The first meeting of the Theologue-Troy was held this past Friday at Village Coffee in Troy, Alabama. We had a good meeting and the discussion was a lot of fun. There really is no great time to include both college students and career types. So, we are going to plan on continuing to meet on the first Friday of every month. The next meeting will be Friday, March 6, at 8:30 am. Tyler Gresham will be presenting Christology: Views of Christ. We are hopeful more people will come out to participate in the discussion.
We have posted below the notes from Reid's presentation on The Doctrine of Scripture.
Historical Views of Inspiration
I. Scripture as the Word of God:
God reveals himself through His creation (that is general revelation) and through His word (that is special revelation). There is enough revelation in general revelation to give people enough knowledge of God to be accountable for their actions, but not enough to deliver themselves from judgment. This is why Paul says, in 2 Timothy 3:15, that God has revealed Himself by means of the Scriptures; that we might be made “wise unto salvation.” Throughout the history of the church, there has been agreement with Paul concerning the centrality of Scripture.
A. The Apostolic Period -
Scripture is the written word of God, which testifies to God’s plan of salvation centered on Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate. Jesus himself affirmed the status of Scripture as “the Word of God” in John 10:35. He also confirmed that it bore witness to His work in John 5:39. Paul viewed his own writing to be not merely human words, but “words taught by the Spirit” in 1 Corinthians 2:13, so that the message of the apostles was “the word of God.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13).
B. The Early Church -
Christians in the post-apostolic church rarely used the phrase “word of God” to speak of Scripture. However, the idea that the words of the Bible constitute a message from God is clearly attested to by an overwhelming consensus of theologians over a period of more than a thousand years.
Irenaeus (Against Heresis) used the phrase “the Holy Spirit says,” referring to Scripture.
Tertullian (Apology) referred to the Bible as a “written revelation from God.”
Augustine (Enchiridion) referred to Scripture as “divine” and to the biblical authors as writers who “by divine assistance were enabled.”
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae) stated that “the author of Holy Scripture is God.”
C. Protestant Church -
The protestant reformers were more emphatic in their designation as the Bible as the “word of God.” Luther commonly used the terms “Word of God” and “Scripture” interchangeably. Calvin (in The Institutes) spoke of the Bible as “having sprung from heaven, as if there, the living words of God were heard.” (1.7.1) Reformed confessions such as the Second Helvetic (1566) and Westminster (1646) speak of the Bible as the word of God.
II. The Inspiration of Scripture:
The Church’s classical confession of the divine authorship of Scripture is closely linked to the doctrine of Inspiration. This term is derived from the language Paul used in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”(ESV)
θεoπνευστος [theopneustos (the-o'-pnyü-stos)] adjective; inspired by God. From Theo: God and Pneo: to breathe. Literally, God-breathed.[1] Of course, the pneuma can also mean “spirit” (as in John 3:8 where Jesus uses the word twice, once meaning wind and the other meaning spirit. In context then, Paul says that all Scripture is a product of the work of the Spirit of God.
A. All Scripture -
First, note that Paul ascribes this quality to all Scripture, not just the parts in red. This would mitigate any buffet view of Scripture in which some of the bible is seen as God’s word, while other parts are seen as human ingenuity. We will see the importance of this when we view the modern alternatives to Plenary Inspiration in the next section.
From a strictly historical context, Paul is here referring only to the writings that we know as the Old Testament (though he may have also had the early gospels in view). However, from the earliest days of the church, Christians have consistently applied Paul’s statement here to the New Testament as well. This is justified on the following grounds:
Jesus saw His message and mission as absolutely consistent with “the Law and
the prophets.” (Matthew 5:17-20)
Jesus commissioned His apostles as agents of divine revelation, inspired by the
Holy Spirit. (John 15:26-17)
Jesus stated that future believers would come to faith through the apostolic word, of
which the New Testament is a written deposit. (John 17:20)
B. Scripture Inspired -
Second, Paul says that Scripture is inspired by God. This clearly extends inspiration not only to the writers but to the documents themselves. We will see why this is important in our review of the Quantitative Inspiration view in the next section. For now it is enough to understand that the writers did not just feel a feeling of inspiration from God that they tried to express in language, but they received a message from God that could be set forth in words.
