17th century

Protestant Orthodoxy: Verbal Inspiration and the Inerrancy of Scripture (Westminster, the Helvetic Consensus)

Luther and his colleagues insisted on the sole authority of Scripture but did not develop a theory of inspiration; seventeenth-century Lutheran orthodoxy did so, often making the doctrine of Scripture the heart of the prolegomena. Inspiration was understood as a special act of the Spirit connected with the writing of the text, plenary and verbal: the authors were "secretaries" of the Spirit, and toward the end of the period Hollaz asserted the inspiration of the Masoretic vowel points. In the Reformed tradition, the Second Helvetic Confession for the first time proclaimed in its first chapter that Scripture is the Word of God wholly inspired by God, the Westminster Confession opened with a chapter on Scripture as "immediately inspired," and the Helvetic Consensus of 1675 (Turretin and others) declared the vowel points of the Hebrew text inspired and infallible.