http://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/stewart.cfm?id=1248
I’m always surprised at how often I disagree with sites like this. Of course, most of what they say I agree with, but when it comes to critiquing various views deemed “liberal” or “heretical” contributing authors often fall short in many of their criticisms. That being said I could be misunderstanding them, so keep in mind that I am trying to be as charitable as possible in this rebuttle… of their rebuttle.
Here is blueletter’s definition of the dynamic view of inspiration;
“God initially divinely inspired the writers of Scripture but left them to use their own words and expressions in describing the truth that He revealed to them. Divine inspiration only occurred at that initial moment when God communicated to the authors of Scripture.”
On a dynamic view how do we know which part to believe?
"If divine inspiration only occurred at the moment of initial contact between God and the writer, and dealt with their thoughts and not their words, then how can we be certain they chose the right words? How are we able to discern between the writer's own fallible opinions and God's thoughts? Why should we have confidence in the Bible if the forty plus authors were left to their own particular way of stating God's truth as it had initially been revealed to them? Why should we assume their final product was always correct on every matter? Ultimately we cannot if we hold this viewpoint.”
The argument;
It seems that the author is pointing to a number of difficulties here. 1) if God only gave the authors of the Bible ideas to put in their own words and did not facilitate their expression of such ideas then there is no guarantee that the authors accurately expressed them the way God intended. 2) If the Bible only contains divine ideas how do we determine which ideas are human and which are divine? Furthermore it also seems possible that there are human ideas that are used to support divine ideas in which case it would also be impossible to determine which ideas are human and which are divine.
Critique;
I want to make it known from the outset that I am not necessarily defending a strictly dynamic view of Inspiration. My aim is to show that the dichotomy between verbal plenary and dynamic views of inspiration is invalid. That being said I believe the view I present is most consistent with a dynamic view of inspiration.
Perhaps the central problem with these claims is that they ignore the meticulous and reliable analysis involved in translation along with linguistic and contextual studies of the Biblical text. While there is much debate about what the Bible teaches one can fairly say that the core themes have been nailed out of the Biblical text along with mountains of details in the claims and teachings of the Bible. This is my central claim; The Bible should not be viewed as a set of ideas about God and man, but a set of claims. Given this any debate about which claims are of human or divine origin become mute. One can avoid the problem altogether by simply pointing out that we should affirm everything the Bible affirms to be true. But here’s the interesting part, when viewed as a set of claims the crucial question involved in Biblical analysis is what the text is claiming in a certain passage or verse? This preserves a central tenant in interpretation, to keep original intent in view. When asking what claims a text is making it is necessary to see what claims the author is making. How is their culture influencing them? What genre of literature is this text? What is the setting of the text?
Some clarifications;
Some might say that my view isn’t like the dynamic view at all in that it doesn’t allow one to believe the Bible err’s in its historical claims. Actually I think it does. This is because in our culture we view texts as a set of propositions, where each sentence that is not a question expresses a simple direct claim about its subject. This is not necessarily the case in other cultures however, particularly those that can be called a “high context” culture where the central claims are often more implicit than they are explicit. This means that informal literary structures such as figures of speech or hyperbole play a larger role in the Bible than they do in modern english texts. Whats more there are quite a few other cultural assumptions that we take for granted in interpreting the Bible. For example; we like to view time as a measurable chronological abstract resource, we expect all stories to follow a strict timeline of events. In the Biblical world this isn’t the case, before the advent of watches and clocks, time was viewed as a fluid constant of reality. Chronology was not stressed as much as it is in Western culture today. Often ancient authors used the order of events to express deeper morals and teachings of the story. So this fact alone allows for the interpretation that the 4 gospels do technically err in their chronology of various events if we view the text from a 21st century perspective, but from the authors perspective, their emphasis is on what Jesus was like, what He was trying to accomplish and how He saw the world. Thus they did not care about the exact order of events in at least some cases, given this can we really say they claimed a chronological order of events if that was not their intention?
