Category: Bible: Inspiration

Q. What solid evidence is there for the divine inspiration of the New Testament other than alleged statements by Peter and Paul? Who gave them the authority to make such a declaration of divinity?

The divine inspiration of the New Testament is something that Christians accept by faith. If we believe in Jesus, we believe in the writings that testify about Jesus. That does not require the same kind of evidence that something would that we wanted to accept by reason.

Nevertheless, something we accept by faith should be reasonable. Faith and reason are two complementary ways of knowing the truth. While each understands a different aspect of the truth, their findings should be compatible.

And we can observe that the New Testament provides a reasonable account of how the trajectory of God’s redemptive work traced in the Old Testament reaches an intrinsically appropriate culmination in the life, teachings, sacrificial death, and resurrection of Jesus and in the way of life of the community of his followers. In other words, the New Testament reasonably is what we would expect it to be if it were divinely inspired. That does not convince us that it is, it reassures us that it is, once we already accept that by faith.

We would also expect the New Testament writers to be aware of this inspiration, and they are, as you note. And if the New Testament is indeed inspired, then that is what gives the writers the authority to declare that it is. Admittedly that is circular. But as one of my theology professors once said, “The only way to do theology is in a circle. The issue is how you get onto the circle.”

For many people, the problem in getting onto the circle is recognizing that faith is indeed as legitimate a way of knowing as reason. Along those lines, I find the following quotation from Blaise Pascal helpful. He was one of the most brilliant mathematicians who ever lived, so he certainly knew how to think reasonably and logically. But his genius also gave him the insight to realize that, as he put it, “The ultimate task of reason is to recognize that there is an infinite number of things that surpass it.” Specifically, there are divine realities that surpass human reason but that we can nevertheless access through the faculty of faith.

Now the capacity for faith is also the capacity for doubt. Anything that must be known by faith can also be doubted. But that is not a bad thing. By working through our doubts, we strengthen our faith. There is a difference between doubt and skepticism. Skeptics begin with the stance that they are not inclined to believe. People who doubt want to believe.

Your question is certainly a legitimate one. I hope you will continue to pursue it, and I hope you will do so as a doubter, not as a skeptic.

Q. I have been taught that the correct description of how the Bible was inspired is “verbal plenary.” Is that supported by what the Bible actually says about itself, or is there a more accurate description? Is “verbal plenary inspiration” what orthodox Christians (a majority? a minority? a fringe?) have held to throughout history? Thanks!

Those who hold to the “verbal plenary inspiration” of Scripture believe that every  word throughout the Bible was individually inspired by God. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the Bible’s inspiration was first described this way by Archibald Hodge and Benjamin Warfield in their article “Inspiration,” which appeared in The Presbyterian Review in April 1881. In that article, they stated their conviction that “the divine superintendence, which we call Inspiration, extended to the verbal expression [i.e. words] of the thoughts of the sacred writers, as well as to the thoughts themselves.”

So to answer the last part of your question first, this is not a belief that orthodox Christians have held to throughout history, at least not under that name. Rather, Christians in all times and places have held more generally to the belief that, as Paul wrote to Timothy, “all Scripture is inspired by God.” Many translations now render this phrase as “all Scripture is God-breathed” or “all Scripture is breathed out by God,” reflecting the Greek term theopneustos. (The English word “inspired” is itself based on the root for “breathe.”)

So Christians believe that in some way the Scriptures are the “breath of God,” that is, something that emanates directly from Him. But they have always held various views about on what level inspiration actually resides. Some indeed believe that it is effective on the level of the words of Scripture (verbal plenary), while others believe that it’s the biblical authors intended meaning that is inspired. Still others say that the story of God’s saving actions in human history is what is inspired within the Bible. There are other views as well.

So the specifics of where inspiration resides seem to me to be a matter on which Christians of good will, with equal commitments to the authority and inspiration of Scripture, can legitimately differ. As a result, I think any Christian would be well advised to be “fully convinced in their own mind” on the matter, but at the same time to be charitable towards those who hold different views that nevertheless respect the Bible as “breathed out by God.”

