Scripture

The doctrine of inspiration stands on a small number of verses and two in particular, and it is worth knowing how small the base is before building on it. 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness. 2 Peter 1:21 says that no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Between them those two verses give an origin and a manner, and neither gives a mechanism.

Theopneustos, the word the BSB renders 'God-breathed' (literally, breathed out by God), occurs once in the New Testament and is rare in Greek generally. It is a compound of the word for God and the word for breath or wind, and a great deal has been argued about whether it is passive, meaning that scripture is the product of God's breathing, or active, meaning that scripture is filled with the divine Spirit and so breathes God out upon the reader. The German lexicographer Hermann Cremer argued for the active sense in the late nineteenth century; B. B. Warfield answered him at length in an essay of 1900 on God-inspired scripture, arguing from the pattern of similar compounds that the sense is passive and that the word says where scripture came from rather than what it does to you. Warfield's reading is now the majority one, and the BSB and most modern versions follow it. It is not unanimous, and the active reading was not an evasion; it was a lexical argument.

There is a second and more consequential question about the same verse. The Greek has no verb in this clause, so the translator has to supply one, and where it goes decides the sense. The Greek can be read predicatively, as the BSB does, giving 'All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful'; or attributively, which is how the Revised Version of 1881 printed it, giving 'every scripture inspired by God is also profitable'. On the second reading the sentence does not assert that all scripture is inspired; it says what inspired scripture is good for. Most modern translations and commentators take the first, partly because the second leaves the adjective doing odd work and partly because Paul has just called the writings sacred in verse 15. The BSB prints the first reading with no footnote at the verse to say that another construction is possible, so a student reading only the BSB would never learn of it. You should know the second exists, because a student who learns that a doctrine has a textual question at its foundation from an opponent rather than from his teacher has been badly served.

Two verses cannot carry a doctrine alone, and they do not have to. The wider pattern is what does the work. 2 Samuel 23:2 has David saying the Spirit of the LORD spoke through him, his word on his tongue. Jeremiah 1:9 has God putting words in the prophet's mouth. Acts 4:25 introduces Psalm 2 as spoken by God through the mouth of David. Hebrews 3:7 introduces Psalm 95 with 'as the Holy Spirit says', and Hebrews 1:5 to 13 strings together seven Old Testament quotations with God as the speaker of all of them. Paul tells the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 that they accepted his message not as the word of men but as it truly is, the word of God. And 2 Peter 3:15-16 puts Paul's letters in the same category as the other Scriptures. The doctrine is an inference from a pattern, which is what most doctrines are.

Nobody disputes that scripture is somehow from God and somehow from human beings. The models differ over how the two relate, and they should be stated by their own defenders rather than by their opponents, which in this area almost never happens.

Dictation is the view that God supplied the words and the writer wrote them down. It is worth being careful here, because the accusation of holding it is far commoner than the position. The Council of Trent, in its decree on the canonical scriptures of 8 April 1546, says the books were written with the Holy Spirit dictating, and that Latin phrase carried a wider sense than the English word now does, closer to composing or prompting than to mechanical transcription. Something close to a strict verbal view really was held by some Protestant scholastics, and the Swiss Formula of Consensus of 1675 went so far as to treat even the vowel points of the Hebrew text as inspired, which was a response to Catholic arguments from the instability of the Hebrew text. Where dictation is genuinely at home is with the prophetic oracle, and the Bible itself contains dictated passages: Jeremiah 36 has Baruch writing at Jeremiah's dictation, and the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 are given as words to be written. What the model cannot accommodate is Luke's preface, or Paul's aside in 1 Corinthians 1:16 that he cannot remember whom else he baptised.

