Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology concerned with the divine origin of the Bible and what the Bible teaches about itself.

Etymology

The word inspiration comes by way of the Latin and the King James translations of the Greek word θεοπνευστος (theopneustos, literally, "God-breathed") found in 2 Tim 3.16-17:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God , and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

Theopneustos is rendered in the Vulgate with the Latin divinitus inspirata ("divinely breathed into"), but some modern English translations opt for "God-breathed" (NIV) or "breathed out by God" (ESV) and avoid inspiration altogether, since its connotation, unlike its Latin root, leans toward breathing in instead of breathing out.

Basis for the doctrine

The proof that a doctrine of divine inspiration is taught by the Bible itself is ample. Besides the direct accounts of written revelation, such as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, the Prophets of the Old Testament frequently claimed that their message was divine by the formula "Thus says the LORD" (for example, ; ; ; ;

In addition, theological conservatives sometimes argue that Biblical inspiration can be corroborated by examining the weight of the Bible's moral teaching and its prophecies about the future and their fulfillment. Others maintain that the authority of the Church and its counsels should carry more or less weight in formulating the doctrine of inspiration.

An exception common to all the different views of inspiration is that, although the New Testament Scriptures quote, paraphrase, and refer to other works including other New Testament documents, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha), and the Greek writers Aratus, Epimenides, Menander, and perhaps Philo, none of the various views of inspiration teach that these referenced works were also necessarily inspired, though each teaches that the use and application of these other materials is inspired, in some sense.

Views of the doctrine

Those Christians who receive the Bible as authoritative generally accept that the Bible is "breathed out by God", in some sense because the Bible itself explicitly states this. However, different groups understand the meaning and details of inspiration in different ways.

The Evangelical view

Most conservative Christians accept the Bible's statements about itself. At times the traditional view of the Bible has been defended as implying that the Bible is "inerrant in the original manuscripts (or 'autographa')", while other traditionalists have sought to guard against the inference that the Bible would be read as

Some evangelical Protestants have sought to characterize the conservative or traditional view as "verbal, plenary inspiration" in the original manuscripts, by which they mean that every word (not just the overarching ideas or concepts) is meaningfully chosen under the superintendence of God. These Christians acknowledge that there is textual variation, some of which is accounted for by deviations from the autographa. In other cases two Biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches are reported to somewhat different effect, and in different words, which this view accounts for by holding that the deviations are also inspired by God. At times this view has been criticized as tending toward a "dictation theory of inspiration", where God speaks and a human records his words, but the traditional view has always been distinguished from the dictation theory, which none of the parties regard as orthodox. Instead, these Christians argue that the Bible is a truly human product and its creation was superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the authors' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style. This divine involvement, it is suggested, allowed the biblical writers to reveal God's own message to the immediate recipients of the writings and to those who would come later, communicating God's message without corrupting it.

The Catholic view

As summarized by Karl Keating, the Roman Catholic apologetic for the inspiration of scripture first considers the scriptures first as a merely historical source, and then it attempts to derive the divinity of Jesus from the information contained therein, illuminated by the tradition of the Catholic Church and by what they consider to be common knowledge about human nature. After offering evidence that Jesus is indeed God, they argue that his Biblical promise to establish a church that will never perish cannot be empty, and that promise, they believe, implies an infallible teaching authority vested in the church. They conclude that this authoritative Church teaches that the Bible's own doctrine of inspiration is in fact the correct one.

The Modernist view

The Modernist (or liberal) doctrine of inspiration typically rejects the Bible's own claims for itself and thus the traditional doctrine. Instead, in this view, other authorities must be established and utilized to determine the validity and truthfulness of the Bible. One such approach is that of Rudolf Bultmann, who argued that Christians must seek to "demythologize" the Bible by removing the layers of myth to get to the underlying historical facts; so that belief in the historical Jesus can be a very different thing than belief in the Jesus of Christian theology.

The Neo-orthodox doctrine

The Neo-orthodox doctrine of inspiration is summarized by saying that the Bible is "the word of God" but not "the words of God". It is only when one reads the text that it becomes the word of God to him or her. This view is a reaction to the Modernist doctrine, which, Neo-orthodox proponents argue, eroded the value and significance of the Christian faith, and simultaneously a rejection of the idea of textual inerrancy. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner were primary advocates of this doctrine.

References

• Warfield, B. B. (1977 reprint). Inspiration and Authority of Bible, with a lengthy introductory essay by Cornelius Van Til. ISBN 0801095867.
• Sproul, R. C.. Hath God Said? ().
• Geisler, Norman, ed. (1980). Inerrancy. ISBN 0310392810.

Inspiration (Theologie) 축자영감설 Inspiration verbal Verbalinspiration