Inspiration & Intelligibility

Post last updated on July 5, 2022

 Image:  Wikimedia Commons

This post originally appeared on June 9, 2020. It has been changed enough to warrant reposting here.

It will be no surprise to anyone that writers often choose to reemploy the same words and images to convey a particular meaning. This is but one element of good and deliberate communication; but a good reader must follow a writer’s queues, for a writer will drop these in his pages like breadcrumbs along a trail. Good writing, then, must still be answered by good reading: A reader must eventually yield to the author’s intention, which is brought to bear upon him by the force of the author’s considered arrangement. A good reader need merely take account of what the author places before him on the page.

Style is one measure of a writer’s effort, word choice and rhythm are its expressions—there are others, also; but my point will be that readers of the Bible should not at all be concerned that different styles exist among the many writers of scripture, especially when their themes and subjects are so frequently in common. Rather than a cause for concern, these become the reader’s necessary and happy interest. They lie next to one another in witness to the unity of scripture, for scripture’s different authors share the same ultimate subjects.

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In other words, the fact that one of scripture’s human authors expresses himself in a distinct style does not at all deny a simultaneously divine authorship. Behind and through these writers, the Lord himself directed and moved these men: He employed many different authors and their styles in his self-revelation. We may note this in a place like 2 Samuel 23:1-3, where David records his last words (verse 1); even so, David also and simultaneously knows these words to be the words of God, spoken both to and through him (verses 2-3). It is of additional interest and importance, still, that these words take a certain stylistic form: Hebrew poetry.

In this way, an ironic pattern emerges, wherein the diversity of styles and imaginative powers bear witness to the same over-arching truth. The themes of one author inevitably reappear elsewhere in the biblical revelation, and the persistent continuity of the Bible is accordingly displayed. The facts that are first discovered under the press of one writer’s hand and style are rediscovered elsewhere in the canon. Even where literary styles differ, a shared body of imagery persists. Neither disparate authors nor passing time defies this objective continuity; rather, their common concerns and hopes highlight it.

This continuity is to be comprehended as the intention and work of God. It takes the form of words and is accomplished by the Spirit through a man. The Apostle Peter has taught us just this: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). In short, the uniformity of the Bible’s content, expressed in such a diversity of writers, bears the expression and character of God himself. If one were to, in contrast, seek a definition of revelation that insists upon God’s mechanical control of the prophets and authors of scripture, then he is seeking something other than the biblical ideas of inspiration and revelation.

Likewise, were a reader to seek a proclamation in which the prophet’s personality is never expressed in the prophecy, he could easily find such models and instances in pagan religion, where the ecstatic experiences of the mystic often leave the prophet without his rational faculties. Paul, however, is quite clear that irrational, ungovernable communication is forbidden by God, and bears no association with the God who reveals himself through men. It is in this respect that Paul writes to the Corinthians that “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Corinthians 14:32). Certainly, this underscores the error of Christians who profess and pretend to speak in unintelligible “tongues,” but it says something more than this.¹See another post, The Babel of the Gospel, where I write about this more.

Instead of an involuntary and ecstatic utterance, the scripture posits a doctrine of inspiration, by which the divine will and revelation is communicated by God unto men. The revelation is given by inspiration (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16-17). It is then received in a thinking, rational, and devoted servant, one who then delivers the same truth to other men in understandable forms and utterances—in words. This is what Peter is describing when he writes that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). As such, there is a real and unavoidable association between the character of God and the form of his revelation. The God who desires to reveal himself is the God whose revelation is made comprehendible to men. In this fact we understand something more than the breadth of God’s faculties; we also perceive the depths of his love, for he made himself known to us.

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Even so, there is another point to be made, for the faculty of speech also highlights a connection between the character of God’s revelation and the nature of man, who is its recipient. Indeed, God’s supernatural word is intended for natural man. To be sure, the supernatural and natural orders are distinct expressions, but these two do not possess the kind of inherent animosity and incongruity that modern men sometimes assume they must. The fact of the matter is that God’s original creation showcased both natural and supernatural elements in an amiable association. The now obvious fractures that exist between these two were not God’s original desire, but resulted from Adam’s sin—what is frequently called the Fall (cf. Romans 5:12, Romans 8:20-22, etc.); and yet, the hostility between the two was not a part of God’s created order. Of course, this is not to say that natural man as he now exists is agreeable of apprehending to the kind of reception present in God’s revelation (1 Corinthians 2:14), but this present rupture confirms man’s sinfulness, rather than debase him to another kind of creature. Speech befits only God and men, and God’s words are intended for man.