Q. In 2 Samuel, the author says that God incited David to take a census of the people because He was angry with Israel. But in 1 Chronicles, the writer says that Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census. I am inclined to blame David himself, since as king, he would bear blame for all royal decisions. The author of 2 Samuel, who is usually truthful, might have felt he needed to avoid blaming the king. But later, in both accounts, David admits his sin. Who was truly responsible for David’s taking a census: God, Satan, or David?

The question you’re asking about is precisely the issue I mentioned when I was asked some years ago what problem in the Bible bothered me the most. In my biblical teaching, I’ve always used a “good question” format. For example, in one of the churches I served as a pastor, for our adult Sunday School curriculum one semester I just told the people, “Write down all the questions you have about the Bible and we’ll work through them together.” I always served churches near colleges and universities, and when my wife and I would have groups of students over for dinner, after the meal she would say to them, “Does anyone have any questions about the Bible? Chris loves to answer those!” At one of these gatherings a student once said to me, “All right, you’ve answered our questions, now what bothers you about the Bible?” And I mentioned this issue—how the Bible attributes the same action in one place to God but in another place to Satan. How much more of a contradiction could you find?

But here’s how I  finally came to terms with the issue. I recognized that as the biblical authors tell the story, they often share their perspectives on why things happened. These perspectives are “inspired” in a sense that I’ll describe shortly, since these are, after all, biblical authors. But the case we’re considering shows that they can’t be “inspired” in the sense of always infallibly correct through divine intervention in the ordinary process of storytelling and composition, because if they were, the Bible simply wouldn’t be able to attribute the same action both to the ultimate holy agent (God) and the ultimate evil agent (Satan) at the same time.

So what’s going on here? As I said, the biblical authors comment on the story as they tell it. (The title of Günther Bornkamm‘s classic volume Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew helped crystallize this insight for me: The biblical authors are entrusted with passing on the tradition of the stories of God’s work in the world, but they also share their own interpretations of it.) For example, in 2 Kings, the author is describing how, right after the long and godly reign of Josiah, the kingdom of Judah was plundered by foreign invaders and ultimately destroyed. The author comments, “Surely these things happened … because of the sins of Manasseh,” Josiah’s grandfather, “and all he had done, including the shedding of innocent blood. For he had filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord was not willing to forgive.”

The author uses a term in Hebrew, translated “surely” here, that means “this has to be” or “this can only be …” For example, in 1 Kings, the Arameans are fighting against King Ahab of Israel, who has enlisted King Jehoshaphat of Judah to help him. Somehow Ahab persuades Jehoshaphat to wear his royal robes into the battle while he goes in disguise himself. When the Arameans see Jehoshaphat in his robes, they say, using this same term, “This has to be the king of Israel.” But when Jehoshaphat cries out to the Lord for help, they realize he can’t be Ahab (who was known to worship Baal), so they leave him alone and go looking for Ahab instead.

So the term is a “particle of assurance or emphasis,” as William Holladay says in his Hebrew lexicon. But why would a biblical author need to use such an expression at all (“this must have been because …”) if they were writing under a kind of divine inspiration that guaranteed that they knew all the reasons for things? Examples like this not only illustrate that this isn’t the way in which the Bible is inspired, they also show that the biblical authors themselves aren’t aware that they are writing Scripture. Another clear example is when Paul writes to the Corinthians, “I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else” besides Crispus, Gaius, and the household of Stephanas. I have no trouble believing that God helped Paul provide the right names, without any omissions, of the people he baptized in Corinth. But if God was doing that, Paul didn’t realize it! Instead, he admitted, “I don’t remember.” So Scriptural inspiration does not involve overriding the ordinary limitations on human memory and perspective.

I don’t find that at all disappointing, however. I actually find it quite exciting that God, in effect, allowed and even invited the biblical authors to contribute their own perspectives as they told the story. As readers, we are then invited to put these perspectives into conversation with one another, if they seem to differ, and we are also invited to join in conversation with them ourselves. This is precisely what you’re doing when you suggest that the author of 2 Samuel might not have wanted to blame David, but you’re inclined to blame him yourself. Excellent!