Verbal plenary inspiration is the position of most conservative Protestants, and it is not dictation. Verbal means the words rather than only the ideas are involved; plenary means all of scripture rather than parts of it. Its defenders argue from the way the New Testament presses individual words, as in Matthew 22:32 where the argument turns on the present tense of 'I am the God of Abraham', or Galatians 3:16 where it turns on a singular noun. What it does not say is that the writers were passive. Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck used the word organic for the same doctrine: God prepared the writer, his family, his language, his temperament and his sources, so that when he wrote freely out of himself he wrote what God intended. Warfield's term for the same idea was confluence, two streams running as one. The Catholic tradition reaches a similar structure through Aquinas: God is the principal author and the human writer a true author working as a free instrument, which is why Dei Verbum can say in section 11 that the writers, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which God wanted.

Accommodation is not an alternative to those models so much as a claim about the manner of all divine speech, and it is very old. John Chrysostom used the word condescension, meaning God's stooping to human capacity, and read the anthropomorphic language of scripture that way. Calvin used the image of a nurse lisping to an infant and said plainly that God accommodates himself to our small measure. So far this is uncontroversial and is held across the traditions. The argument begins where the principle is extended: if God accommodated his speech to the language of the ancient world, did he also accommodate it to that world's picture of the world? Kenton Sparks and Peter Enns have argued in different ways that he did, and that scripture's cosmology, its historiography and its legal forms are those of its own setting rather than corrections of them. Enns proposed an incarnational analogy: as Christ is fully God and fully man, scripture is fully divine and fully a product of its culture, and a reader who flinches at the second half is closer to docetism than he thinks. That proposal cost Enns his post at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008, which tells you how live the argument is. Critics, among them D. A. Carson and G. K. Beale, reply that the analogy proves too much, since Christ's humanity was sinless and the parallel therefore gives no licence for error, and that accommodation used this way becomes a name for whatever the interpreter has already decided scripture cannot be asserting.

One more model deserves accurate statement rather than the caricature it usually gets. Karl Barth held that scripture is a genuinely human witness to revelation which becomes the word of God to the church as God freely speaks through it again. His critics, including many who admire him, say this makes the Bible's authority intermittent and puts the event of hearing above the text. His defenders answer that he was refusing to make God's speech a property the church owns and can control, that he preached from the text every week of his working life, and that nobody who reads the Church Dogmatics can accuse him of taking scripture lightly. You do not have to agree with him to state him fairly, and stating him fairly is a test this lesson is setting you.

Here the church is genuinely divided, and the division runs inside traditions as much as between them. Do not expect this section to close.

The inerrancy position received its most careful modern statement at a summit convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in Chicago in October 1978, whose statement was signed by close to three hundred evangelical scholars. Read it before you argue about it, because it is far more qualified than its reputation. Article Ten restricts inspiration strictly to the autographic text, while denying that any essential element of the faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. Article Twelve affirms that scripture in its entirety is inerrant, and denies that inerrancy may be limited to spiritual, religious or redemptive themes to the exclusion of assertions in history and science. And Article Thirteen supplies the distinction that most of the argument turns on: it denies that it is proper to evaluate scripture by standards of truth and error alien to its usage or purpose, and denies that inerrancy is negated by phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations. The accompanying exposition says that scripture is inerrant not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed. Inerrancy, on this account, is truthfulness measured against what the text is actually asserting, and a good deal of popular criticism of the doctrine is aimed at a version the statement itself denies.

The infallibility position holds that scripture is entirely trustworthy and will not fail in what it was given for, namely faith and practice, while declining to extend the claim to incidental matters of history, geography or natural description. Its defenders insist this is not a lower view but a differently focused one. G. C. Berkouwer, in Holy Scripture, argued that the doctrine of scripture must be drawn from scripture's own purpose, which it states as making us wise for salvation, and that a doctrine built instead on an abstract notion of what a divine book must be like is speculative. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 used the careful phrase 'without error in all that it affirms', which many British and Commonwealth evangelicals have preferred ever since, and Fuller Theological Seminary revised its statement of faith in this direction in 1972. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim argued in 1979 that the church's main tradition had always been infallibilist in this sense and that strict inerrancy was an innovation of nineteenth-century Princeton, above all in the 1881 essay on inspiration by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield. Their historical thesis was attacked in detail by John Woodbridge in 1982, who assembled patristic, medieval and Reformation material asserting scripture's truthfulness without qualification, including Augustine's declaration in his eighty-second letter to Jerome that he holds the canonical authors alone to have been entirely free from error. The historical argument is generally reckoned to have gone against Rogers and McKim; the theological question they raised is still open, since showing that a view is old does not show it is right.

