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A Guide to Christian Theology - Lesson 6

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The Bible is Inspired by God

 Dr. Beshears focuses on the Bible’s divine inspiration, using passages like 2 Timothy 3:15-16 and 2 Peter 1:16-21. The text explains “God-breathed” as divine influence shaping Scripture. Breshears highlights authors being guided by God while expressing their styles and situations, yet conveying His truth. He asserts that inspiration covers both concepts and words, rejecting mere concepts or dictation, emphasizing Scripture’s reliability and authority. This lesson offers a comprehensive grasp of “inspiration.”

Gerry Breshears
Gerry Breshears
A Guide to Christian Theology

I. Understanding the Concept of Biblical Inspiration

A. Definition of Inspiration

B. Theological Basis: God-Breathed Scriptures

C. Comparison with God's Creation of Adam

II. Scriptural References to Inspiration

A. Second Timothy 3:15-17

B. Second Peter 1:16-21

C. Interpretation of "Moved by the Holy Spirit"

III. Human Authors and Divine Guidance

A. Diversity of Human Authors

B. Guided and Carried by the Holy Spirit

IV. Defining Inspiration and its Implications

A. Standard Definition of Inspiration

B. Scriptures Recognized as Authoritative

C. The Nature of Inspiration as a Divine Work

V. Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy

A. Belief, Obedience, and Embrace of Scripture

B. Emphasis on God's Instruction, Commandment, and Promise

VI. Different Views on Inspiration

A. Conceptual Inspiration

B. Verbal Plenary Inspiration

C. Dictation Theory and Comparison with Islam

VII. Evangelical Understanding of Scripture

A. Human Words Guided by God's Message

B. Inspiration as God Speaking to His Church

 


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So if you remember the last lesson here in topic two, scripture, the old New Testament are verbally inspired by God. I want to play with that term a little bit and understand what we mean when we say the Bible is inspired by God. So if you've got your Bible, turn to second Timothy chapter three. Second Timothy 3:15. He's talking about Timothy. He says, from infancy, you've known the holy scriptures. It is the sacred writings, which would be the Old Testament, which are able to make you wise for salvation, whose faith in Christ Jesus. And then he says, all scripture is God breathed, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training and righteousness so that the sermon of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. And that phrase, God breathed, becomes a technical term.

And what we're saying, and this takes us back to how God created Adam, the original man, he took dust to the ground and he breathed the breath of life into him and he became a living person or living soul. I think that's the same thing he's talking about in the Bible. When we use the term inspired or God breathed or whatever we say, we're saying that somehow God took words and in some sort of creative breathing made them words that are useful for rebuking, correcting, training righteousness to equip the servant of God very good work. And that's what we mean by inspired. These words speak with godly authority.

Second Timothy 3:16. We won't take through all the passages, but another key one is in second Peter chapter one. You go to second Peter chapter one. The story here, Peter's talking about his own, how he comes to see who Jesus is. And we kind of pick up in the middle of the story. Verse 16, second Peter 1:16. We did not follow cleverly devised stories when he told about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ in power, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. And he's talking about here, he said he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to the majestic glory saying, this is my son, whom I love, with him I'm well pleased. And he's talking here the transfiguration. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we're on the sacred mountain. So he's talking about the voice of God that came declaring to Jesus. This is my beloved son. And so what he says here, and he backs off a little bit.

Verse 19, second Peter chapter one, we also have the prophetic message of something completely reliable. The prophetic message completely reliable. You do well to pay attention to it as a light shining in the dark place until the day dawns and the Morningstar rises in your heart. So you're talking about the prophetic message, but then he goes on and becomes more specific. Verse 20, this reliable message, above all you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation for prophecy, never had its origin in the human will. But prophets though human spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

And when I unpack scripture, this is the meaning of scripture. This is a key phrase for me is to understand here that in second Peter what he's saying here is the prophet's reliable because they're guided or carried by the spirit. So this is a contrast of myths. This is a reliable thing he said. And what he's saying here is the initiative of the writing of scripture. The prophetic stuff that's written down in canon is coming from God, not from humans. It comes as they were guided along. But it also says that men spoke.

So when you read the scripture, we're reading the writings of humans. We have in scriptures of writing of humans, we have words of women as well as men. But the writers were probably all men. We don't know in some cases who wrote them, but they spoke as they were moved or carried along by the Holy Spirit. So when you talk about this moved, it's the word we get our English word ferry from, a boat that carries you across a river, is the word they use there. It means taken up and compared to the bearer's goal. So when I think about this, second Timothy talks about all scripture. Every scripture, holy scripture is God breathed. Second Peter is talking about the fact that it's human speaking, but as they're moved or guided by God.

So my definition of inspiration, and this is a standard definition, it's in your notes, and this is that work of God. So it's a divine work where he providentially prepared and move the human authors, enabling them to receive and communicate according their individual personalities and styles and situations. The truth is his church know for his glory and human salvation. Now, [inaudible] definition, that's a variation on standard definitions. Westminster Catechism and [inaudible]. It's a work of God where he prepares and moves the human authors. So when Paul writes first Corinthians for example, he's writing to a situation of the church in Corinth and it's Paul writing to those people addressing problems in their context, the divisiveness, the sin that's among them. But what he's doing is enabling to receive and communicate according to their own personalities. So we read the writings of Paul and read writings of Peter. They're really different. We read the four gospels, read Mark and Matthew, and they're pretty different in style and the way they're doing things, John is way different.