We can certainly observe that in any situation, God has a plan, and Satan has a plan, to work with the free choices of human moral agents to advance their own larger purposes. In our day-to-day walk with the Lord, we need to be very discerning about the situations we face: We need to ask ourselves, “How can I recognize and cooperate with God’s plan for this situation, and how can I recognize and avoid furthering Satan’s plan?” It seems to me that the author of 1 Chronicles recognized that Satan would try to use any opportunity to damage and destroy David’s kingdom, while the author of 2 Samuel recognized that God was already aware of the pride and confidence in human power that the census expressed and that God was displeased with these things. These two authors bring out these complementary perspectives. And you have added your own perspective, well supported by the text: David’s own pride, which led him to persist in taking the census even after Joab told him the Lord was Israel’s protector, rather than the army, was also responsible. David confessed afterwards that he had sinned.

So what we have ultimately is a conversation within the text, and between the reader and the text, about why particular things happen in the story. And as I see it, that is the level on which inspiration resides. What we are given in the Bible is an inspired conversation that we are invited to join. We can be confident that the answer to our question is in that conversation, although we may discover, as we talk things out with the biblical authors, that we actually have a deeper question than we may have realized at first. Maybe the issue isn’t really, “Which one of these three was responsible for the census: God, Satan, or David?” Maybe the issue is actually, “In a moral universe in which forces of good and evil try to work through the free choices of human moral agents to advance their own purposes, how can I make choices that will not further the purposes of evil, but rather help further God’s purposes and enable me to join in with them?”

Q.  Thank you for your efforts in answering innumerable questions that come across from the believers.  Praise be to God.  Now here is my question. We Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired, revealed word of God. But other religions also say that their scriptures are God-revealed.  For example, Hindus believe that the Vedas/Upanishads are shruti, which means “heard.” They claim they are God-given.  Then which religion’s scriptures really are God-breathed?

It is true that all the major religions claim that their sacred books are divinely inspired.  But there is a significant difference in the way they describe and depict the inspiration process.  This at least allows a person to make a clear choice between varying accounts of the nature of divine action to produce sacred books.

I have not studied Hinduism in great detail, and I don’t feel qualified to discuss it in depth, but at least as I understand it, Hindus believe that the books they consider to be shruti are translations into humanly comprehensible form of the “cosmic sound of truth” as it was “heard” long ago by inspired poets.  In other words, there was first a distinct and discrete divine revelation, and this has now been captured and recorded in these sacred books.

Similarly Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad received divine revelations in Arabic via the angel Gabriel through visions, voices, dreams, etc., and that he then “recited” to others what he heard.  These revelations were later written down in the Qu’ran (which means “recitation”).  Once again the divine revelation is something objectively separate from the sacred book, which essentially records it.  That is, the divine action and the human agency are discrete.

To give one more example, Mormons hold that the Book of Mormon was originally inscribed on golden tablets in a language unattested anywhere else on earth, and that the angel Moroni showed Joseph Smith where the book was buried and taught him how to translate its contents into English.  In this case as well the human role is essentially to transmit the prior, discrete divine revelation; the human agent had no real creative role in shaping the form or content of the sacred book.

By contrast, Christians believe that God inspired the Bible while human authors were in the process of writing to address concerns that had arisen within the believing community.  (This is true even in cases where the written work records a discrete divine revelation, such as the words God spoke to ancient Israel at Mount Sinai:  that theophany is worked into an extended historical narrative whose real aim is to trace the unfolding covenant relationship that readers are being invited to become part of.)  The process of literary composition, in the case of the biblical authors, is really no different from this process as it ordinarily occurs.  This means that the human authors used their God-given abilities to a significant degree to shape not just the form but arguably even the content of the sacred books.  One might say, in fact, that a certain part of the divine revelation we have now in the Judeo-Christian scriptures would be missing if one of these authors had not set out to address a given concern.

Nevertheless (Christians believe), it can be recognized in retrospect that the impulse for them to do this actually came from God, so that there is a synergy between the human enterprise of literary composition and the divine enterprise of inspiration.  Still, the way Christians see their sacred books requires a much more significant and creative human participation in their creation than is the case in other religions.  Perhaps among them Hinduism allows for the greatest creative contribution, on the part of the ancient poets who composed hymns, chants, ritual formulas, etc., based on what they “heard.” But at least as I see it, there is still a contrast between the Hindu belief in a pre-existing “cosmic sound” that was captured in these compositions and the Christian understanding that the Bible was created “along the way,” in a divine-human synergistic process, as the community that was in covenant relationship with God worked out its life, beliefs, and practices.

