# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162 The Modern Theory of the Various Doctrinal Types of the New Testament.

himself over, in fixing his concept of inspiration, to being guided by the
testimonies of that Scripture which he has previously come to know, through
the testimonium spiritus sancti — that is, the inward testimony of the Holy
Ghost in the heart of the reader eager for salvation — by experience as
God's living Word, finds, in passages such as John 10:35; Galatians 3:16
(where St. Paul derives an important proof from a grammatical form),
2 Peter 1:21 (ἐλάλησαν, "they spoke"), 1 Corinthians 2:13 (ἐν λόγοις
διδακτοῖς πνεύματος, "in words taught by the Spirit"), and in the whole
doctrine of inspiration of holy Scripture set forth, partly ex professo and
partly incidentally, which admits of no exception whatever to the general
rule, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God" — finds no offense
either in the proposition (offensive to present-day theology) of Baier
(Compendium, 65): "The divine inspiration of Holy Scripture is such an act
by which God supernaturally communicated to the understanding of the
writers, not only the concepts of all the matters to be written down — and
that in such a way that these concepts were conformable to those matters —
but also the concepts of the very words, indeed of all the words, by which
those matters were to be expressed,"*) nor in that of John Gerhard (Loci
II, 26): "The instrumental causes of Holy Scripture were the holy men of God
(Heb. 11:1; Rom. 1:2), whom we therefore rightly call God's handservants,
Christ's hands, and the Holy Ghost's writers,"**) nor in that of Calov
(Systema locorum theologicorum I, 551): "No error, even in the most trivial
matters, no lapse of memory, still less any falsehood, can have any place
whatsoever in the whole of Holy Scripture."†) Rather, these words are
spoken to him from the heart and are a splendid expression of his own
faith; and where, for that reason, he encounters in his exegesis
difficulties — historical, chronological, astronomical, and
scientific — that often seem insoluble, he withdraws into the citadel of
faith and would rather doubt his own understanding and everything else than
the truth of the Scripture he has experienced as the truth, which itself
claims inspiration for all its words as well; and he may also experience
more and more how the difficulties that previously seemed insoluble
wonderfully resolve themselves, and how bewildered is the understanding of
man, led astray by corrupted reason, which finds difficulties where at
bottom there are none, and whose sole cause is the blindness and
superficiality of our understanding. —

How greatly, and how generally, present-day theology, by contrast, departs
from the old doctrine of inspiration is shown, among other things, quite
clearly by the

*) Divine inspiration is an act of such a kind, by which God supernaturally
communicated to the understanding of the writers not only the concepts of
all the things to be written, conformable to their objects, but also the
concepts of the words themselves, and indeed of all of them, by which those
things were to be expressed.

**) The instrumental causes of Holy Scripture were the holy men of God ...
whom we therefore rightly call God's amanuenses, and the hands of Christ
and the scribes and notaries of the Holy Ghost.

†) No error, even in the most trifling matters, no lapse of memory, still
less any falsehood, can have any place in the whole of Holy Scripture.