Christians often Talk about Biblical inspiration, yet, after almost 2000 years of the church, it is so easy to view the Bible as some lofty, holy book disconnected from real people’s lives. Alternatively, there are those who want to say it’s just a human book and downplay that somehow it is God’s word for us. In this post, I will describe how I see this holy book as both God’s unique revelation to us and a priceless record of human engagement with him.  

As part of Paul’s final instructions to his young colleague Timothy, he writes about the inspiration and authority of scripture.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:14-17)

Paul was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) here. The apostles had not written significant parts of the New Testament then. Also, what they wrote had not been collected together and called scripture.

This post is about the inspiration of scripture. I have given my perspective on Biblical authority in another post.

I believe the inspiration of scripture was an organic process between God and the human author and reader.

In Greek, “God-breathed” is a compound word that only appears once in scripture. It comes from theos, or God, and pneuma, which the New Testament writers often translate as Spirit, but it also means breath or wind.

If Paul wanted to tell Timothy that scripture is verbatim the dictation of God to human writers, he would have had the vocabulary to say so. After all, dictating to a scribe was common in his Greco-Roman and Hebrew worlds. Instead, Paul used an unusual word that brought God and Spirit together in one word for this occasion. He did so to give Timothy confidence that their scripture was the “word of God” because the Spirit of God moved over the whole process of putting it together.

Timothy would find God’s truth in scripture by observing the movement of the Spirit within it. But, using the Greek word theopneuma, which many translators translate as God-breathed, Paul is trying to grasp the mystery of the Spirit at work in the human heart and mind in a very fluid and dynamic way. Today, we can read the words on the page as human words. Yet those words are so heavily infused with the ideas of God that we must believe they are the Words of God for us.

The Spirit’s wind seems more like Jesus’s description of the Spirit to Nicodemus in John 3. The Spirit is like “The wind which blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.” This seems odd to our understanding of the weather.

These days, the wind is labelled according to where it comes from. In Canterbury, New Zealand, where I live, people talk about hot nor-west winds and dread the cool nor-easterly wind. But commentaries say the author John, Jesus, and Nicodemus did not think of wind in terms of the direction it came from. Instead, they were only conscious of the wind because they felt it or heard leaves rustle. They understood the wind through the effect it had on them and their surroundings.

I think Paul is saying that we understand the Spirit at work in the hearts and minds of scripture’s authors because we see the Spirit’s effect on the words the authors wrote. Except for a few instances, like when God told Moses to write down the words of the covenant in Exodus 34 or when God told the prophets to write down the prophecies, for the most part, we do not see the Spirit say to the author, write down these exact words.

Rather, I think this means the Spirit moved in the hearts and minds of those who first told the stories, composed the psalms and prophetic songs, coined the wisdom, and had the apocalyptic visions. The Spirit was there moving the author as they wrote the words of scripture down, even when they thought they were recording their experiences of God, rather than hearing directly from him. He was there supervising the editors and scribes as they drew the different writings together, and he was there at work when the rabbies decided what was scripture, and what was not.

I suggest that these exceptions, where the original authors knew they were hearing from God, make my case stronger. They indicate that occasionally, scripture’s authors understood that they were explicitly writing down the words of God. But mainly, they experienced writing down their account of God’s work with them and his people. In retrospect, because we see the clear signs of the Spirit’s inspiration, we regard these human words as the Word of God. The effect of seeing scripture this way for me is that I see no conflict between reading the Bible as a human book, written in a time and place, with all the limitations of human authors, and at the same time as the Word of God because the Spirit blew over the writing.

We can understand more closely what scripture means for us today by first finding out as much as we can about what it meant to the humans who wrote and first read it. My example with Jesus and Nicodemus illustrates my point. The Spirit knows the physics about where the wind comes from and where it goes, even better than today’s weather people. But this would have been lost on John and his readers. John wrote with an understanding of the natural world as he knew it.

So, I am confident that the Spirit helped John recall the overall sense of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, expressing it in a way that would have made sense to early readers. Furthermore, because the Spirit “blew through” and affected John’s writing process, the theological truth of the text has been handed down to us. But I am not disturbed by the idea that the details of the text do not stand up to scientific scrutiny today.

So, what does it mean to believe that scripture was inspired? I suggest it means that the Spirit was at work, “blowing” in the hearts and minds of the human authors. As a result of that wind, human words are the words of God for us to learn from and grow with—more on that in my discussion of Biblical Authority