The Entire Process is Divinely Inspired.
"The process of divine inspiration did not end with the initial contact between God and the authors of Scripture. It continued throughout their composition of the work until the biblical book was finished.”
Eh I have to call foul on this one, I can’t think of a version of this argument that isn’t circular in its reasoning. This is especially true since the author gives no biblical or non-biblical arguments to support this assertion. In addition I see no inconsistency between my view and the assertion that inspiration was a process. It seems perfectly consistent to propose that the authors of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit what claims to make in the text while they were writing it. One does not have to view inspiration as strictly involving the wording of the text in order to view it as a process.
The View Confuses Inspiration with Illumination
"This view also confuses inspiration and illumination. The emphasis on Scripture is on divinely inspired words, not divinely inspired writers. It is not the process, but rather the end product that is stressed. It is all Scripture that is God-breathed, not all writers.”
Critique;
Simple enough the writers are not inspired the words are. There is no indication from scripture that the apostles or prophets of old were “upgraded” so to speak in order to adequately express divine ideas. That being said, it would seem that if inspiration did reside in the author initially then that would solve the problem of guaranteeing accurate transmission of divine ideas to the text as God would obviously be capable of enlightening men in a way sufficient to record His revelation in the way He intended.
In addition, on my view this critique doesn’t even apply as its the claims of scripture that are inspired and not the people nor the words specifically.
Does 2 Timothy 3:16-17 teach a strictly Plenary Verbal view of inspiration?
I don’t think so. I can’t think of any reason why the concept of all scripture being theopneustos (God Breathed) requires one to believe that every single word is divinely inspired or literally breathed out by God. Such a view seems to border a mechanical dictation view. It seems a better view of “God breathed” is simply to say that all of scripture came from God, or God is the ultimate source of all scripture.
Questions about Plenary Verbal Inspiration;
If as blueletterbible claims here is true, that its the wording that is inspired and not simply the words, then how is it possible that two entirely different translation such as the NLV and the NASB both be inspired if they both contain different wordings of the text? Is one more inspired than the other? I understand that those of a verbal plenary view of inspiration believe that only the original text is truly word for word from God but even so its still the case that translations such as NASB are more true to the original text (being more of a word for word translation) than those like the Message or the NLT.
One article writes; "So if you REALLY want to know God's Word, you have to learn and study it in the original languages. Only a few pastors in the world teach Bible in the original languages to their congregations, but such pastors DO exist. So you can use 1Jn1:9, ask Father in Son's name to direct you to the pastor He wants for you. Never Never Never underestimate God's Power. Your IQ is of no importance, high or low. JUST BE WILLING TO LEARN.” This seems highly problematic to me. What is the point of affirming that the Bible is God’s word if the translations we have can never be truly and completely the word of God? If this is truly the view of those who defend V.P.T. then why do we hear from them at the same time that views like that of Karl Barth are heretical or at the very least false teaching?
If it really doesn’t matter what the exact wording is when it comes to different versions of the Bible then what is the point of emphasizing to the nth degree that God desired every word to be the way it was in the original text? Furthermore at that point what is the difference between saying so long as the various wordings maintain the correct ideas various translations are equally inspired and saying that only the concepts of the Bible are inspired and not the exact words?
Ultimately I just see no reason to suppose the every single word of the Bible is exactly the way God wanted it. Taken to its logical conclusion such a view just makes no sense, it can’t be every exact word otherwise we should only be using a single authoritative version of the Bible as Mormons and KJV only advocates do. It makes much more sense simply to affirm that inspiration and inerrancy only require that we believe that what the Bible claims is true.
Interesting articles;
http://www.satsonline.org/userfiles/Smith_GrammaticalExpositionOf2Tim3.16-17.pdf
http://www.tektonics.org/whatis/whatinspire.html
http://www.dbts.edu/journals/2006/Decker.pdf
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