C. Verbal, Plenary Inspiration -
Theologians have sometimes used the words “verbal” and “plenary” to describe the traditional Christian doctrine of biblical inspiration.
1. Verbal Inspiration, refers to the idea that the very words of Scripture are the words God desired to be written. They are as Paul puts it, “words taught by the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:13) Modern Protestants see Scripture as simultaneously the Word of God and the words of men. While this view takes seriously the different personalities of the biblical authors, it insists that the words used by the writers were not merely human attempts to articulate their experience of God. The words were those which God wanted written, and He supervised the writing of the words in such a way as to not override the humanity of the biblical authors.
2. Alternatives, have sometimes replaced verbal inspiration as many modern theologians falsely equate it with what is called Dictation Theory of Inspiration.
Dictation Theory; view of inspiration that views the biblical writers as scribes who wrote down words dictated tot hem by the Holy Spirit. While some ancient and modern writers have spoken of biblical inspiration in terms more or less approximating dictation, in an attempt to emphasize that the very words of Scripture are the words of God, the overall consensus of Christian history has been to reject the notion of dictation in the strictest sense. Dictation fails to take into account the different writing styles and experiences of the various biblical authors, and is closer to what Islam believes concerning the Koran.
Quantitative Theory (or Illumination View); view of inspiration that defines it in such a way as to make Scripture only quantitatively superior to the writings of men such as Shakespeare or Plato. In an attempt to distance themselves from a dictation theory, these Christians define inspiration in terms of the experience of the writers of Scripture, who received inspired feelings or ideas from God, then sought to express these in words. While this does take seriously the differences in personality found in the biblical authors, it fails to recognize Scripture as qualitatively different from any other writings. The difference between Scripture and all other writings is one of kind, not merely one of just quality or degree.
3. Plenary Inspiration, simply means full. It is thus another way of saying that all Scripture is inspired by God and consequently “cannot be broken.” (John 10:35)
4. Alternatives, have sometimes replaced plenary inspiration as modern theologians try to synthesize Quantitative Theory in various degrees with verbal inspiration.
Encounter View; Karl Barth was a twentieth-century Swiss theologian who rejected the traditional notion of verbal, plenary inspiration and did not regard the Bible as the word of God. In his Church Dogmatics, Barth refuses to acknowledge any revelation apart from the Person of Jesus Christ. He says, “Revelation remains revelation and does not become a revealed state. Revelation remains identical with Christ.” (118) God’s one self-revelation is the person of Christ. Since this revelation can not be confined to the past, for Barth it is identical only to the risen Christ who continues to live and to indwell believers. No words about Christ can be classified as revelation in a direct sense, nor any ideas about God, as revelation is only the person of God who reveals Himself to us when we encounter the risen Christ.
Therefore, Scripture can only be called the word of God in a secondary sense. By the Holy Spirit it became and will become a witness to the divine revelation of the risen Christ. It becomes the word of God when Jesus confronts us through it. None of the Bible is the word of God, but it may all become the word of God to us. Thus, the personal encounter which believers have (experience) becomes the theological norm. This view is very popular today and is the interpretive basis for the postmodern Christian sub-culture.
Historical Acts (or Dynamic View); is another modern school of thought that identifies divine revelation with God’s saving acts in history. The Bible is a witness to past saving acts o God, but is not itself divine revelation. It simply consists of the ancient writers’ attempts to articulate the impact of God’s saving acts on their lives.
Therefore, Scripture is merely human responses to God’s acts in history. While the definition of revelation is different than Barth’s it has the same problem as not seeing revelation as including language but only experience. This view even takes one step further in saying that the writers did not necessarily encounter God directly, but rather the results of what God did for them.
