INSPIRATION. Noun
formed from Latin and English translations of theopneustos in 2 Tim. 3:16,
which av rendered: ‘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 rsv is no improvement
on av, for theopneustos means 5breathed rather than 5breathed by God—divinely
5spired, rather than 5spired. 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
outbreathing and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God’
(Church Dogmatics, I. 2, E.T. 1956, p. 504)); 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 through Scripture, or of Scripture
as breathing out God, but of God as having breathed out Scripture. Paul’s
words mean, not that Scripture is inspiring (true though this is), but
that Scripture is a divine product, and must be approached and estimated
as such.
The ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’ of God in the OT (Heb.
rûa?, nesamâ) denotes the active outgoing of divine power,
whether in creation (Ps. 33:6; Jb. 33:4; cf. Gn. 1:2; 2:7), preservation
(Jb. 34:14), revelation to and through prophets (Is. 48:16; 61:1; Mi.
3:8; Joel 2:28f.), regeneration (Ezk. 36:27), or judgment (Is. 30:28,
33). The NT reveals this divine ‘breath’ (Gk. pneuma) to be
a Person of the Godhead. God’s ‘breath’ (i.e. 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 rsv or rv in construing
the sentence (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, v. 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 organs of revelation—prophets,
psalmists, wise men and apostles—to speak, as well as to write,
the words of God.
I. The idea of biblical inspiration
According to 2 Tim. 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 the scripture’; see also Je. 36; Is. 8:16–20). 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, p. 103). 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, 1946, p. 122, n. 9). 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. Je. 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 inspiring 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 saith the Lord’ could
be prefixed to each book of Scripture with no less propriety than it
is (359 times, according to Koehler, op.cit., p. 245) 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.
II. 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 (Ex. 34:27f.; Dt. 31:9ff., 24ff.). The truth of
all statements, historical or theological, which 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. OT passages identify the Mosaic
law and the words of the prophets, both spoken and written, with God’s
own speech (cf. 1 Ki. 22:8–16; Ne. 8; Ps. 119; Je. 25:1–13;
36, etc.). NT writers view the OT as a whole as ‘the oracles
of God’ (Rom. 3:2), 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. 1:20f.; cf. 1 Pet. 1:10–12). Christ and his apostles
quote OT texts, not merely as what, e.g., Moses, David or Isaiah said
(see Mk. 7:10; 12:36; 7:6; Rom. 10:5; 11:9; 10:20, etc.), but also
as what God said through these men (see Acts 4:25; 28:25, etc.), or
sometimes simply as what ‘he’ (God) says (e.g. 1 Cor.
6:16; Heb. 8:5, 8), or what the Holy Spirit says (Heb. 3:7; 10:15).
Furthermore, OT statements, not made by God in their contexts, are
quoted as utterances of God (Mt. 19:4f.; Heb. 3:7; Acts 13:34f., citing
Gn. 2:24; Ps. 95:7; Is. 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: Dt. 18:15; 34:10) professed that
they spoke the words of Yahweh, setting before Israel what Yahweh
had shown them (Je. 1:7; Ezk. 2:7; Am. 3:7f.; cf. 1 Ki. 22). Jesus
of Nazareth professed that he spoke words given him by his Father
(Jn. 7:16; 12:49f.). The apostles taught and issued commands in Christ’s
name (2 Thes. 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, Jn. 14:26; 15:26f.; 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, ‘written
with the finger of God’ (Ex. 24:12; 31:18; 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 OT. In effect, they claimed
the Jewish Scriptures as the Christian Bible: a body of literature
bearing prophetic witness to Christ (Jn. 5:39f.; Lk. 24:25ff., 44f.;
2 Cor. 3:14ff.) and designed by God specially 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 OT texts). Christ insisted that what was written in the OT ‘cannot
be broken’ (Jn. 10:35). He had not come, he told the Jews, to
annul the law or the prophets (Mt. 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 for ever, because it is God’s word (Mt. 5:18; Lk.
16:17); the prophecies, particularly those concerning himself, must
be fulfilled, for the same reason (Mt. 26:54; Lk. 22:37; cf. Mk. 8:31;
Lk. 18:31). To Christ and his apostles, the appeal to Scripture was
always decisive (cf. Mt. 4:4, 7, 10; Rom. 12:19; 1 Pet. 1:16, etc.).
The freedom with which NT writers quote the OT (following lxx, 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 OT. (See C. H. Dodd,
According to the Scriptures, 1952; K. Stendahl, The School of St Matthew,
1954; R. V. G. Tasker, The Old Testament in the New Testament2, 1954;
E. E. Ellis, Paul’s Use of the Old Testament, 1957.)
III. 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, 1951, p. 155).
3. Inspiredness is not a quality attaching to corruptions which 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 often) 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.
(*Spirit, Holy Spirit; *Prophecy; *Scripture;
*Authority; *Canon of the Old Testament; *Canon of the New Testament;
*Interpretation, Biblical.)
Bibliography. B. B. Warfield, op.cit. (much of the relevant material is
also in his Biblical Foundations, 1958, chs. 1 and 2); A. Kuyper, Encyelopaedia
of Sacred Theology, E.T. 1899; J. Orr, Revelation and Inspiration, 1910;
C. F. H. Henry (ed.), Revelation and the Bible, 1958; K. Barth, Church
Dogmatics, I, 1, 2 (The Doctrine of the Word of God), E.T. 1936, 1956;
W. Sanday, Inspiration, 1893; R. Abba, The Nature and Authority of the
Bible, 1958; J. W. Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 1972; G. C. Berkouwer,
Holy Scripture, 1975; TDNT 1, pp. 742–773 (s.v grapho), and 4, pp.
1022–1091 (s.v. nomos). j.i.p.
Wood, D. R. W., & Marshall, I. H.
(1996). New Bible dictionary (3rd ed. /) (Pages 507-509). Leicester, England;
Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.