Inspiration
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in scripture and the ology, an extraordinary influence exerted by the Holy Spirit on certain teachers and writers so as to illuminate their understandings, raise and purify their moral natures, and impart a certain divine element to their utterances, whether oral or written. The chief New Testament passages on which the doctrine rests are two. The first is thus rendered in the Authorized Version: "All Scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine," etc.; in the text of the Revised Version this is, "Every Scripture inspired of God [is] also profitable for teaching," etc., and in the margin, "Every Scripture [is] inspired of God and profitable," etc. The second is II Pet. i: 21, "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" (Authorized Version). "For no prophecy ever came (margin, was brought) by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost " (Revised Version). The Scriptures " 66 were, of course, the Old Testament. The great majority of Christians hold what is termed "plenary inspiration "viz., that the influence of the Holy Ghost on the sacred speakers and writers was such as absolutely to pervade their mind and heart, making their utterances as divine as if they had come from God without human creation. A minority believe that the Scripture writers were preserved from all error only when they uttered moral and spiritual teaching, while in numbers, unimportant points of history, etc., they might err. A few reduce the inspiration of the sacred writers to that possessed by Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, etc., in other words, identify it with what is termed genius. See BIBLE.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 it reported that "the great majority of Christians" held to plenary inspiration, with only "a minority" allowing that the biblical writers might err on numbers or minor history. That balance has since reversed across most of Christendom: the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (1965) taught that Scripture teaches without error the truth God wished recorded "for the sake of our salvation," a formula deliberately narrower than blanket inerrancy, and most mainline Protestant bodies took similar ground. Strict verbal inerrancy did not disappear but became the marker of a particular party, codified in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy of 1978, signed by some 300 conservative evangelical leaders. The 1921 entry was also written just as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was breaking open in American churches, a fight over exactly these two verses that it does not mention.
Written for this edition, 2026.