Both positions are criticised from outside, and the criticism should be stated rather than skipped. James Barr's Fundamentalism of 1977 argued that the harmonising required to sustain either position distorts the texts in practice, that the difficulties are handled by a case-by-case ingenuity no historian would accept elsewhere, and that appealing to lost autographs makes the claim unfalsifiable. The reply from inerrantists is that the autograph restriction is not an escape hatch but a consequence of taking textual criticism seriously, and that the Chicago Statement itself insists the text can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. The reply from infallibilists is that their position is precisely designed to avoid the harmonising, which is why they draw the line where they do. Barr's further charge, that neither position is held consistently, is one each side turns on the other.

Now the phenomena, which is where the argument is actually fought, and the honest move is to sort them rather than pile them up. Some are textual: the ages of kings differ between Kings and Chronicles in ways that look like copying, and the BSB footnote at 2 Chronicles 36:9 tells you so. Some are about precision: the round numbers in the census lists, the approximate measurements of the bronze sea in 1 Kings 7:23, the sun's rising and setting. Some are about selection and arrangement: the Gospels order episodes differently, and Matthew and Luke give different genealogies, and John dates the temple cleansing at the beginning where the others have it at the end. Some are about citation: Matthew 27:9 credits Jeremiah with words drawn mostly from Zechariah 11, and Mark 2:26 has Abiathar where 1 Samuel 21 has Ahimelech. Some are about the writers' picture of nature: Mark 4:31 calls the mustard seed the smallest of all seeds sown upon the earth, which is the way a Galilean farmer talks and not the way a botanist does. Each position has resources for most of these and admits difficulty over some. Inerrantists handle most of them through Article Thirteen, and the honest ones concede that a residue remains unresolved, which Article Fourteen anticipates by denying that unresolved discrepancies vitiate the Bible's truth claims. Infallibilists handle them by declining to make the claim in the first place, and the honest ones concede that the line between what scripture affirms and what it merely uses is drawn by the interpreter and can be moved when convenient. Neither concession destroys the position that makes it. Both are the price of the position, and a teacher who hides the price of his own view while advertising the other's has stopped teaching.

The classical Protestant handbooks give scripture four attributes, and they are worth knowing precisely, because each is stated far more modestly in the confessions than in popular use.

Authority means that scripture binds because of what it is and not because the church says so. The Westminster Confession puts it at 1.4: the authority of scripture depends wholly upon God, its author, and therefore it is to be received because it is the word of God. Note what it does not say: it does not say the church has no role in recognising scripture, and section 1.5 of the same confession credits the testimony of the church as a motive that may move us to a high esteem of scripture, before locating full persuasion in the inward work of the Holy Spirit.

Sufficiency means that scripture contains everything necessary for salvation and for the faith and life God requires, so that nothing further need be added. The Westminster formula at 1.6 is careful and is regularly quoted without its second half: the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture. Good and necessary consequence is doing heavy work in that sentence, and the same section goes on to allow for circumstances of worship and government ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence. Sufficiency is a claim about what is necessary, not a claim that the Bible answers every question.

Clarity, or perspicuity, means that what must be known for salvation is plain enough in scripture that an ordinary reader using ordinary means can grasp it. Again the confessional form at 1.7 is modest: not all things are alike plain, nor alike clear to all, but those things necessary to be known and believed for salvation are so clearly propounded somewhere in scripture that the unlearned as well as the learned may attain a sufficient understanding of them. That is a much smaller claim than the one usually attacked and the one usually asserted. The most serious objection to it is empirical and is worth feeling: sincere readers using ordinary means have reached incompatible conclusions for five centuries, which is exactly the fact the next lesson is about.

