Dr Paul Allen

How can texts written by ordinary human beings in the context of common human experience be at the same time the eternal and unchanging Word of God? The following points seek to clarify the nature of inspiration. Inspiration Is Not Dictation Except in some specialized cases, inspiration does not mean dictation. God did not whisper into the ears of the biblical authors but rather worked through each author’s own circumstances, thoughts, intentions, and personalities to communicate his divine message. The exceptions would be in those cases where the author is told to write exactly what he is told (as in some prophetic texts) or where God himself inscribes the text (as in the Decalogue, inscribed on stone tablets “by the finger of God”; Exod. 31:18). Evidence that inspiration does not mean dictation is the differences among biblical authors in literary styles, including vocabulary choice, sentence structure, level of diction, and choice of genre. Mark’s Gospel, for example,

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God .” [Matt 22:29] The doctrine of biblical inspiration means that God breathed his own words through the consciousness of human writers. Men and women (such as Deborah, Hannah, and Mary) were moved by God the Holy Spirit so that the words they spoke or sung were the Word of God himself. Inspiration does not mean that God dictated the Bible to its human authors (except for those sections when God spoke directly to the writers, and they took down what he said, as is the case with much of Exodus and Leviticus ). Nor does the doctrine of inspiration mean that the human authors became mere automata while God made their hands move as he wished. In fact, quite the reverse is the case. Just as we experience an increased self-awareness in God’s presence and a blossoming of our talents as we encounter him, so the distinctive personalities of the human author's came to life as they wrote. Theol

The belief that the Bible is the Word of God is foundational to our lives as Christians. When the Scripture says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105), we assume that in the Scriptures we have truthful and reliable direction from God. But just how secure is that assumption? In Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, the brilliant historian Sir Leigh Teabing declares,   The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.… The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. Although this statement is spoken by a fictional character in a novel, it accurately depicts what some people think about the Bible. In fact, in the introduction to this book, Dan Brown claims: “All descriptions of … documents … in this