In other words, I see a distinction between a belief in a divine revelation that exists prior to and independently of a religion’s sacred books, and which is effectively transmitted through them, and a divine revelation that comes into being only as the sacred books themselves take shape within the historical life of the believing community.

This distinction corresponds to and reflects, I believe, an essential distinction between Christianity and other religions.  Christianity is foundationally a creation-affirming, history-affirming faith that leaves a large place for human agency in the outworking of the divine-human relationship.  So while it remains true that all major religions claim that their sacred books are divinely inspired, I would say that Christianity makes this claim in a way that stakes out a unique place for it among world religions.

In my last post I discussed the question of how there could have been light on the first day in the Genesis creation account when the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day.  I suggested that the Genesis author was writing from an observational perspective—that he was describing on the first day the light that appears in the sky before the sun rises and which is still seen on days when the sun doesn’t become visible, believing this light to be independent of the sun.  As I noted, this explanation may answer the original question, but it raises another one:  How can the inspired word of God be expressed through such a limited human perspective?  In the Bible, wasn’t the omniscient God making sure that everything the human authors wrote was fully accurate, scientifically and historically?

My response to this would be that we only have one divinely inspired book, the Bible, so that whatever expectations we might have of such a book, if we want to know what one is really like, we have to look at the only one we have.  And when we do, it  appears that the Bible is indeed written from an observational perspective:  The Genesis creation account as a whole, for example, describes a flat earth under a solid sky, lit by a diffused light independent of the sun. That’s exactly how it appears.

But it’s actually very gracious of God to allow the biblical authors to tell his story from our perspective like this.  Imagine if the Bible had said instead that while the sun might appear to be moving through the sky, it’s actually stationary relative to the earth, and while the ground beneath our feet might not appear to be moving, it’s actually spinning at a thousand miles an hour, creating the impression of the sun’s motion.  People throughout the centuries would have rejected a book that made claims so outlandishly contrary to plain experience!  People would still do the same in many parts of the world today.  So by having the biblical authors express divine truths in observational language, God ensured that the Bible could travel into all different times and places, speaking to all human cultures.  It can still speak to our own scientific culture today if we simply recognize and accept the perspective from which it is written, without being scandalized that this is contrary to the expectations we might have of it.

Indeed, the Bible itself says that it was delivered through human authors.  The implication of this is that while the authors were given divine wisdom and insight, the human limitations on their knowledge were not supernaturally lifted. Peter, for example, describes the inspiration of Scripture in this way:  “Men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21).  He does not say, “God took over the minds of people and used their hands to record His omniscient thoughts.”  Later in that same epistle Peter describes Paul’s letters as “scripture,” but listen to how he describes their composition process: “So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him”—not “through the substitution of the divine mind for his own” (2 Peter 3:15).

Indeed, when we look at Paul’s letters themselves, we find that, even as inspired scripture, they show that there were limitations on Paul’s knowledge, which he himself recognized.  For example, when pleading with the Corinthians to be unified, Paul said he was glad he only baptized Crispus and Gaius, so that no one could say they had been baptized in his name.  “Oh yes,” he adds, “I also baptized the household of Stephanus, but beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.”  This is a place where Paul admits the limitations on his own knowledge of a specific point.

Later in that same epistle, he shows that he was aware of the limitations on his knowledge generally, compared with God’s knowledge:  “For we know only in part, we prophecy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.  . . .  For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Here we see a biblical author, in the very act of writing scripture, contrasting his partial knowledge with the divine omniscience.  We should therefore not conclude that if the Bible is the word of God, it will demonstrate omniscience—among other ways, by transcending phenomenological description of the natural world—and that if it does not behave this way, it cannot be the word of God. Rather, we should marvel at God’s creativity and gracious condescension in allowing his story to be told from our perspective, so that people everywhere and at all times could hear it without impediment from within the framework of their own earthly existence.