The Inspiration of the Bible
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE
J. I. Packer
The word “inspiration” comes from Latin and English translations of theopneustos in 2 Timothy 3:16, which the KJV renders: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” “Inspired of God” in the RSV is no improvement on the KJV, for theopneustos means out-breathed rather than in-breathed by God—divinely ex-pired, rather than in-spired. In the last century Ewald and Cremer argued that the adjective bore an active sense, “breathing the Spirit,” and Barth appears to agree. He glosses it as meaning not only “given and filled and ruled by the Spirit of God,” but also “actively outbreaking and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God” (Church Dogmatics, 1.2); but B. B. Warfield showed decisively in 1900 that the sense of the word can only be passive. The thought is not of God as breathing out God, but of God as having breathed out Scripture. Paul’s words mean, not that Scripture is inspiring (true though it is), but that Scripture is a divine product, and must be approached and estimated as such.
The “breath” or “spirit” of God in the Old Testament denotes the active outgoing of divine power, whether in creation (Ps. 33:6; Job 33:4; cf. Gen. 1:2; 2:7), preservation (Job 34:14), revelation to and through prophets (Isa. 48:16; 61:1; Mic. 3:8; Joel 2:28ff.), regeneration (Ezek. 36:27), or judgment (Isa. 30:28, 33). The New Testament reveals this divine “breath” (Greek pneuma) to be a Person of the Godhead. God’s “breath” (the Holy Spirit) produced Scripture, as a means to the conveyance of spiritual understanding. Whether we render pasa graphe as “the whole Scripture” or “every text,” and whether we follow the RSV or the RV in construing the sentence (the RV has “every scripture inspired of God is also profitable,” which is a possible translation), Paul’s meaning is clear beyond all doubt. He is affirming that all that comes in the category of Scripture, all that has a place among the “sacred writings” (hiera grammata, 2 Tim. 3:15, RV), just because it is God-breathed, is profitable for the guiding of both faith and life.
On the basis of this Pauline text, English theology regularly uses the word “inspiration” to express the thought of the divine origin and quality of Holy Scripture. Actively, the noun denotes God’s out-breathing operation which produced Scripture: passively, the inspiredness of the Scriptures so produced. The word is also used more generally of the divine influence which enabled the human instruments of revelation—prophets, psalmists, wise men, and apostles—to speak, as well as to write, the words of God.
THE IDEA OF BIBLICAL INSPIRATION
According to 2 Timothy 3:16, what is inspired is precisely the biblical writings. Inspiration is a work of God terminating, not in the men who were to write Scripture (as if, having given them an idea of what to say, God left them to themselves to find a way of saying it), but in the actual written product. It is Scripture—graphe, the written text—that is God-breathed. The essential idea here is that all Scripture has the same character as the prophets’ sermons had, both when preached and when written (cf. 2 Pet. 1:19-21, on the divine origin of every “prophecy of Scripture”). That is to say, Scripture is not only man’s word—the fruit of human thought, premeditation, and art—but also and equally God’s word, spoken through man’s lips or written with man’s pen. In other words, Scripture has a double authorship, and man is only the secondary author; the primary author, through whose initiative, prompting, and enlightenment, and under whose superintendence each human writer did his work, is God the Holy Spirit.
Revelation to the prophets was essentially verbal; often it had a visionary aspect, but even “revelation in visions is also verbal revelation” (L. Koehler, Old Testament Theology, E.T. 1957). Brunner has observed that in “the words of God which the Prophets proclaim as those which they have received directly from God, and have been commissioned to repeat, as they have received them . . . perhaps we may find the closest analogy to the meaning of the theory of verbal inspiration” (Revelation and Reason). Indeed we do; we find not merely an analogy to it, but the paradigm of it; and “theory” is the wrong word to use, for this is just the biblical doctrine itself. Biblical inspiration should be defined in the same theological terms as prophetic inspiration: namely, as the whole process (manifold, no doubt, in its psychological forms, as prophetic inspiration was) whereby God moved those men whom he had chosen and prepared (cf. Jer. 1:5; Gal. 1:15) to write exactly what he wanted written for the communication of saving knowledge to his people, and through them to the world. Biblical inspiration is thus verbal by its very nature, for it is of God-given words that the God-breathed Scriptures consist.