Partial-inspiration; is a third modern approach which takes a two-level view of biblical inspiration. While the approach takes on various forms, it basically states that there is a qualitative difference between biblical statements concerning spiritual matters and those that concern historical or temporal matters.
Spiritual matters are seen as inspired and therefore true.
Historical matters are seen as secondary and may not be historically accurate or true.
Some in this view hold that certain statements in Scripture may be historically false, yet convey spiritual truth. This view differs from that of Barth and the “God-who-acts” perspectives in that it does attempt to link divine revelation with the words of the Bible and thus includes ideas and not just experience. However, it falls short in that it attributes error to some of what bible authors wrote about history. Rather than dismiss the historical text, they reinterpret them as something like parables or allegories. This drives a wedge between the words of the biblical authors and the word of God. This highlights the connection between the theories on biblical inspiration and methods of interpretation. Because of that connection, I would like to highlight a few of those methods.
III. Interpretation of Scripture:
A. Allegorical –
An allegory is the expression of truths through symbolic figures and actions or generalizations about human conduct or experience. The notion that readers of Scripture must interpret many events as allegories has its root in Greek philosophical dualism. According to this worldview, historical events and realities, including language, are but images or shadows of divine realities. (see Plato’s Republic, book 6) The Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, is rooted in the idea that God has acted and spoken at specific times and places in history. For this reason they actually avoided allegory and focused on actual words and deeds. This only began to change in the second and third century with Marcion and Origen.
B. Literal –
During the forth and fifth centuries, strong opposition arose to these allegorical methods. The uniting idea in these oppositions was the belief that the primary meaning of the text was its literal, historical sense that which the biblical writers intended to convey by means of ordinary usage of human language.
These early opponents had little lasting effect on the popularity of the allegorical method until the onset of the Protestant Reformation. With the Reformation came a renewed emphasis on the Hebrew background of the bible and on the literal interpretation. Martin Luther, who was trained in the allegorical method as a Roman Catholic Augustinian Monk said, “Scripture’s plainest meaning are to be preserved; and unless the context manifestly compels one to do otherwise, the words are not to be understood apart from their proper and literal sense.” (Martin Luther: Selections, 266) In emphasizing the plain, literal sense Luther did not deny that Scripture contained figures of speech and symbolic language. In fact, he emphasized that the writer’s own words and historical background should determine the interpretation of the text. This grammatical-historical exegesis approach stresses that the meaning of the Bible is clear enough for any reasonably informed person to understand. It also opened new avenues of theological insight which allowed the reformation to articulate fresh perspectives on the previously unchallenged dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the new emphasis on the historical led in time to another interpretive approach called the historical-critical method, which carried consequences unforeseen by Luther.
C. Historical-critical –
During the eighteenth century biblical scholarship came under the strong influence of Enlightenment philosophy. The Rationalist wing of this intellectual movement defined history as a closed continuum of cause and effect. This left no room for the miraculous or supernatural. When applied to biblical interpretation it led to a historical-critical hermeneutic, which declared that the biblical accounts of the supernatural were not history but myths. Myth was seen as a primitive way of interpreting remarkable events in the pre-scientific age of the Bible. That leaves it to the interpreter to go behind the myth and discover what really happened. This came under very serious attack toward the end of the nineteenth century showing that the gospel accounts were written in such a way that it is impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the supernatural Christ.
Thus, the Allegorical method seeks to find the meaning above the text by way of spiritual interpretation. The Literal method seeks to find the meaning within the text by means of grammatical-historical exegesis. The Historical-critical method seeks to find the meaning behind the text by means of investigative interpretation.
The key is that the Literal method best describes the traditional or orthodox view of Scripture as the word of God, inspired through divine revelation, and thus authoritative and sufficient for matters of faith and conduct.
[1] Blue Letter Bible. "Dictionary and Word Search for theopneustos (Strong's 2315)". Blue Letter Bible. 1996-2009. 4 Feb 2009. < strongs="G2315&t="KJV">
Monday, February 9, 2009
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