Were the Apostles’ Inspired? Or Was It Something They Wrote?

This article is nothing more than arguing over a word and is entirely unnecessary. All scripture was breathed by God, and men wrote it. Of course the men who wrote the Bible were “divinely inspired” - God breathed the words out to men who heard them and who then wrote them down. The writers were used by God supernaturally to pen the words God wanted them to pen.

Other thoughts:

“Second, if God inspired the men, their other writings should be inspired too.” - this is an illogical argument.

“Fourth, “inspired men” opens the door for men to repeat this action today.” - More illogical argumentation. There are so many other things we could claim in the same manner.

[JNoël]

This article is nothing more than arguing over a word and is entirely unnecessary.

then why are you arguing with it?

[Don Johnson]

JNoël wrote:

This article is nothing more than arguing over a word and is entirely unnecessary.

then why are you arguing with it?

Because someone needed to. The article is an unnecessary source of conflict over words, and it should be called out as such.

This article is way off base. This is not the historical understanding of this confession. He keeps stating the term “inspired men”, yet that is not what the confession states. It states men divinely inspired and in 1855 clarifies it by God, and if you continue to read, it states that God is the author. This is a sad print that is being pass off as an article by the FBFI. The language structure is a bit more archaic in the 1833, but the 1855 clarifies it with updated language. Before someone attacks an archaic languaged confession they should understand the contextual understanding of the confession. This is the first time I have heard someone attack the 1833 on the grounds of inspiration, and to call it a false doctrine is just too far of a stretch.

[dgszweda]

This is the first time I have heard someone attack the 1833 on the grounds of inspiration, and to call it a false doctrine is just too far of a stretch.

David, the article doesn’t call the Confession false doctrine. It calls it a doctrinal error. I suspect that you all may be reacting to having a favorite ox being gored. If the 1833 Confession were perfect, why would it need the revisions you point out?

The overall point of Tim’s article is what led to its publication. I think his point is correct.

An unfortunate article. The 1833 NHCF means the men were “divinely moved” to write what they did. The context supports this. Strangely, the author uses Greek to exegete an English source document. An American dictionary contemporaneous with the original 1833 (Webster’s 1828) defines “inspired” as “informed or directed by the Spirit,” which is the meaning the context suggests. The OED also notes this is a valid understanding of the word; the relevant option here (def. 4a) is “to influence or actuate by divine or supernatural agency.” Again, the context suggests this meaning.

The author is wrong.

[Don Johnson]

The overall point of Tim’s article is what led to its publication. I think his point is correct.

In order to support the title of his article, he references a confession that itself was updated later to help clarify the position, a position we all agree with. The author of the article could not have made his case without using the more ambiguously worded confession. That’s sloppy.

But the point he makes is the point of the article. it is a blog, not an academic publication.

I still think you all are huffy because someone doesn’t like a confession you like.

[Don Johnson]

I still think you all are huffy because someone doesn’t like a confession you like.

Not at all. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever even read the entire confession. I’m just trying to point out that he has created conflict where it doesn’t exist. That’s a problem that should be corrected, and I hope he is reading all of this so he perhaps recognizes it.

More than one problem with this article.

From my first book, The Midrash Key:

This “hypostatic union” means we believe that Yeshua is both God and man. This raises a question: If Jesus was God, was every word he uttered the “Word of God?” If Christ asked brother James to “pass the biscuits,” was that request inspired?

I think we need to make a distinction between (1) words a divine Person has spoken, (2) the inspired words of a divine Person, and (3) Scripture.

Consider the first category, “words a divine Person has spoken.” This includes whatever God the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit have said to one another, to angels, or to men.[1] Many of these words – though true and perfect – were intended only for the moment.

The inspired words of a divine Person are not merely true, but impregnated with a special power and purpose (Isaiah 55:10-11). But not all inspired words have been preserved.[2] When we discuss God’s written Word (Scripture), we mean God’s preserved and inspired word.
The Scriptures provide a blueprint for all we need in the realm of spiritual maturity (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Thus the Scriptures are the full composite of all the inspired teaching God has determined perennial and essential.