Thus, inspired Scripture is written revelation, just as the prophets’ sermons were spoken revelation. The biblical record of God’s self-disclosure in redemptive history is not merely human testimony to revelation, but is itself revelation. The inspiration of Scripture was an integral part in the revelatory process, for in Scripture God gave the church his saving work in history, and his own authoritative interpretation of its place in his eternal plan. “Thus says the Lord” could be prefixed to each book of Scripture with no less propriety than it is (359 times, according to Koehler) to individual prophetic utterances which Scripture contains. Inspiration, therefore, guarantees the truth of all that the Bible asserts, just as the inspiration of the prophets guaranteed the truth of their representation of the mind of God. (“Truth” here denotes correspondence between the words of man and the thoughts of God, whether in the realm of fact or of meaning.) As truth from God, man’s Creator and rightful King, biblical instruction, like prophetic oracles, carries divine authority.
BIBLICAL PRESENTATION
The idea of canonical Scripture (i.e., of a document or corpus of documents containing a permanent authoritative record of divine revelation) goes back to Moses’ writing of God’s law in the wilderness (Exod. 34:27ff.; Deut. 31:9ff., 24ff.). The truth of all statements, historical or theological, that Scripture makes and their authority as words of God are assumed without question or discussion in both Testaments. The canon grew, but the concept of inspiration, which the idea of canonicity presupposes, was fully developed from the first and is unchanged throughout the Bible. As there presented, it comprises two convictions:
1. The words of Scripture are God’s own words. Old Testament passages identify the Mosaic law and the words of the prophets, both spoken and written, with God’s own speech (cf. 1 Kings 22:8-16; Neh. 8; Ps. 119; Jer. 25:1-13; 36, etc.). New Testament writers view the Old Testament as a whole as “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2, KJV), prophetic in character (Rom. 16:26; cf. 1:2; 3:21), written by men who were moved and taught by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:20; cf. 1 Pet. 1:10-12). Christ and his apostles quote Old Testament texts, not merely as what men like Moses, David, or Isaiah said (see Mark 7:6, 10; 12:36; Rom. 10:5, 20; 11:9;), but also as what God said through these men (see Acts 4:25; 28:25), or sometimes simply as what “he” (God) says (1 Cor. 6:16; Heb. 8:5, 8), or what the Holy Spirit says (Heb. 3:7; 10:15). Furthermore, Old Testament statements, not made by God in their contexts, are quoted as utterances of God (Matt. 19:4ff.; Heb. 3:7; Acts 13:34, citing Gen. 2:24; Ps. 95:7; Isa. 55:2 respectively). Also, Paul refers to God’s promise to Abraham and his threat to Pharaoh, both spoken long before the biblical record of them was written, as words which Scripture spoke to these two men (Gal. 3:8; Rom. 9:17), which shows how completely he equated the statements of Scripture with the utterance of God.
2. Man’s part in the producing of Scripture was merely to transmit what he had received. Psychologically, from the standpoint of form, it is clear that the human writers contributed much to the making of Scripture—historical research, theological meditation, linguistic style, etc.
Each biblical book is in one sense the literary creation of its author. But theologically, from the standpoint of content, the Bible regards the human writers as having contributed nothing, and Scripture as being entirely the creation of God. This conviction is rooted in the self-consciousness of the founders of biblical religion, all of whom claimed to utter—and, in the case of the prophets and apostles, to write—what were, in the most literal sense, the words of another: God himself. The prophets (among whom Moses must be numbered: Deut. 18:15; 34:10) professed that they spoke the words of the Lord, setting before Israel what the Lord had shown them (Jer. 1:7; Ezek. 2:7; Amos 3:7). Jesus of Nazareth professed that he spoke words given him by his Father (John 7:16; 12:49). The apostles taught and issued commands in Christ’s name (2 Thess. 3:6), so claiming his authority and sanction (1 Cor. 14:37), and they maintained that both their matter and their words had been taught them by God’s Spirit (1 Cor. 2:9-13; cf. Christ’s promises, John 14:26; 15:26ff.; 16:13ff.). These are claims to inspiration. In the light of these claims, the evaluation of prophetic and apostolic writings as wholly God’s word, in just the same way in which the two tables of the law, “inscribed by the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18; cf.24:12; 32:16), were wholly God’s word, naturally became part of the biblical faith.
