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This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.

This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186–189), calls it a “docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument; denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the way.” Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact., 1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves”; Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit, as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.” This reminds us of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they would be had ancient seas existed.

Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying: “A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear declaration of that which he prophesieth”; in Gen. 15:12—“About the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of God. Sanday, 78, says also: “Josephus holds that even historical narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard their Scripture as ‘the decrees of God,’ which they strictly observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.” The Rabbis said that “Moses did not write one word out of his own knowledge.”

The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said: “What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the Scripture.” Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke, under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3, 1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.” The Swiss Formula of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures “the very word of God,” but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says: “I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently point in illustration of the fact that where there is most theology, there is often least religion.”

Of this view we may remark:

(a) We grant that there are instances when God's communications were uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to writing.

For examples, see Ex. 3:4—“God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”; 20:22—“Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”; cf. Heb. 12:19—“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that no word more should be spoken unto them”; Numbers 7:89—“And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim: and he spake unto him”; 8:1—“And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying,” etc.; Dan. 4:31—“While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee”; Acts 9:5—“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest”; Rev. 19:9—“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb”; 21:5—“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”; cf. 1:10, 11—“and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest, write in a book and send it to the seven churches.” So the voice from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus (Mat. 3:17, and 17:5; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these passages).

(b) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of Scripture facts—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.

Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of the words was universal. On 1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος, the text usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says: “There is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.” Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.”Paul claims for Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the influence of the Spirit. Manly: “Dictation to an amanuensis is not teaching.” Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder of the verse, 1 Cor. 2:13—“combining spiritual things with spiritual words.”

(c) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with the theory of a solely divine authorship.

Notice Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation (Rom. 5:12 sq., 2 Cor. 11:1 sq.), and his ignorance of the precise number whom he had baptized (1 Cor. 1:16). One beggar or two (Mat. 20:30; cf. Luke 18:35); “about five and twenty or thirty furlongs” (John 6:19); “shed for many” (Mat. 26:28 has περί, Mark 14:24 and Luke 22:20 have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription? Clarke, Christian Theology, 33–37—“We are under no obligation to maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for applying the word 'inspired' to our present Bible as a whole, and theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be disproved.”

(d) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers.

Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins. God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins, Without Antonio.” Mark 11:3—“The Lord hath need of him,” may apply to man as well as beast.

(e) It contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications, the more fully is man in possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely mechanical.

Joseph receives communication by vision (Mat. 1:20); Mary, by words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (Luke 1:28). The more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication. These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father says at the baptism to Jesus: ‘My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest in thee. For thou art my Rest.’ Inspiration becomes more and more internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the opposite Docetic view, the most perfect inspiration should have been that of Balaam's ass.” Semler represents the Pelagian or Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship, he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of the Bible.