Biblical inspiration

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.[12]

Pope Benedict XVI gave the following (non-dogmatic) 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. ...[T]he individual author or group of authors ... are not autonomous ... they form part of ... the "people of God," ... the deeper "author" of the Scriptures. ...[L]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. [13]

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.[14][15][12]

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."[16] John Calvin also rejected the verbal dictation theory.[17]

Although Luther did not believe God physically penned the Bible, he asserted that "He [the pious Christian] should not doubt that however simple they [the Scriptures] may seem, these are the very words, deeds, judgments, and history of the high majesty and wisdom of God."[18]

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."[19]

Evangelicals 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 (not just the overarching ideas or concepts) 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"[20] and Norman Geisler in "When Critics Ask"[21] have proposed answers to hundreds of claimed contradictions. Some discrepancies are accounted for by changes from the autographa (the original manuscripts) 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 (see, for example, the Westminster Confession of Faith or the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy).

Three basic approaches to inspiration are often described when the evangelical approach to scripture is discussed:[22]^:239

• Verbal dictation theory: The dictation theory claims that God dictated the books of the Bible word by word, suggesting the authors were no more than tools used to communicate God's precisely intended message.[22]
• Verbal plenary inspiration: This view gives a greater role to the human writers of the Bible while maintaining a belief that God preserved the integrity of the words of the Bible. The effect of inspiration was to move the authors so as to produce the words God wanted.[22] In this view the human writers' "individual backgrounds, personal traits, and literary styles were authentically theirs, but had been providentially prepared by God for use as his instrument in producing Scripture."[23] However, the theory nuances that "God so mysteriously superintended the process that every word written was also the exact word he wanted to be written—free from all error."[24]
• Intuition theory: The authors of the Scriptures were merely wise men, so the Bible is inspired by advanced human insight.[25]
• Partial inspiration: the Bible is infallible in matters of faith and practice/morals, yet it could have errors in history or science (e.g. the Big Bang could be true, and the Genesis creation account is more allegorical than historical).[25]
• Dynamic inspiration: The thoughts contained in the Bible are inspired, but the words used were left to the individual writers.[22] This suggests the underlying message of the Scriptures are inspired, while the exact wording is dynamic.

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[26] and calls the Holy Spirit the author of the Bible.[27]

At times, the verbal plenary inspiration theory has been criticized as tending toward a dictation theory of inspiration,[28] 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 (presumably in the original autographs, forever inaccessible to us) 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.[28]

In the New American Commentary by T.D. Lea and H.P. Griffen, it was written, "[n]o respected Evangelicals maintain that God dictated the words of Scripture."[22]

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.[14] 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.[29] 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.

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 (1884-1976) and Walter Brueggemann (1933- ), 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.

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 (1886-1968) and Emil Brunner (1889-1966) were primary advocates of this approach.