Understanding Inspiration
By George “Chip” Hammond
Recently Russel Bowers, Republican Speaker of the House of the Arizona legislature, testified that he was asked to call the legislature back into session to try to decertify the electors appointed by the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Without any evidence, and lacking constitutional authority to so, Bowers refused based upon his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
We may rightly admire a person for refusing to violate his conscience and oath of office, particularly when there was both external pressure and internal temptation to do so. (Bowers himself had wanted the election outcome to be different.) In his testimony, however, Bowers said something that I fear many American Evangelicals would hardly find objectionable. He stated, “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired.” Bowers is a member of the Mormon Church and as such he stands outside of the scope of the historic Christian faith. Though I am not an expert on Mormonism, I am unaware of a belief that the Constitution stands on a par with the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and texts such as the Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants. Perhaps this is just a personal tenet of Mr. Bower’s, and not a Mormon doctrine. Over the last decade, however, I have heard politicians and public figures who claim a more orthodox Christian faith express the same sentiment: The U.S. Constitution is divinely inspired by God.
Blasphemy is a strong word that can provoke an emotional response. It is sometimes thrown around thoughtlessly and irrationally. I use it here not as an insult, but deliberately and with a very specific definition. Blasphemy has to do with ascribing to other entities what belongs to God alone or ascribing to God something that is unworthy of him.
God’s Word (the Bible) is said to be theopnuestos, “God-breathed” (1 Timothy 3:16), or in the old way of saying it, “given by inspiration.” The Christian faith holds not merely that the Bible is an inspiring book, nor that it is “inspired” like J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but that it is the very Word of God given through human agency. The Bible does not speak on all subjects (for example, no one can learn to perform brain surgery or drive a car from reading the Bible). Its purpose is to tell us what we were created for, what went wrong, and how we can be reconciled to God. On everything it speaks it is authoritative (because it is the Word of God), necessary (it contains things outside the ken of creation that we could not know or figure out unless we were told), sufficient (nothing else needs to be, nor can be added to it to tell us what we were created for, what went wrong, and how we can be reconciled to God), and clear (not to all alike, nor in all parts, but what is needed to be known is easily seen; see Westminster Confession of Faith 1:7. As Alistair Begg has said, “The plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things”).
Because it is the Word of God, what the Bible tells us about what we were made for, what went wrong, and how to be reconciled to God is the truth. It is often said that the Bible is “inerrant,” that is, “without error.” This is true, but what the Church has always believed about the Bible is stronger than that. A student’s exam paper may be inerrant in that it happens to contain no errors. The Bible is not merely inerrant, but infallible. It’s not merely that it doesn’t happen to contain any error (inerrant). It is, given its source and ultimate Author, impossible for it to err (infallible).
(By the way, there is a movement within Evangelicalism and even Reformed circles today to down-play the infallibility of the Bible. Those who do so often claim to be doing so in defense of the Bible. Such a claim could only gain traction in the post-modern, post-truth situation we find ourselves in today. A moment’s reflection will tell you that emphasizing the Bible’s inerrancy as opposed to its infallibility is a diminution of the Bible).
The Bible itself says that it is not the profound reflection of religious people (2 Peter 1:20-21), but it is God’s own message. For this reason, it is not open to emendation upon “better religious reflection.” The Scriptures “cannot be broken” (John 10:35). The Bible as a whole and in all and every part means what God intends for it to mean. We may understand that intent more or less accurately, but the true meaning of the Bible is God’s intended meaning. Our task is to understand it as accurately as we can. We cannot change either the text or its meaning.
That the Bible is divinely inspired is a tenet of the Christian faith. To say that the Constitution of the United States is likewise divinely inspired is blasphemous because it either ascribes too little to the Bible, or too much to the Constitution.
In the first place, the U.S. Constitution is the work of a committee in its crafting and adopting. As historian Jack Rakove has detailed in his book Original Meanings, the Constitution must be viewed from the perspectives of meaning, intention, and understanding.
