III.
The Inspiration of Scripture
A. Inspired means God-breathed
1. Both the text itself
and the author are inspired
a. Text: 2 Timothy 3:16, 17: All Scripture is breathed
out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for
training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for
every good work.
b. Author
i. 2 Peter 1:19-21: And we have the prophetic word
more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp
shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your
hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from
someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of
man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
ii. 2 Peter 3:15, 16: And count the patience of our
Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according
to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them
of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand,
which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the
other Scriptures.
B. Theological terms that can help
us
1. Plenary: means full,
so all of scripture
2. Verbal: words,
letters
a. John 10:34-36: Jesus answered them, “Is it not
written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the
word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the
Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I
said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
b. Galatians 3:16: Now the promises were made to
Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring
to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.
c. Implication of a and b
i. We can’t pick and choose what to obey.
ii. The text in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic is what is
inspired; not the other languages it has been translated into.
3. Confluent: “to flow
together”, human and divine
a. Implication: Human personality, colloquialism, and
quirks are found throughout the scriptures
C. Theories of Inspiration
1.
Dictation: The writers passively recorded God’s words without any participation
of their own styles or personalities.
a. problems: doesn’t properly
address confluence
b. Romans
16:6-8: Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you. Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my
fellow prisoners. They are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ
before me. Greet Ampliatus, my beloved
in the Lord.
2.
Accommodation: God accommodates himself to the limitations and the vocabulary
of the human author so that what is written has these human qualities to it.
a.
strengths: addresses much of scripture that seems puzzling such as anthropomorphisms
b. problems:
doesn’t properly address confluence
3.
Supervision: The Holy Spirit doesn’t dictate to the human authors what to
write, but he supervises the writing of Scripture in such a way that the human
author will write what God or the Holy Spirit wants him to write.
a. So
soon, however, as we seriously endeavor to form for ourselves a clear
conception of the precise nature of the Divine action in this ‘breathing out’
of the Scriptures – this ‘bearing’ of the writers of the Scriptures to their
appointed goal of the production of a book of Divine trustworthiness and
indefectible authority – we become acutely aware of a more deeply lying and
much wider problem, apart from which this one of inspiration, technically so
called, cannot be profitably considered. This is the general problem of the
origin of the Scriptures and the part of God in all that complex of processes
by the interaction of which these books, which we call the sacred Scriptures,
with all their peculiarities, and all their qualities of whatever sort, have
been brought into being. For, of course, these books were not produced
suddenly, by some miraculous act – handed down complete out of heaven, as the
phrase goes; but, like all other products of time, are the ultimate effect of many
processes cooperating through long periods. There is to be considered, for
instance, the preparation of the material which forms the subject-matter of
these books: in a sacred history, say, for example, to be narrated; or in a
religious experience which may serve as a norm for record; or in a logical
elaboration of the contents of revelation which may be placed at the service of
God’s people; or in the progressive revelation of Divine truth itself,
supplying their culminating contents. And there is the preparation of the men
to write these books to be considered, a preparation physical, intellectual,
spiritual, which must have attended them throughout their whole lives, and,
indeed, must have had its beginning in their remote ancestors, and the effect of
which was to bring the right men to the right places at the right times, with
the right endowments, impulses, acquirements, to write just the books which
were designed for them. When ‘inspiration,’ technically so called, is
superinduced on lines of preparation like these, it takes on quite a different
aspect from that which it bears when it is thought of as an isolated action of
the Divine Spirit operating out of all relation to historical processes.
Representations are sometimes made as if, when God wished to produce sacred
books which would incorporate His will – a series of letters like those of
Paul, for example – He was reduced to the necessity of going down to earth and
painfully scrutinizing the men He found there, seeking anxiously for the one
who, on the whole, promised best for His purpose; and then violently forcing
the material He wished expressed through him, against his natural bent, and
with as little loss from his recalcitrant characteristics as possible. Of
course, nothing of the sort took place. If God wished to give His people a
series of letters like Paul’s He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He
brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write
just such letters. (The Inspiration
and Authority of the Bible, B. B. Warfield, page 154-155)