The additional point to now be made is that when God sent his Son into the world, Jesus was the divine Word of God in human flesh (John 1:1; see also John 1:14, etc.). Accordingly, in the Incarnation, the initial idea of God’s creative speech is explicitly reconfirmed and now associated with God who became flesh. God’s creative speech was the source of the first creation (cf. Genesis 1:3); the Word becomes the means of God’s new creation (John 1:1). And to this end, Jesus’ words consequently bear the same effect of the Father’s words in Genesis 1—they grant life to man (John 6:63).

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In this manner, the present, undesigned, but real animosity between God and man is removed. God’s appearance as a man with a natural body (which does not deny that it was also raised in his resurrections as a spiritual body, 1 Corinthians 15:44) becomes the initial basis for the believer’s salvation. Jesus uniquely knows the Father and then makes the Father known to sinful natural man (Matthew 11:27). Indeed, the Father becomes conceivable to man by the appearance, word, and works of the incarnate Word (John 14:10-11, John 5:36, John 10:25).

In God’s revelation through scripture’s authors, then, the acts of Jesus take various and repeated forms that explicitly and implicitly recall the Bible’s account of the first creation. For instance, in Genesis 1:3 God speaks, and light appears. Then, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, Jesus is described as the Word of God and the face of God, shining into the darkness that resides in the hearts of men. The creative power of God in the world is hereby focused upon the regeneration of men. Similarly, in John 3:2 Jesus is the light that proceeds out of darkness, bringing life to men. He emerges from the darkness of night to converse with Nicodemus in way that recalls the appearance of light in Genesis 1:3. The point is not to make Jesus exactly analogous to the created light of the first creation, but to show how the narratives relate the first creation with what follows in the Incarnation and ministry of Jesus Christ. Therefore, in 2 Corinthians 5:17-19, Paul writes how union with Jesus Christ—declaring that if any man be “in Christ,” he is a new creature—is the source of God’s new creation. In the same place, Paul then decidedly links this fact to the preaching of the gospel by men (2 Corinthians 5:19). Accordingly, God’s Word is declared in the spoken word of men, effecting the will and power of God.

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In both inspiration and in the Incarnation, we are reintroduced to evidence of an intended harmony between the natural and supernatural orders. The harmony was present before the Fall; it is reestablished through the Incarnation. Their proper association is confirmed in Christ Jesus but consequently highlights the misapprehensions of speculative philosophy and religion, untethered as they are from God’s revelation in Christ. In other words, the proper relationship of the supernatural and natural worlds cannot now exist outside of the resurrected Lord. Rather ironically, both materialism and pantheism (but also rationalism and mysticism²Perceptively, Herman Bavinck writes that “mysticism is always and again going over into rationalism, and rationalism periodically falls back into mysticism. The extremes touch each other and shake hands.” Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion According to the Reformed Confession (Glenside, Pennsylvania: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 386.) make the same mistake: They fail to understand the correct connection between God and his creation, between God and his creatures.

To put it another way, the sought-after connection between God and natural man is only offered through the Son. This fact serves to highlight the special, exalted privilege and happy station of believers, even as necessarily precludes these hopes from the unbeliever.

Close and inseparable as the relationship between the Father and the Mediator is, that between Christ and the believers is equally so. In inner power it surpasses every union that can be found among creatures and even that which exist between God and His world. Distinguished on the one hand from all pantheistic admixture, it is on the other hand far superior to all deistic juxtaposition and all contractual relationship. Scripture teaches us something about its nature by comparing it with the relationship between a vine and its branches, the head of a body and its members, a man and a woman. It is a relationship which fully and eternally unites the Christ with His church and with its members in the depth of their being and in the essence of their personality.³Ibid., 380.

In its various spheres, revelation is by virtue of the Son and carried out by the Spirit, effecting understanding and a renewed relation between God and men. In scripture, language is made to serve God in a rational and benighted soul and make him a devoted soul. God’s words are given to us by the prophets, inscribed with a pen.

