Dr Paul Allen

Titlepage of the New Testament section of a German Luther Bible, printed in 1769. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) What does this word “ inspiration ” really mean as it is applied to the Bible ? Unfortunately, not all churchmen are agreed. Therefore, we have various theories of inspiration: 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 th

English: Rudolf_Bultmann Deutsch: Rudolf_Bultmann (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Colossians 1:24–29 “I became a minister…to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” ( vv. 25–26 ). The liberal theology that emerged from the nineteenth century and still plagues the church even today was not only influenced by the radical immanentism of Hegel and the radical subjectivism of Schleiermacher. Naturalism, a view that holds nothing exists except the physical universe, also had a profound impact on liberalism. The result was a crop of liberal theologians who did not believe in the miraculous. Some of them even denied the existence of the personal God altogether. These men tried to explain away the many supernatural references in the Gospels , viewing the miracles purely in materialistic terms. The feeding of the five thousand, for example, was not a supernatural multiplication of a few loaves and fishes. Instead, Jesus w