Biblical inspiration

Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology concerned with the divine origin of the Bible and what the Bible teaches about itself.

Views of the doctrine

Those Christians who receive the Bible as authoritative generally accept that the Bible is "breathed out by God" in some sense because the Bible explicitly states this. However, different groups understand the meaning and details of inspiration in different ways.

Related Topics:
Christian - God

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Basis for the doctrine

The proof that a doctrine of divine inspiration is taught by the Bible itself is ample. Besides the direct accounts of written revelation such as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, the Prophets of the Old Testament frequently claimed that their message was divine by the formula "Thus says the LORD" (for example, I Kings 12:22-24; I Chronicles 17:3-4; Jeremiah 35:13; Ezekiel 2:4; Zechariah 7:9; etc.). In the New Testament, Jesus treats the Old Testament as authoritative and says it "cannot be broken" (John 10:34-36), and the Second Epistle of Peter claims that "no prophecy of Scripture...was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:20-21). That epistle also claims divine authority for the Apostles (3:2) and includes Paul's letters as being counted with the Scriptures (3:16).

Related Topics:
Revelation - Moses - Ten Commandments - Prophets - Old Testament - New Testament - Jesus - Second Epistle of Peter - Apostle

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In addition, theological conservatives sometimes argue that Biblical inspiration can be corroborated by examining the weight of the Bible's moral teaching and its prophecies about the future and their fulfillment.

Related Topics:
Moral - Prophecies

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The Conservative view

Most conservative Christians accept the Bible's statements about itself. At times, the traditional view of the Bible has been defended as implying that the Bible is "inerrant in the original manuscripts (or "autographa")", while other traditionalists have sought to guard against the inference that the Bible would be read as intended if measured by modern scientific values, ways of describing things, or conventions of precision, and prefer the terminology of "Biblical infallibility". On particular issues, these preferences of description (although superficially synonomous) represent sharp disagreements about particular approaches to interpretation.

Related Topics:
Inerrant - Manuscript - Biblical infallibility

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Some evangelical Protestants have sought to characterize the conservative or traditional view as "verbal, plenary inspiration" in the original manuscripts, by which they mean that every word (not just the over-arching ideas or concepts) is meaningfully chosen under the superintendence of God. These Christians acknowledge that there is textual variation, some of which is accounted for by deviations from the autographa. In other cases two Biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches are reported to somewhat different effect, and in different words, which this view accounts for by holding that the deviations are also inspired by God. At times, this view has been criticized as tending toward a "dictation theory of inspiration" where God speaks and a human records his words, but the traditional view has always been distinguished from the dictation theory, which none of the parties regard as orthodox. Instead, these Christians argue that the Bible is a truly human product and its creation was superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the authors' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style. This divine involvement, it is suggested, allowed the biblical writers to reveal God's own message to the immediate recipients of the writings and to those who would come later, communicating God's message without corrupting it.

Related Topics:
Orthodox - Holy Spirit

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The New Testament Scriptures quote, paraphrase, and refer to other works including other New Testament documents, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha), and the Greek writers Aratus, Epimenides, Menander, and perhaps Philo. The traditional doctrine, however, does not teach that these referenced works were also necessarily inspired, though it does teach that their use and application is.

Related Topics:
Scriptures - Septuagint - Apocrypha - Aratus - Epimenides - Menander - Philo

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The Modernist view

The Modernist (or liberal) doctrine of inspiration typically rejects the Bible's own claims for itself and thus the traditional doctrine. Instead, in this view, other authorities must be established and utilized to determine the validity and truthfulness of the Bible. One such approach is that of Rudolf Bultmann who argued that Christians must seek to "demythologize" the Bible by removing the layers of myth to get to the underlying historical facts; so that belief in the historical Jesus can be a very different thing, than belief in the Jesus of Christian theology.

Related Topics:
Modernist - Liberal - Rudolf Bultmann - Myth - Historical Jesus - Jesus

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The Neo-orthodox doctrine

The Neo-orthodox doctrine of inspiration is summarized by saying that the Bible is "the word of God" but not "the words of God." It is only when one reads the text that it becomes the word of God to him or her. This view is a reaction to the Modernist doctrine, which, Neo-orthodox proponents argue, eroded the value and significance of the Christian faith, and simultaneously a rejection of the idea of textual inerrancy. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth was a primary figure in the Neo-orthodox movement.

Related Topics:
Neo-orthodox - Karl Barth

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