So we find very different personalities and styles and situations. But above it all is what we're doing is this is truth, that it's not just for that situation, it's for the whole church. And Richard Bauckham is a New Testament scholar, retired now, but he wrote a book, The Gospel For The Nations. And what he does recount in there as a fairly fine historian as well as a New Testament scholar is some of these books were immediately recognized as authoritative and important beyond the local thing. And they were quickly copied and distributed widely to other congregations. And that was true in the case of Paul's letters. We know that he wrote letters that we don't have in the Bible. I mean it talks about a letter to [inaudible] and we don't have it, have no idea what was there. So it's not because it's apostolic, it's because they recognize this book is the one that's authoritative for the church and they were copied and distributed early on.

We know in the case of Corinthians, there are at least two other letters that we don't have. So what we have would call First Corinthians is certainly a second letter and what we call second Corinthians, almost certainly a fourth letter, and there are probably others that we don't know about, but these two were picked out and distributed. And that process of recognizing these as words that are God speaking to the whole church, not just this one organization is where I talk about... When you talk about inspiration. And so if you look in the Catholic catechism, the Catholic Church, the current one that the Catholic Church uses, they have very similar statements about scripture. God inspired the human authors of sacred books to compose the sacred books. God chose certain men who all the while he employed them in his task made full use of their own faculties and powers. So that though he acted in them and by them is though the true authors, they were consigned to writing or they wanted written and no more.

That's the same kind of thing I just said. From a Protestant side, the Roman Catholic says the same thing about the nature of scripture and this is widely agreed to. So [inaudible] inspired, what we're saying there is this is God's word to his church, the whole church. And we're saying all of these. Now the interesting thing is these are all of them taken together. He can't pick out a life verse and extract it from his context because they're in a letter and the letter is in a context that goes all the way from Genesis to Revelation. So we'll unpack this for a little bit in the conical interpretation.

So I've got a statement in your notes here, and I actually like this a lot through the Chicago statement of Biblical inherency. It's says, holy scripture is to be believed as God's instruction. It's teaching in all that it affirms, obeyed as God's commandment in all it requires, embraces God's promise in all that it promises. So believed his instruction, what it affirms, obeyed his commandment in what it requires, embraced his promise in all that it promises. When you read this again, holy scripture is to be believed as God's instruction in all it affirms, shall believed in instruction, obeyed his God command and what it requires and embraced his promise and what it promises. So it's believed, obeyed, and embraced because it is the inspired root of God. This is the very voice of God speaking to us today. That's a fundamental concept of inspiration, which is this first big word that we apply to this.

Okay, questions from the peanut gallery, so to speak. Inspiration. It's interesting this is held across Christendom, this basic idea. Now here's the problem, for a lot of people they're going to say inspiration is only the concepts of scripture, not the words of scripture. So the ideas are there from God, but the particular wordings are human and we don't pay too much attention to those. And then what that means in practice, if I don't like what the scripture says, well that's just Paul's way of saying it. His concept is we should love everybody. But he says here, and so you end up in taking the words of scripture and you don't really take them very seriously because of the concepts that are there, not the words that are there. And that gives you a way to bypass pretty much anything you don't like in scripture.

So merely conceptual. Are the concepts inspired? Absolutely. But what second Timothy is saying is the very words come from God. Second Peter same thing. And he speaks in these words and we can't change the words. Could God have used different words? Probably, but he didn't. So that's one thing. It's conceptual, but it's verbal and we call it verbal plenary. And when we say verbal plenary, meaning God is speaking these words and in these specific words. And so when you talk about verbal plenary, God speaks in these words and all these words taken together. So verbal means in these words and plenary means all these words taken together. The error on the other side from the conceptual is dictation. And that's the idea that a dictation theory, God speaks the word and the writer writes them down without any of their personality be involved.

So Athenagoras, Holy Spirit breathes the words through the writers as a musician breathes through a pipe. So the pipe adds nothing to the music. It's all from... So when you think of the Quran in Islam, they believe in dictation. They believe the angel Gabriel came and dictated to Allah and he wrote down the exact words. And there was nothing of the personality of Muhammad that came into the Quran. We as Christians say something very different. We absolutely see the personality of Moses. We absolutely see the personality of Isaiah. We see the personality of Jeremiah and so on. In the New Testament we see Peter and Paul and John and James and the others. And they're very different because the persons and situations are different.

So we believe these are human words breathe into by God so those words become the very message God has for his church. That's the heart of inherency, or sorry, the inspiration. It's human words, but these human words because of God preparing and guiding writers are the very words God wants to say to his church. And it's true for the church, the whole of the church. Not everything in there, but this is the word taking together is fellow church. That's the concept of inspiration and that's the heart of evangelical understanding is scripture is [inaudible] day, God speaking, word of God. Simple.

 

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