What Is Biblical Inspiration?

I’m an occasional reader of the Australian academic Mike Bird’s Substack posts; “occasional” insofar as I’m only a “free” subscriber, not a “paid” subscriber, despite receiving weekly exhortations to “upgrade” (i.e., pay him money) “for the full experience.” I also get regular invitations to subscribe to his YouTube channels (yes, there’s more than one).

Anyway, this blog is not about academics supplementing the income they receive from their employment with side hustles. The connection is that Mike will apparently post about this tomorrow (Tuesday), but only for his paying customers. Since biblical inspiration is a subject I engage with quite frequently, I thought I would talk a bit about it in my own blog this week. Since I’m not one of his paid subscribers, I don’t think I can be guilty of plagiarism—not unless borrowing his title counts. In any event, I’m getting in first, by publishing today!

The biblical basis for biblical inspiration (if I can call it that) comes from 2 Timothy 3:16–17—coincidentally, the “verse of the day” today (technically, verses, surely; but let’s not be picky) on the BibleGateway website.

16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (NRSVUE)   

This is the only verse in the Bible that speaks directly to the nature of Scripture. If ever you hear verses that include the phrase “the Word of God” being quoted as if they are speaking about the Bible, they are not. It’s a title Christians use in referring to the Bible, not one that the Bible uses to refer to itself.  It’s speaking of either what God says or commands more widely, or Jesus as the Logos, or the proclamation of the gospel. NB 2 Peter 1:20–21, which is sometimes cited in that context, is talking about prophecy.

What, then, does “inspiration” mean? Other translations, such as the NIV, render the Greek word here (theopneustos) as its more literal meaning of “God-breathed” (that Greek word is a combination of the word for God and the word for breathed). In other words, somehow, through the Holy Spirit, God has “breathed” the text—or “breathed into” the text—in some supernatural way. I use “somehow” and “some” quite intentionally, because it’s not at all self-evident what that actually means in practice: what it “does” to the text as a result.

Certainly it makes it unique and special. It means there is something of God about it. What it does not mean is “dictated” to the human writers. Nor does it mean that there is no element of humanity within the text. A combination of humanity and divinity is present, which is analogous (I would put it no more strongly than an analogy) to the presence of humanity and divinity in the incarnate Jesus. The challenge for us is to grasp how that combination is reflected in what we read and how best to interpret it—or as I like to say, how to read it well.

As with Jesus, it is easy for evangelicals in particular (with their very strong focus on the centrality of Scripture) to default towards an overemphasis on the presence of the divinity and an underemphasis on the presence of the humanity. I do not mean we should be dividing up the Bible into its “divine” bits and its (merely) “human” bits. I mean we should be conscious that we will be encountering humanity within the text as well as divinity; inspired though it may be, it has come to us via human writers.

In his brief advert for Tuesday’s forthcoming blog, Bird defines inspiration thus:

In its most basic expression, biblical inspiration designates the belief that Holy Scripture comes from God and through humans as a message for us.            

I’m sure the (paid) blog will say far more, but as it stands, this is a pretty shallow definition; indeed, I’d say it raises more questions than it answers. Ambiguity is to the fore. What does Bird mean in saying that Scripture “comes from” God? I’m pretty sure he won’t mean dictation. And what does “through humans” mean? That the biblical writers were merely passive conduits, like pipes through which water flows? Or did they actively contribute to the content? In what sense is Scripture “a message for us”? Certainly it includes messages, in various senses—to many different people at many different times—but it’s a great deal more than a set of messages. Not least because the majority of the Bible is not messages but stories (the technical word for the genre is “narrative”); even the messages are mostly embedded within the context of stories.         

Much as evangelicalism likes to assert certainty in beliefs, I’m inclined to the view that biblical inspiration (or being God-breathed, if you prefer) is, from God’s perspective, deliberately enigmatic: puzzling, mysterious, and even inexplicable. I can imagine asking God, “What do you mean by that?” and him responding not with a spoken answer but a mischievous little smile. If there were to be an answer, it might well be along the lines of “That’s for me to know and for you to figure out.”  

I certainly don’t think it means that God “corrected the biblical writers’ homework,” as it were: that he took a blue pencil to their earlier drafts, to ensure that everything said (and how it was said) would be exactly how he himself would have said it. God did not sanitise the text of its humanity to ensure it spoke only in his voice. How else are we to read “Happy is the person who grabs your babies and smashes them against the rocks”? (Psalm 137:9, written in the context of the Babylonian exile and the atrocities committed by the Babylonians during their conquest of the land.)

Once we realise that not everything in Scripture speaks with God’s own voice—that inspiration does not mean every sentiment expressed by a biblical writer represents God's own sentiments—good biblical interpretation requires us to acknowledge that and take account of it in our reading and application throughout Scripture.        

Despite the inherent ambiguity in what inspired or God-breathed mean in practice, Reformed evangelicalism has worked hard to fill in the gaps for us by introducing a whole suite of words and concepts telling us what they mean. And, insofar as those are then incorporated into statements and confessions of faith, they acquire the status of beliefs that must be affirmed. One such word, featuring prominently, is “inerrancy.” What does that mean? You may well ask.

Nearly 50 years ago, a group of conservative academics published the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which ran to over 4,000 words! It was crafted as a series of paired statements affirming and (correspondingly) denying what the phrase meant. Google it, if you’re interested, but it does seem like a lot of fuss for the benefit of one word, not least when it’s a word that Scripture does not use of itself.

The paucity of reference in Scripture to the nature of Scripture is actually striking. One can only wonder why conservative evangelicalism is so determined to pronounce so definitively on a concept that is extra-biblical in nature. Personally, I am very happy to affirm my belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, provided that what we mean by that is “The Bible as we have it is exactly as God wished us to have it—there are no ‘errors’ from his perspective.”

There we go: 4,000+ fewer words than Chicago needed.

I think these are questions we all need to think through for ourselves. What, exactly, is the nature of the Bible as God's inspired gift to us? What does it mean for it to reflect both divinity and humanity?

One thing we should be particularly wary of is imbuing the Bible with a kind of mystical or even magical character, as though inspiration somehow gives the text hidden properties or meanings waiting to be discovered. That can all too easily lead to speculative interpretations, some of them frankly rather weird, that have little if anything to do with what the biblical writers were actually saying.

Given that 2 Timothy 3:16–17 is the only place in Scripture that speaks definitively of the nature of Scripture, the modesty of its claims for itself is also noteworthy. One might have expected something rather more strident than simply “useful.” In fairness, though, the list of things that it’s useful “for” is not too shabby: reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, though it has to be said that the Bible itself does not “do” any of those things—people do them, using the Bible, whether well or badly. In other words, people interpreting and applying the Bible on God’s behalf.  

Finally, I can’t help but notice that verse 17 (which often gets left out when verse 16 is being quoted) states the ultimate purpose of inspired Scripture is to equip us—indeed, to make us proficient—in “every good work.” Not in “every good belief.” Perhaps the habitual evangelical anxiety about anything that might sound like “salvation by works” helps explain why verse 17 receives rather less attention than verse 16.