Faith & Spirit Quote by Dwight L. Moody

Moody’s line is a neat piece of revivalist jujitsu: it turns the grand, contested question of biblical authority into a personal testimony that no debate club can easily dislodge. “Inspired” is doing double duty. In theological terms it means divinely authored; in everyday speech it means emotionally moved. Moody collapses the two meanings into one quick loop - the Bible is from God because it works on me. That circularity isn’t a bug so much as the point. He’s preaching to a culture where arguments about higher criticism, science, and modern doubt were bubbling up, and he’s offering a shortcut around the intellectual bottleneck.

The intent is pastoral and strategic. Moody wasn’t trying to win a seminar; he was trying to win a room. The subtext is: stop outsourcing your faith to experts, whether skeptical professors or professional apologists. The proof you need is not trapped in manuscripts and commentaries; it’s in the felt experience of conviction, comfort, and moral recalibration.

It also smuggles in a democratizing claim: the authority of scripture is accessible to anyone who can be changed by it. That’s classic American evangelical confidence - pragmatic, anti-elite, and suspicious of gatekeepers. At the same time, the line quietly exposes the movement’s vulnerability: if inspiration is validated by inspiration, what happens when the text doesn’t “inspire” someone, or inspires them toward uglier ends? Moody’s brilliance is to keep the argument where revivalism thrives: in the immediacy of transformed life, not the cold air of adjudicated facts.