Christ and the apostles bore striking witness to the fact of inspiration by their appeal to the authority of the Old Testament. In effect, they claimed the Jewish Scriptures as the Christian Bible: a body of literature bearing prophetic witness to Christ (Luke 24:25, 44; John 5:39; 2 Cor. 3:14ff.) and designed by God for the instruction of Christian believers (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 2 Tim. 3:14ff.; cf. the exposition of Ps. 95:7-11 in Heb. 3–4, and indeed the whole of Hebrews, in which every major point is made by appeal to Old Testament texts). Christ insisted that what was written in the Old Testament “cannot be broken” (John 10:35). He had not come, he told the Jews, to annul the law or the prophets (Matt. 5:17); if they thought he was doing that, they were mistaken. He had come to do the opposite—to bear witness to the divine authority of both by fulfilling them. The law stands forever because it is God’s word (Matt. 5:18; Luke 16:17); the prophecies, particularly those concerning himself, must be fulfilled for the same reason (Matt. 26:54; Luke 22:37; cf. Mark 8:31; Luke 18:31). To Christ and his apostles, the appeal to Scripture was always decisive (cf. Matt. 4:4, 7, 10; Rom. 12:19; 1 Pet. 1:16).
The freedom with which New Testament writers quote the Old Testament (following the Septuagint, Targums, or an ad hoc rendering of the Hebrew, as best suits them) has been held to show that they did not believe in the inspiredness of the original words. But their interest was not in the words, as such, but in their meaning; and recent study has made it appear that these quotations are interpretative and expository—a mode of quotation well known among the Jews. The writers seek to indicate the true (i.e., Christian) meaning and application of their text by the form in which they cite it. In most cases this meaning has evidently been reached by a strict application of clear-cut theological principles about the relation of Christ and the church to the Old Testament.
THEOLOGICAL STATEMENT
In formulating the biblical idea of inspiration, it is desirable that four negative points be made:
1. The idea is not of mechanical dictation, or automatic writing, or any process which involved the suspending of the action of the human writer’s mind. Such concepts of inspiration are found in the Talmud, Philo, and the Fathers, but not in the Bible. The divine direction and control under which the biblical authors wrote was not a physical or psychological force, and it did not detract from but rather heightened the freedom, spontaneity, and creativeness of their writing.
2. The fact that in inspiration God did not obliterate the personality, style, outlook, and cultural conditioning of his penmen does not mean that his control of them was imperfect, or that they inevitably distorted the truth they had been given to convey in the process of writing it down. B. B. Warfield gently mocks the notion that, when God wanted Paul’s letters written,
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)
3. Inspiredness is not a quality attaching to corruptions that intrude in the course of the transmission of the text, but only to the text as originally produced by the inspired writers. The acknowledgment of biblical inspiration thus makes more urgent the task of meticulous textual criticism, in order to eliminate such corruptions and ascertain what that original text was.
4. The inspiredness of biblical writing is not to be equated with the inspiredness of great literature, not even when (as is often true) the biblical writing is in fact great literature. The biblical idea of inspiration relates not to the literary quality of what is written but to its character as divine revelation in writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics, 1956.
Dodd, C. H. According to the Scriptures, 1952.
Ellis, Earl E. Paul’s Use of the Old Testament, 1957.
Koehler, L. Old Testament Theology, 1957.
Stendahl, K. The School of St. Matthew, 1954.
Tasker, R. V. G. The Old Testament in the New Testament, 1954.
Warfield, B. B. The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 1951.