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It is in pagan religions, then, that we see the divorce of revelation and knowledge. Hinduism gives us some indication of this, though it is more evident in some of its schools (darśanas) than in others. This is not a slander: Many of the Indian philosophical schools debated among themselves as to the definition of reality and how such can be demonstrated and known. That said, for many Hindus the Vedas are acknowledged as a basic and essential feature of Hindu identity; and yet, it is also quite true that relatively few Hindus can understand the Sanskritic language of the Vedas. Nevertheless, the Vedas are identified as śruti—meaning that which is overheard.⁴Śruti, meaning what is revealed and heard. It is often stated in distinction to smṛti, which might be roughly understood as tradition that is in agreement with the revelation contained in the śruti. It is an old and very common (but not now universal) idea that one cannot be a Hindu if he denies the Vedas. This conviction is what led Hindus to classify Buddhists as nastik—unorthodox “non-affirmers,” because they denied the authority of the Vedas. For all but a small minority, the Vedas remain an irreducible aspect of Hindu orthodoxy, identified as scripture.⁵Richard King writes that “within the so-called ‘orthodox fold’ of Hindu philosophy attitudes toward the Vedic scriptures are quite diverse.” He then goes onto cite examples where the confession of the Vedas sometimes has different meaning among the different philosophical schools. See Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (New Delhi: ANE Books/Maya Publishers under license from Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 43.

This said, it is very important to understand what this orthodoxy does not require of its adherents: The striking fact is that, for many Hindus, the comprehensibility of the text is not as important as its bare utterance during the various rituals. In the main, the Vedas prescribe and order the performance of the Vedic sacrifices. They are also said to effect the legitimacy of the Hindu ritual.⁶A recent news story highlighted a similar distinction in the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism wrongly prescribes salvation as dependent upon the ritual efficacy of a human priest. Accordingly, when one priest failed in the ritual practice, the Roman church then admitted the invalidity of the rituals themselves. See BBC News article, One-word gaffe invalidates thousands of US baptisms. Klaus Klostermaier summarizes Hindu ritual practice this way:

The hymns themselves were never simply read aloud but they had to be recited in an exactly prescribed pitch…Although the text of the Ṛgveda remained unchanged throughout India for thousands of years, different styles of recitation developed and were preserved in different parts of the country. The recitation has to be accompanied by precisely studied movements of the right arm and of the fingers according to accent and pitch. A young Brahmin had to go through many years of intensive training before he was qualified to officiate at a sacrifice. Since it was believed that a single mispronounced syllable could spoil the entire costly arrangement, extreme care was taken to perfect the Brahmin’s training.⁷Klaus Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 48. Klostermaier writes again, “A mantra need not have an intelligible word meaning; it is the sound equivalent of reality and at the same time the medium by which this otherwise transcendent reality is reached.” Ibid., 56.

The Indologist Raimundo Panikkar confirms this idea in relation to ritual:

The Vedas are not primarily a written document; they are not even a set of thoughts or a collection of injunctions. They are primordially spoken language, a set of words with meaning, sound, and power. Traditionally the Vedas have to be chanted or recited. Vedic recitation stands for the total and sincere (because also public, or at least audible) participation of the person for whom the Veda is “Veda,” that is, knowledge, insight, and ultimately liberation.⁸Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience, Mantramanjar: An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1977), 34.

Here, too, speech is highlighted as an effective element of religion; and yet, a key distinction remains between the biblical doctrine of inspiration and the Hindu association of religious speech with ritual. Notably, “the blessing derived from [Vedic] scripture does not depend upon its comprehension.”⁹Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 57. Indeed, the Vedic hymns are said to possess a certain ritualistic power despite their unintelligibility to the audience.¹⁰Klostermaier notes: “Hired Brahmins recite the whole book without interruption. Hardly anyone listens—it is enough to recite the text faithfully in order to gain merit.” Ibid. Radhakrishnan writes that the

Upanisads contain accounts of the mystic significance of the syllable aum, explanations of mystic words like tajjalann, which are intelligible only to the initiated. Upanisad became a name for a mystery, a secret, rahasyam, communicated only to the tested few.¹¹See comments by Radhakrishnan inThe Principal Upanishads, trans. S. Radhakrishnan (Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India: Harper Collins Publishers, 35th Impression: 2021), 19.

It appears that Radhkrishnan values the esoteric content of the Upanishads—the concluding parts of the Vedas, the philosophical considerations to the rituals described elsewhere;¹²The Upanishads are the later and concluding parts of the Vedas, but they represent a different kind and intention than what precedes them. They are philosophical texts, intended to elaborate upon the meaning of the rituals that are described in the earlier and preceding parts of the Vedas. nevertheless, the Vedas are hereby endowed with a ritualistic function among a people who do not comprehend the linguistic form. The śruti—imputed with the preeminence of revelation—is heard but not understood, chanted but misapprehended by its audience. Bare ritualism is the inevitable child of such a doctrine of scripture. Indeed, many writers conclude that the appearance of the Upanishads was to compensate for the ritualism that eventually developed in the Vedic period.

