Inspiration in Modern Theology

Modern thought is characterized by a chasm between supernature and nature. Sometimes this is the result of a divide having to do with knowledge. The idea is familiar. Even if there is a God, we cannot see, hear, taste, touch, or smell that metaphysical realm. It is a matter of it exceeding our experience.

Other times the chasm is more straightforward denial of the supernatural in terms of its existence. So naturalism (or materialism) explains as much as it can by “scientific” means. The more that is explained in terms of this method, the less one tends to appeal to the supernatural. Christians think themselves immune to this because they do not believe what such skeptical views teach.

They are slower to realize that the modern worldview’s implications are coursing through the assumptions of their theological and biblical studies. At the very least, there is a kind of “crowding out effect” on the supernatural-natural frontier. There is a kind of “zero sum” game where simplistic causality is assigned to either the divine or the human, which is to have already conceived of their relationship in exclusively spatio-physical terms. We will see how this plays out shortly.

Often our first hurdle to clear is the historical objection—namely, that this or that part of the doctrine of Scripture was a result of that reactionary impulse we know as fundamentalism. The conservative theologians devised new doctrines in order to answer the “new knowledge.”

Every lie is a twisted truth, of course. Modern conservatives did respond to modern liberals, just as orthodoxy always must to heresy. Furthermore it is quite true that elements of the doctrine of Scripture are more carefully sketched out in that context.

It is precisely because inspiration was less frequently challenged, before the modern era, that premodern treatments of Scripture do not say as much about it. Richard Muller makes this very point,

“The major Reformed scholastic systems … all fail to single out inspiration as a separate topic. They tend to view inspiration either as a subtopic of the discussion of the divinity of Scripture, or as a characteristic of the forma scripturae arising from the discussion of the efficient, formal, material, and final causality of Scripture, or as part of the argument for the authority and authenticity of the text. The major exegetical works of the era also assume the doctrine but make little effort to prove it or to argue it against possible counterevidences in the text. This is not to say that the doctrine of inspiration was unimportant to the Protestant thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it is to say, however, that a right understanding of the old Protestant doctrine of inspiration arises out of a sense of its place and role in the larger doctrine of Scripture rather than out of a mistaken equation of the doctrine of inspiration with the doctrine of Scripture.”1

We ought to be conversant in the historical development without confusing that information-increase with an invention of fundamentally different ideas. Leave the historical deconstructionists to their own imaginations.

Attacks on Inspiration by Caricature

The most popular way to assault the Reformed doctrine of biblical inspiration is to argue that it implies a concept called “mechanical dictation.” The efficient causality of God is the only real cause. In short, this would be philosophical occasionalism applied to biblical inspiration. The human author is reduced to a puppet. It is true that Calvin and Warfield did both use the word “dictation.” However, it should be noted that where the reformer uses this word it is “in a manner”2 or in generic summation:

“that the Law and the Prophets are not a doctrine delivered according to the will and pleasure of men, but dictated by the Holy Spirit.”3

Warfield uses the word in citing 2 Samuel 14:3, 19, but this is one of dozens of passages cited in that section only to show the more general point that it is God’s word in the mouth of the prophets. This text is cited more as a “strong case” and so his description of “dictation” should not be taken as a comprehensive theory or model.4 A reading of the primary sources here dispels the notion that such historic uses of the word “dictate” meant the same thing as the caricature would have us believe. 

Another helpful qualification of this point is offered by Frame:

“Some theologians, I think, have been too eager to avoid suspicion of a dictation theory. Certainly, there are places in Scripture where God literally dictates words for human beings to write down.”5

He cites examples from Exodus 34:27, Jeremiah 36:4, and Revelation 2-3. It is a good point, and the burden of proof is on the critic to show how dictation is a priori ruled out in all cases. Such a thing can be said to occur here or there without being confused with the norm. On the other hand, the Scriptures themselves prevent us from annihilating human deliberation and intentionality by that divine priority.

Consider how Jude opens off his short epistle: “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (v. 3). What is interesting about this? There was a human affection that anticipated this writing project, and there was also a strategic change of course because of a danger faced by his audience. The humanity of Jude is vivid here. 

There is also that place where Peter says,

“the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Pet. 1:10-11).

This is a remarkable passage in that it attributes the ultimate intentionality to “the Spirit of Christ,” as if talking about His “future” work; and yet, at the same time, it describes the human authors as making a conscious inquiry about what they are writing. Were they in this inquisitive state during the exact moment of writing, or only during their time away from their writing instruments? We do not know. Yet it strains the imagination to think of their minds being less active during the act itself. 

A grosser caricature than mechanical dictation is that such a holy book would have to literally “drop right out of the sky,” readymade. In reality, Warfield remarks, “many processes cooperating through long periods”6 were ordained, under which he includes something as distant from the act as “the preparation of the men to write these books.”7 That raises questions about how those natural and developing processes interrelate to comprehensiveness of divine causality. It raises questions about the relationship between providence and inspiration, for example.