Yeshua spoke many inspired words, but only some of them have been preserved as Scripture.[3] From a human perspective, we can assume that the Gospel writers chose to include portions they considered relevant to the Christian community or for evangelism.

What do we mean by assuming all Scripture is inspired? Although many conservative Christians claim to believe in verbal, plenary inspiration, some who make this claim really believe in a theory called “dictation.” …True verbal plenary inspiration means that God guided the authors to assure that what they said was in accord with what God wanted said. God saw to it that the words they chose accurately conveyed the thoughts God wanted to convey.[4] I do not operate from a premise of dictation, but verbal, plenary inspiration.

I believe that God typically worked through and with the human minds of the Scriptural authors. Some texts, like the 613 commandments of the Torah, were indeed dictated, but dictation is not the rule. Thus we believe the entire Bible to be the Word of God, but much of it is simultaneously the Word of God AND the word of godly men.[5]

[1] Though some of these words were both inspired and Scripture, it is interesting to note that the creation of the universe could be attributed to a conversation between the Persons of the Trinity.

[2] I Corinthians 14 makes clear that prophesying was an important function in the infant church. Prophesying is often defined as either inspired speech or inspired thought. Yet these many prophecies (some true, others false) have not been preserved. The First Testament mentions many prophets whose words are not recorded in Scripture. For example, in I Kings 14, Ahab speaks poorly of Ahijah the prophet. This means that Ahijah had previously prophesied, but these words were not recorded. In I Samuel 28:6, Saul inquired of the prophets but received no answer. Thus nameless prophets dot the First Testament.

[3] This is suggested by John 21:25, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.” One “thing” Jesus did much of is teaching.

[4] See Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology, pp. 80-81.

[5] See Daniel Wallace’s paper, “Is Intra-Canonical Theological Development Compatible with a High Bibliology?” for further study on this subject.

I think the phrase I remember seeing (from Erickson?) that captures the distinction between orthodoxy and dictation is “concursive.” I might be wrong. I remember Erickson had a great discussion on the different viewpoints in his systematic, which is still the best evangelical Baptist ST out there, I believe. Just bought the third edition in Kindle. It’s a treasure.

I bought Robert Letham’s work this past Christmas, and have dipped into it a few times. Great stuff. I am wanting to branch out a bit, though, and am thinking of grabbing Lombard’s Sentences and Aquinas in hardcover. I have Aquinas in Kindle, right now, but don’t consult him at all.

I think the test for the P&D article here is “would the authors of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith have recognized their idea as it was expressed in the P&D article?”, and I think the answer to that question is an emphatic “no”. If you argue they were, as argues P&D, inspired over the course of their careers and not just as they wrote down the canonical books, then you would have to grant that to Peter as he refused to eat with Gentiles, denied Christ, and the like. Classic example of the straw man fallacy.

The authors would perhaps point out,to respond to P&D, that the inspiration that put those words on parchment in ink had to do something to guide that pen, the hand and arm that held it, and the mind that thought at the time it was actually doing the work of phrasing the relevant sentences. And when you’ve conceded that, you might as well say the writers were inspired during that time.

What’s left, really, is a quibble over clarity as perceived 187 years after the original document was written. Meh.

What is the limit of inspiration? Was everything the apostles said inspired? If so, how do you explain Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Gal 2? The point of Tim’s article is that *only* the apostolic writings collected in the Canon (i.e. the Bible) are inspired. Other letters by them were not. The apostles themselves were not inspired, their writings of Scripture were. You may argue that this distinction is minor. Fine. There are ramifications of suggesting that the men themselves were inspired and everything they said is authoritative. Geoffrey Bromiley, writing in Christianity Today, 1963, points out how the Catholics go astray with their appeal to tradition, or authority outside the Bible.

Now it is true that no precise definition has been given either of unwritten tradition or of its relation to Scripture. This was an unfulfilled task of the Vatican Council of 1870, and it is one of the most important and contentious issues of the Second Vatican Council. There are those who would bring spoken tradition and written Scripture into the closest possible relation, as though the one were merely the oral form of the other. In this case, no possibility of qualification by addition arises, for Scripture remains a constant check upon living proclamation. The evangelical emphasis on the importance of preaching might well be fitted into some such understanding.