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Nonetheless, this bare ritualism, it has been proposed, is overcome by what Panikkar has called a kind of participation.¹³What we see, then, is some kind of evident rupture between knowledge and practice. This seems eventually evidence of ritualism. Richard King cites Jitendranath Mohanty, offering a different possibility from the Hindu perspective, that Hindu worship proceeds upon the alleged continuity of tradition. In such a case, tradition would overcome and establish practice when understanding is absent. King writes, “In a discussion of the status of philosophy vis-à-vis tradition, Mohanty argues that the acceptance of Vedic revelation (śruti) as a valid foundation for knowledge by many Hindu philosophers does not constitute a rigid adherence to a dogmatic religious orthodoxy, but reflects instead an acknowledgement of the inevitability of tradition.” See King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, 15. That tradition may serve as an additional authority is a welcome corrective to more modern western trends. What is not clear is whether this inclination has a limit. At what point does tradition become insufficient or erroneous. He tells us what he means by this: Panikkar describes the details of Vedic recitation, highlighting its exactitudes and austerities. Man’s participation, he then writes, requires one’s whole being.¹⁴Panikkar, The Vedic Experience, 34. And it is through this “participation” that the ritualism is overcome. Panikkar writes:

Any of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray, and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words except the one who utters them. The Vedas are living words, and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression.

At this point, Panikkar merely assumes what is axiomatic for many Hindus: The Vedas have no author. They exist independently of man. This is thought to universalize the revelation:

What has no author, according to the apaurruseya¹⁵Panikkar describes this as a traditional Hindu notion of “non-authorship.” The Vedas, it is said, have neither human nor divine author. Ibid., 12. insight, is the relation between the word and the meaning or object. The relationship is not an external or extrinsic relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit the type of relationship which exists between the word and the meaning [emphasis added]. To do this we would require another relationship and so on ad infinitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda,¹⁶Meaning, knowledge it does not convey real or saving knowledge…Only when you become their “author,” when through assimilation you are able to utter them, when you yourself are the proper origin, the auctor of the text, do the Vedas disclose their authentic “authority” [emphasis added].¹⁷Panikkar, The Vedic Experience, 12-13.

How, then, does the timeless, unauthored “word” become living? Only in the present subjective experience of men. Here, then, is an important and contrasting distinction: The Bible grants us a living word that is mediated between God and man in history, that is transmitted in a discernible form and language, one that is ultimately made effective for the salvation of sinners through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a man. In Jesus Christ, God and man become related in a unique identity. The word of God lives because God himself is eternally a living and autonomous person.¹⁸Personhood is now often misunderstood. It does not (as is sometimes supposed) necessarily mean human, but pertains to a being who possesses characteristics that form a unique identity. Panikkar, on the other hand, writes of a mystical word that finds its power in a self-conceived, subjective spirituality that originates in one’s rigorous ritual and meditation. The Vedic “word” finds its definition and power in the acts of a sinful creature.

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Although Panikkar is not depositing all Vedic significance in a participating priest and audience, the reader should understand that he, nonetheless, still describes a situation in which the efficacy of the Vedic scripture originates in the human creature and not in a Creator. In this sense, he echoes the presuppositions of Advaita Vedanta: there is no real distinction between the visibly apparent elements of the universe. All is, in its essence, one. This is its fundamental error, both its presupposition and conclusion.

In the end, the Vedic power finds no historical display except in man. Panikkar writes that “recitation belongs to the very nature of the Vedic Word which is actualized in the sound vibrations. The sacramental character of the Word¹⁹Panikkar means the Vedic words, here, though he uses Christian terminology. is seen in its necessary connection with sound as its physical element. The śruti, indeed, needs to be heard.”²⁰Ibid., 35. In evident contrast, the Bible tells its readers that God himself spoke the world into existence before man’s creation. His words possessed power without man, but they were still revealed to men. God later sent his Son to become the beginning of a new creation, and they found their power in and through one man. In Jesus Christ (called the Word), God speaks through man and reconciles them to God. Faith in God’s word becomes our accepted participation in what God has first and understandably extended to him through the Spirit’s inspiration.