with one-half of the soul.
Nor can we decline the task of estimating the weight of the evidence as a whole, by shutting our eyes to one or the other variety of the evidence, or attending to them only alternately. Christianity is neither a mere philosophy nor an empty illusion: it is objectively real and subjectively operative, and finds its rooting both in its inspired record and in its spiritual efficacy.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, viii. 1910, pp. 679–688.