Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1879 — Ancient and Modern Ideas of Inspiration. [ARTICLE]

Ancient and Modern Ideas of Inspiration.

J. E. Lindholm in Bunday Afternoon. The ansients set God and the universe in opposition. They often ascribed the creation of the world to a being less perfect than God. They were unable by a higher synthesis to reconcile their conceptions of Deity with the evil and imperfection which they beheld in themselves and the world around. Polytheism had made Deity an intimateand&fniliar presence that too often shared human frailty and vice. It was the reaction of Semitic Monotheism to send God away almost into the reigon of the unknowable. It enthroned him in far-off and inap{iroachable majesty and holiness. So ealous were the Semites of the idea of God’s unaproachablaness and unsearchableness that, though in the warmth of religious utterance He was said to have appeared, to have revealed himself by some name or otherwise, returning to philosophic accuracy, they would speak of such manifestation as that of some emanating power or lower God, and would sooner lay themselves open to the charge of believing in all sorts of lesser divinities as mediatory powers than in the least to appear to make Supreme Deity capable of any representation whatsoever Has he appeared, or uttered His voice, or named himself Jehovah? And would men hence persume to begin to predicate anything concerning nto nature or mode of existence? He withdraws indescribable and unnamable into Hto absoluteness.

While God thus dwelt apart, alone in the possession of all that Is good, this gross world, its thoughts, works and imaginations were only evil continually,- It was. totaley depraved. It had no self-restorative power. It had no innate ability to will or think anything that is good. Even what might appear as good works were not so in reality, but had without doubt the nature of sin. How then were goodness and truth to appear and shine on the earth? It could only be by an interposition of the far-off God; by lowering the celestial sphere to inspir or “breathe” its holiness into the earthly. This was effected by the communication of an angel or by the gift of a dal mon. In these messengers God was efficaciously and infallibly present. This mechanical Junction of the celestial sphere with the terrestrial was denominated inspiration. The conception of inspiration that inevitably followed was this: They who received these divine messages, i. e., inspired persons, were universally regarded as pure mediums. Undoubtedly. There was and could be no human element in the message. The whole was direct from heaven. The inspired vere possessed. “The word that the Lord hath put in my mouth, that I must speak.” That this logical inference was commonly made we take Philo out of a multitude as witness: “A prophet says nothing of his ownr, but everything which he says is strange and prompted by some one else He is a sounding instrument of God’s voice, being struck and moved to sound in an invisible manner by him.” Again: “When the divine light shines the human light sets ~ . . and this verv frequently happens to the race of prop* hets for the mind that is in us is removed from its place at the arrival of the devine spirit, but is again restored when that spirit departs.”

Since, then, ancient philosophy made the inspired person a pure medium, “a sounding instrument of God’s voice,” every inspired utterance must be infallible. . On this dark background of essential enmity and separation between God and nature much of past theology has been outlined. Some of it had been steeped in this utter gloom. This ancient falshood of man’s total depravity and hostility td God yet hangs its sable pall over the theology of some. But our view of nature and of God’s government thereof is now radically changed. We believe nature to be sacred and God immanent'and transeunt therein, its hypostasis and conscious soul. Religion we no longer look upon as a wave come from some etherial and mystic sea to flood our godless valley with its healing waters. As we have concluded men to be. not children of the devil and of darkness by nature, but the sons ot their divine Creator, we find religion to be a fact deeply rooted in their moral consciousness. The .highest manifestation of the hiding God that can possibly be vouchsafed us, must after all be divinely human. But If so, if the sublimest revelation of God to man must be a revelation of Him in and through*man, then the germs of great truth and high capacity already reside In him by nature. A righteous life, then, te the result of drawing out, by all manner, of education, the God-planted possibilities within him. But how was it attained, according to the ancient mechanical view? It was by first driving out and

jtilj sen/fronts 1 distant Gai, mw be by opus tetic predestination: their inspiriation must be infallible, since it communi* cutes nothing but vhat is from above.