Modern Alternatives to Verbal Plenary Inspiration

This also calls attention to the relationship between Arminian theology and biblical inspiration. Whether we are speaking of stricter dictation or not, the fact of the matter is that the verbal plenary inspiration model at least implies that the divine will has determined the human will in the case of the biblical authors. The Remonstrants’ confessional statement of 1621 expressed that the biblical books “were written and endorsed by those men who were inspired, instructed and directed by the Spirit of God.”8 However, to be inspired in a way that means “instructed” and “directed” may or may not demand that the Holy Spirit had ensured the divine meaning in each and every case of human authorship. But this is what we mean.

Inspiration implies an utter subordination of the will of those men to the will of God, and that in the causal sense. According to consistent Arminian theology, God can never do that. If one qualifies the Arminian principle for “a sufficient reason,” then at least some sufficient reasons are admitted to exist to suspend the otherwise highest virtue of free will. But then why should not the salvation of sinners be an equally sufficient reason?

The Arminian must at least make his choice: 1. qualify the inspiration concept; 2. qualify the inviolability of free will; or 3. live in a forced state of cognitive dissonance.  

The main alternative to the orthodox Reformed view of inspiration is the position of Karl Barth. He makes a distinction between the written Scriptures as the witness to the Word, whereas God acting in Christ is the content of the Word itself. A great deal of Barth’s language is enigmatic. So, for example, when he says, “dogmatics as such does not ask what the prophets and apostles said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets,”9 it may at first seem like the distinction is purely between biblical and systematic theology. Not so. And it is his peculiar concept of “inspiration” that makes it plain.

For Barth,​​ inspiration encompasses the point of revelation to the biblical author all the way to the point of the truth-encounter in the present hearing. So the “Church proclamation must be ventured in recollection of past revelation and in expectation of coming revelation.”10 Let us call the first point “Inspiration A” (IA) and the second point “Inspiration B” (IB).

What makes the separation between the Spirit’s initial revelatory activity and the Bible that we see before us is described by the term recollection. In short, the Spirit does infallibly reveal God to those prophets and apostles (IA), and then, subsequent to this event, the fallible pens of those human authors recount this revelation within their own circumstance. 

“Therefore when we have to do with the Bible, we have to do primarily with this means, with these words, with the witness which as such is not itself revelation, but only—and this is the limitation—the witness to it.”11 

He then attempts to qualify in quintessential Barthian fashion: “In this limitation the Bible is not distinguished from revelation. It is simply revelation as it comes to us, mediating and therefore accommodating itself to us—to us who are not ourselves prophets and apostles, and therefore not the immediate and direct recipients of the one revelation, witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”12

Charles Augustus Briggs appeared to have already held this separation between the words of the text and the Word of God in the nineteenth century.13 Yet for the Barthians there would be a more wide-ranging theological rationale for this divorce between the personal and the propositional, between the supernatural and the natural. To Barth, God is disclosing himself in Scripture, not information about himself. The Bible is not its own holy object apart from its witness to Christ. It becomes the Word when God graciously, by the Spirit, “co-opts the human words of Scripture to present Christ.”14 That encounter from the Spirit to each believer becomes the Truth (IB), though we would simply call the Spirit’s presentation of the truth of the word illumination; and we would insist that such truth is already the objective truth and that in the whole of the written word. 

Another kind of alternative to biblical inspiration has always existed among those conflating “inspiration” with an ongoing voice of the Spirit of equal origins and therefore authority with the written revelations.

Among their number have been the Montanists of the early church, the “Enthusiasts” of the early modern era—or Die Schwärmer, as Luther derisively called them, as they swarm around like bees—and the Pentecostal and Charismatics of the late modern era.

All of these have one thing in common when it comes to revelation. No matter what they say by way of qualification, such a claim to private revelation is in fact an elevation of such visions or “words” to the same level of authority as the written word of God. How could they not be? If they are indeed from God, then exactly how does one qualify their degree of authority? We will return to this in that section. Suffice it to say, this is a different notion of inspiration.

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1. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Two: Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 231.

2. Calvin, Institutes, IV.8.8.

3. Calvin, Commentaries, XXI:249; cf. on Jeremiah 34:4-6

4. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 87.

5. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2010), 141.

6. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 154.

7. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 155.

8. While I must credit the historical work done by Douglas Kuiper in his article, “The Remonstrants’ Doctrine of Scripture in Relation to Their Opposition to Sovereign Grace,” for this reference and its context, I cannot agree with the reasons he lists for the falsity of the Remonstrants’ view. Promising to be (at least partly) an exposition of the way that Arminianism corrupts inspiration per se, Kuiper uses the opportunity instead to apply Van Tillianism to how “human reason” is elevated as judge in discerning the various attributes of Scripture. No doubt Arminianism deifies human reason as it does with the will; but this is not the most direct consequence of Arminianism on biblical inspiration proper. 

9. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1.2.

10. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I. 96.

11. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.3.19.1.

12. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.3.19.1.

13. Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 193

14. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Holy Scripture,” in Michael Allen and Scott Swain, ed., Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 40.