Considering meaning, we may ask “what did the particular words used mean in the eighteenth century?” (For example, the word “welfare” has taken on in modernity nuances that did not exist in the eighteen century). An Oxford English Dictionary can help us here, but it will not supply us with “the answer” because then as now, words have a breadth of semantic domain. Yet even where that domain is restricted, “original meaning” of the words will not tell us what the Constitution means because there is always a certain propriety to language as it is used by individuals, and syntax and grammar, not just individual words, are critical to meaning.
The next level the that has to be considered is the intent of the framers. Everyone uses language in slightly proprietary ways. When things are crafted by committee it is possible that two people proposing and agreeing on the language may have radically different ideas of what the agreed upon language means (and James Madison’s detailed notes on the debates at the Constitutional Convention shows that this was exactly the case). It is important to note, though, that the framers did not view themselves as kings issuing decrees that the people must abide by (the whole reason for the American Revolution would make such a notion repugnant to them). After producing a document but profoundly differing with one another on what the document they produced meant, they then sent that document to the states for ratification by their governing bodies.
Thus, the last perspective to be considered is that of the understanding of the legislators to whom it came for ratification. Here the intention issue becomes multiplied, for those voting on its ratification had to determine, each for himself and as various bodies, what the words meant.
Whereas the Bible means what God intends for it to mean, what does the Constitution mean? Does it mean what Noah Webster says it means? It cannot mean what the Constitutional Convention intended, because the members of that body had at times radically different ideas of what the words meant. Far less can the words mean what the ratifiers thought they meant, for they all had different ideas of what the words meant also.
The very philosophy of an American democratic republic, however, was that power would rest with the people. (“Democracy” comes from two Greek words meaning “people” and “power”). The intent from the beginning was that the Constitution would mean whatever the people of the United States said it meant. This means inexorably that its meaning will change. The Founders put “speed bumps” in the way of this: the Supreme Court would ultimately decide what the Constitution means, and that court would be appointed by presidents and confirmed by a Congress elected by the people. This guaranteed that change would not come precipitously but fulfilled the goal of the framers that the people would have power. The people would determine through proper gates and channels what they wanted the Constitution to mean.
But it’s not merely the interpretive issue. Article V of the Constitution lays out the provision for amending the Constitution, even to the point of being able to “alter or abolish it” (thus the Declaration of Independence). The Constitution and the principles on which it was founded carry within it the seeds of its own eventual and inevitable destruction.
While Christians may admire Russell Bowers for taking seriously his vow to uphold and defend the Constitution and refusing to transgress the boundaries of the authority afforded to him by it, we must reject in the strongest possible terms any idea of a “divine inspiration” of the Constitution, especially as in any way being a tenet of our faith. We may discuss the idea of God’s extraordinary providence in the founding of our nation, and even his special superintendence over her course and convention (the evidence for which seemed so strong that even the deistic Benjamin Franklin was forced to acknowledge it).
To place the Constitution on a par with the Bible as being divinely inspired and a tenet of faith is to blaspheme — either by denigrating the authority of the Bible, or by falsely ascribing to the Constitution the authority of the Word of God.
The Bible was not written by a committee with conflicting ideas about what the words meant. The meaning of the Bible is God’s meaning, which we must strive to understand. Unlike the Constitution, the Bible’s meaning is not determined by “the will of the people,” whether the population in general, or by the Church. And the Bible is not open to emendation and dissolution. Hard as it is fathom, the day will come when the Constitution of the United States will be relegated to the status of passe historical civic data, just as the Code of Hammurabi is today (it was undoubtedly impossible for the people of the Akkadian Empire to imagine that the Empire and its laws would ever pass away). By contrast, all people and the governments they produce are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord stands forever (1 Peter 1:24-25). Heaven and earth will pass away, but God’s words will never pass away (see Luke 21:33).
Christians may (indeed must) respect the supreme law of the lands in which they live, but they must not make the extremely dangerous mistake of ascribing to such human laws divine inspiration. Russel Bowers may sincerely believe that the Constitution of the United States is divinely inspired. In that belief he is wrong.
