How is the Bible inspired?
 |
| Titlepage of the New Testament section of a German Luther Bible, printed in 1769. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
1. Liberal views of inspiration.
The liberal theologian’s view is expressed particularly in the statement: “The Bible contains the Word of God.” This suggests that it also contains a varied admixture of the words of men. Their position may be stated as follows: From place to place within the Book are to be found revelations which God at times gave to pious men, much as He illumines men’s minds today with insights into Divine truth. The Bible is a sort of religious scrap book in which are recorded stories, legends, geneologies, and love poems, classified, arranged and rearranged without any regard to chronological or literary perfection. The dangerous part of this view is that it places into the hands of finite, feeble and fallible Man the power to determine what and where God is speaking. Thus, Man is given power over Infinite Truth rather than taking a place under it.
2. Neo-orthodox views of inspiration.
These may be summarized by the statement that: “The Bible becomes the Word of God.” Let us consider two of these neo-orthodox views:
a) The existential view popularized by Barth.
This teaches that there are many human errors and imperfections in the Bible—even in the autographs. But the Bible becomes the Word of God when He chooses to use this imperfect channel to confront man with His perfect Word. This is accomplished by a personal encounter by God with man in an act of revelation. In this existential experience—crisis encounter—the meaningless blobs on the page leap from the Bible to speak to man concretely and meaningfully. At this “moment of meaning” the Bible becomes the Word of God to the believer.
b) The demythologizing view of Bultmann and Neibuhr. The Bible must be stripped of religious myth in order to get at the real meaning of God’s self-giving love in Christ. One must look through and beyond the historical record, with all its myth and error, to the super-historical. Events, such as the Fall of Man, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, are not necessarily the objects of verifiable and factual history. Hence, the Bible becomes a revelation when, by the proper (demythological) interpretation, one is confronted with absolute Love as set forth in the “myth” of God’s self-less love in Christ.
How, we ask, can the gospel writer be wrong in an area we can check him, history, and right in an area, doctrine, where no checks are possible? These men refuse to believe that God performed the miracle of giving us, by inspiration, an infallible Bible, but are ready to believe that God daily performs the greater miracle of enabling men to find and see, in the fallible words of men, the infallible words of God. It is very difficult to see why God would make use of error to teach us truth.
