Biblical inspiration


Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology that the human authors and editors of the Bible were led or influenced by God with the result that their writings may be designated in some sense the word of God.

Etymology

The word inspiration comes by way of Vulgate Latin and the King James English translations of the Greek word θεοπνευστος found in :
When Jerome translated the Greek text of the Bible into the language of the common people of Latium, he translated the Greek theopneustos as divinitus inspirata. The word "inspiration" comes from the Latin noun inspiratio and from the verb inspirare. Inspirare is a compound term resulting from the Latin prefix in and the verb spirare. Inspirare meant originally "to blow into", as for example in the sentence of the Roman poet Ovid: "conchae sonanti inspirare iubet". In classic Roman times, inspirare had already come to mean "to breathe deeply" and assumed also the figurative sense of "to instill in the heart or in the mind of someone". In Christian theology, the Latin word inspirare was already used by some Church Fathers in the first centuries to translate the Greek term pnéo.
The Church Fathers often referred to writings other than the documents that formed or would form the biblical canon as "inspired". Some modern English translations opt for "God-breathed" or "breathed out by God" and avoid "inspiration" altogether, since its most literal meaning, unlike its Latin root, leans toward breathing in instead of breathing out.

Basis

The Bible contains many passages in which the authors claim divine inspiration for their message or report the effects of such inspiration on others. 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 of divine origin by prefacing the revelation using the following phrase: "Thus says the LORD". 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". The Second Epistle of Peter also implies that Paul's writings are inspired
Many Christians cite a verse in Paul's letter to Timothy, 2 Timothy 3:16-17 as evidence that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable..." Here St. Paul may be referring to the Old Testament, since the scriptures have been known by Timothy from "infancy". Others offer an alternative reading for the passage; for example, theologian C. H. Dodd suggests that it "is probably to be rendered" as: "Every inspired scripture is also useful..." A similar translation appears in the New English Bible, in the Revised English Bible, and in the New Revised Standard Version. The Latin Vulgate can be so read. Yet others defend the "traditional" interpretation; Daniel B. Wallace calls the alternative "probably not the best translation."

Views

A 2011 Gallup survey reports, "A 49% plurality of Americans say the Bible is the inspired word of God but that it should not be taken literally, consistently the most common view in Gallup's nearly 40-year history of this question."
Theories seeing only parts of the Bible as inspired
meet with insistent emphasis on plenary inspiration on the part of its proponents.

Roman Catholic

The Roman Catholic Church holds the Bible as inspired by God, but does not view God as the direct author of the Bible, in the sense that he does not put a 'ready-made' book in the mind of the inspired person.
Pope Benedict XVI gave the following explanation in 2007:

The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject — the pilgrim people of God — and lives within this same subject....he individual author or group of authors... are not autonomous... they form part of... the "people of God,"... the deeper "author" of the Scriptures....ikewise, this people... knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who — through men and their humanity — is at the deepest level the one speaking.

The Catholic view of Biblical inspiration stems from the belief in the historical authenticity of the foundation of an indefectible church, and Jesus' grant of teaching authority to that church through his apostles. Because the church designated the canon through its tradition, its authority to identify the inspired books is accepted, rather than any self-contained or inherent claims of the Scriptures themselves.

Protestant

According to Frederic Farrar, Martin Luther did not understand inspiration to mean that the scriptures were dictated in a purely mechanical manner. Instead, Luther "held that they were not dictated by the Holy Spirit, but that His illumination produced in the minds of their writers the knowledge of salvation, so that divine truth had been expressed in human form, and the knowledge of God had become a personal possession of man. The actual writing was a human not a supernatural act." John Calvin also rejected the verbal dictation theory.
Although Luther did not believe God physically penned the Bible, he asserted that "He should not doubt that however simple they may seem, these are the very words, deeds, judgments, and history of the high majesty and wisdom of God."
The doctrine of sola Scriptura was one of the central teachings during the Protestant Reformation. It teaches that the Bible is the final authority for moral, spiritual, and for some, civil matters. As Luther said, "The true rule is this: God's Word shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel can do so."

Evangelical

view the Bible as a genuinely human product, but one superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the authors' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style. This divine involvement, they say, allowed the biblical writers to communicate without corrupting God's own message both to the immediate recipients of the writings and to those who would come after. Some Evangelicals have labelled the conservative or traditional view as "verbal, plenary inspiration of the original manuscripts", by which they mean that each word was meaningfully chosen under the superintendence of God.
Evangelicals acknowledge the existence of textual variations between biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches. They see these as complementary, not contradictory, and explain them as the differing viewpoints of different authors. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew was intended to communicate the Gospel to Jews, the Gospel of Luke to Greeks, and the Gospel of Mark to Romans. Evangelical apologists such as John W. Haley in his book "Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible" and Norman Geisler in "When Critics Ask" have proposed answers to hundreds of claimed contradictions. Some discrepancies are accounted for by changes from the autographa that have been introduced in the copying process, either deliberately or accidentally.
Many Evangelicals consider biblical inerrancy or biblical infallibility to be the necessary consequence of the Bible's doctrine of inspiration.
Three basic approaches to inspiration are often described when the evangelical approach to scripture is discussed:
As Lutherans confess in the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets". The Apology of the Augsburg Confession identifies Holy Scripture with the Word of God and calls the Holy Spirit the author of the Bible.
Criticism
At times, the verbal plenary inspiration theory has been criticized as tending toward a dictation theory of inspiration, where God speaks and a human records his words. C. H. Dodd wrote:

The theory which is commonly described as that of "verbal inspiration" is fairly precise. It maintains that the entire corpus of Scripture consists of writings every word of which was directly "dictated" by the Deity... They consequently convey absolute truth with no trace of error or relativity... No attempt will be made here to formulate an alternative definition of inspiration... That I believe to be a false method. There is indeed no question about the original implications of the term: for primitive religious thought the "inspired" person was under the control of a supernatural influence which inhibited the use of his normal faculties.

In the New American Commentary by T.D. Lea and H.P. Griffen, it was written, "o respected Evangelicals maintain that God dictated the words of Scripture."
The Evangelical position has been criticized as being circular by non-Christians and as well as Christians such as Catholic and Orthodox authors, who accept the doctrine of biblical inspiration but reject the Protestant arguments in favor of it. These critics claim that the Bible can only be used to prove doctrines of biblical inspiration if the doctrine is assumed to begin with. Some defenders of the evangelical doctrine such as B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge, however, moved away from such circular arguments and "committed themselves to the legitimacy of external verification" to inductively prove the doctrine, though they placed some restrictions on the evidences that could be considered.
Others such as Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and John Frame have accepted circularity as inevitable in the ultimate presuppositions of any system and seek instead to prove the validity of their position by transcendental arguments related to consistency.

Modernist Christianity

The typical view within Liberal Christianity and Progressive Christianity rejects the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired in a unique way. Some advocates of higher criticism who espouse this view even go so far as to regard the Bible as purely a product of human invention. However, most form critics, such as Rudolf Bultmann and Walter Brueggemann, still regard the Bible as a sacred text, just not a text that communicates the unaltered word of God. They see it instead as true, divinely inspired theology mixed with foreign elements that can sometimes be inconsistent with the overarching messages found in Scripture and that have discernible roots in history, mythology, or ancient cultural/cultic practices.

Neo-orthodox

The Neo-orthodox doctrine of inspiration views the Bible as "the words of God" but not "the Word of God". It is only when one reads the text that it becomes the word of God to the reader. 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. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner were primary advocates of this approach.