Necessity means that scripture is needed, because the knowledge of God available without it does not reach salvation. This is the doctrine of the previous lesson restated from the other side, and it rests on the same texts: Romans 10:14-17 on faith coming by hearing, 1 Corinthians 1:21 on the world not knowing God through wisdom. Taken together, the four attributes say that scripture is enough, is clear about what matters, is needed, and binds. Taken apart, each is a smaller claim than the slogan built on it, and a student who can quote the confession is better armed than one who can only quote the slogan.

Protestant descriptions of the Catholic and Orthodox doctrines of scripture are usually descriptions of what those churches say about tradition, which is a different subject and belongs to the next lesson. Set that aside for a moment and let each say what it holds about the book itself.

The Catholic doctrine of inspiration is at least as strong as any Protestant one and was defined earlier. Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 1893 taught that inspiration cannot be restricted to certain parts of scripture, and that it is wrong to say the sacred writer erred, since inspiration excludes error by its very nature. Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943 urged Catholic scholars to study the literary forms of the ancient Near East, on the ground that what the writer asserts can only be determined once you know what kind of writing he is doing, which is a move the Chicago Statement would later make in its own idiom. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum, promulgated on 18 November 1965, teaches in section 11 that the books of scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Catholic theologians have argued since 1965 about whether that final clause restricts inerrancy to matters bearing on salvation or simply names the purpose for which the whole is true, and the Pontifical Biblical Commission returned to the question in a document of 2014. So the debate you met in section 3 has its Catholic form too, which is worth knowing before assuming that inerrancy is a Protestant argument.

What is distinctive in the Catholic account is where scripture lives. Dei Verbum says in section 21 that the church has always venerated the divine scriptures as she venerates the body of the Lord, and the analogy is deliberate: the word is received at the altar and in the lectionary before it is studied at a desk. The same document ends by urging all the faithful to frequent reading of the scriptures and repeating Jerome's line that ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. A Protestant who was taught that the Catholic Church discourages Bible reading should read Dei Verbum 22 and 25 before repeating it.

The Orthodox account is not the Catholic one with the magisterium removed, and it will be misunderstood if it is filed that way. The starting point is that scripture is the church's book: the same Spirit who inspired the writers is the Spirit who gathers, reads and understands them in the assembly, so scripture is not an external authority that the church submits to from outside, but the written form of the church's own life in the Spirit. Georges Florovsky put the consequence sharply, that scripture is never an independent instance standing over against the community, because it was never given apart from it. The Orthodox have no conciliar definition of inspiration comparable to Dei Filius or Dei Verbum and have generally not wanted one, partly because the categories in which the Western argument is conducted, error and precision and autographs, are held to be juridical categories imported into a relationship that is not juridical. The Greek text used in worship and cited by the Fathers is the Septuagint, which gives the Orthodox Old Testament a different shape and a different textual base from the Protestant one, a fact that matters as soon as a discussion of inerrancy asks which text is meant.

The Orthodox emphasis falls on how scripture is rightly read rather than on how it was produced. It is read in the Liturgy, in an assembly, framed by prayer and by the hymnography that interprets it, and the reader is expected to be changed by the reading rather than only informed. The Fathers are the standing witness to how the church has heard the text, not a second source of information. Where a Protestant asks what guarantees the text, an Orthodox theologian is more likely to ask what makes a reader able to hear it, and to answer with ascesis, repentance and the common life of the church. That is a real difference of question and not merely of answer, and it is the reason the two traditions so often talk past each other on this subject.

What all three traditions hold in common is larger than the disputes and is worth stating before the disputes are taken up in the next lesson. Scripture is from God. It comes to us through human beings who were genuinely writing, not dissolved into instruments. It is the church's settled and public norm rather than a private possession. It is given to be obeyed and not only to be analysed. And it is sufficient for what God gave it to do. What the next lesson takes up is the question none of that settles, which is who decides what it means when Christians disagree.