After giving the definition of inspiration, three presuppositions are set out. First, inspiration is put in its place, which is to say that Hodge and Warfield acknowledge that while inspiration is true, “it is not in the first instance a principle fundamental to the truth of the Christian religion.” In a later article on inspiration, Warfield would say, “We found the whole system of Christian doctrine on plenary inspiration as little as we found it upon the doctrine of angelic existences.”⁹ This doesn’t mean they downplayed the doctrine, but it is important to see this qualification.

In the second presupposition, they observe that inspiration “must be conditioned upon our general views of God’s relation to the world, and his methods of influencing the souls of men.” This is their way of expressing the difference between supernaturalistic and naturalistic worldviews. They express this directly: “The only really dangerous opposition to the church doctrine of inspiration comes either directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, from some false view of God’s relation to the world, of his methods of working, and of the possibility of a supernatural agency penetrating and altering the course of a natural process.” This leads to the third presupposition, the “continuity between all the various provinces and methods of God’s working.” Each of these, the supernatural and the natural, God and the human authors, constitute “one system in the execution of one plan,” with “all these agents and all these methods [being] so perfectly adjusted and controlled . . . [that] all together infallibly bring about the result God designs.” This is the notion of concursus. Warfield offers a fuller discussion of concursus in his essay “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” published in The Presbyterian Review in 1894.

After setting out these three presuppositions, Hodge and Warfield turn next to the genesis of Scripture, again returning to the idea of the human agency in the writing of Scripture. Such human agency is “everywhere apparent, and gives substance and form to the entire collection of writings.” This means in short that the Scriptures have been generated “through an historic process,” with the Holy Spirit ever present throughout the process. Then they put forward their definition of inspiration as plenary, verbal inspiration, anticipating various objections or alternative views to the claim of verbal inspiration. The first is that to some the verbal theory sounds like the dictation theory. They dispense with that handily. The second is an alternative to verbal inspiration that instead pictures the biblical authors as inspired in a general way who then set out to write in their own abilities and limitations of divine truth, resulting in an adequate but not infallible text. A third objection also puts forth an alternative view, claiming that “while the thoughts of the sacred writers concerning doctrine and duty were inspired and errorless, their language was of purely human suggestion, and more or less accurate.” Yet another view sees the biblical authors as inspired and therefore inerrant when it comes to matters of faith and practice or of matters pertaining to “doctrine and duty,” but not so when it comes to matters of history or science or geography and the like. These elements of the Bible are deemed of secondary importance and contain inaccuracies and discrepancies. In reply, Hodge and Warfield assert, “the Scriptures not only contain, but are, the word of God” (emphasis theirs).