The more traditional view, however, is rather different, and far more dangerous. On this interpretation unwritten traditions are apostolic truths and precepts which were never committed to writing, but which are equally authoritative with what is written. Thus the Church might teach and practice many things which cannot be substantiated from Scripture. If challenged, as at the Reformation, it counters the argument from Scripture by an appeal to unwritten tradition. “Biblical” and “apostolic” are not necessarily coterminous. Thus the Bible loses its unique position as the one absolute authority and criterion in the Church. Tradition is not merely another aspect of the one source of revelation. It is a second source in the stricter sense. Or rather, the apostolic preaching is the one source. And this has come down to us in the complementary forms of Scripture on the one side and tradition on the other. Hence many things may be defended as authentically apostolic even though there is no sanction for them in Scripture. On this reading, the control of Holy Scripture is very largely undermined.

Geoffrey W. Bromiley, “Roman Catholicism: The Sources of Revelation,” Christianity Today (Washington, D.C.: Christianity Today, 1963), 9.

One could object to the point Tim asserts by saying it makes too much of a distinction. In ordinary language, we do talk about the inspired writers of the Bible, but if pressed, I think we would agree that it is their writings in the Bible itself carry the inspiration, not the men themselves. Tim uses the wording of the 1833 confession as an illustration of a common error of speech and points out that the error can lead to other errors. I think its a point worth making.

My objection to your criticism is that you all seem to be unwilling to engage with the points Tim is making. Do you think, for example, that the letters Paul alludes to between himself and the Corinthians were inspired? I think we can safely say there was at least one of these. Personally, I see him alluding to two other letters in the pages of the two epistles we have. Were those missing letters inspired? My understanding of the doctrine of inspiration would say no.

Further, I can’t imagine that Peter only ever wrote two letters in his life, or John just the three that we have. Why were they not preserved, if they were inspired?

The same goes for Paul, James, and Jude. Do we have everything they ever wrote? I doubt it. So the point of the article is that inspiriation is limited to the books we have. We need to start there with our doctrine. I think that’s a point worth making.

[Don Johnson]

What is the limit of inspiration? Was everything the apostles said inspired? If so, how do you explain Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Gal 2? The point of Tim’s article is that *only* the apostolic writings collected in the Canon (i.e. the Bible) are inspired. Other letters by them were not. The apostles themselves were not inspired, their writings of Scripture were. You may argue that this distinction is minor. Fine. There are ramifications of suggesting that the men themselves were inspired and everything they said is authoritative. Geoffrey Bromiley, writing in Christianity Today, 1963, points out how the Catholics go astray with their appeal to tradition, or authority outside the Bible.

…

My objection to your criticism is that you all seem to be unwilling to engage with the points Tim is making. Do you think, for example, that the letters Paul alludes to between himself and the Corinthians were inspired? I think we can safely say there was at least one of these. Personally, I see him alluding to two other letters in the pages of the two epistles we have. Were those missing letters inspired? My understanding of the doctrine of inspiration would say no.

Further, I can’t imagine that Peter only ever wrote two letters in his life, or John just the three that we have. Why were they not preserved, if they were inspired?

The same goes for Paul, James, and Jude. Do we have everything they ever wrote? I doubt it. So the point of the article is that inspiriation is limited to the books we have. We need to start there with our doctrine. I think that’s a point worth making.

I think we’re still just talking around the issue, stuck on an English word, “inspiration.”

Let’s see if we can follow each other.

1) Theopneustos is how scripture came to be. God Breathed.

2) None of us were there, and the Bible does not tell us exactly how that worked. And so we are forced to figure it out ourselves. But do we really need to?

We accept The 66 as being God’s intended writings for our learning. How those 66 came to be isn’t entirely clear to us, outside of God Breathed.

I think we’re arguing about something that doesn’t need to be argued about. There were humans God used to pen The 66. How did he do it? God Breathed. But how? I don’t know, and none of us do, either. But we have The 66, and that is what God intended us to have. No one is saying the writers said or wrote more things than The 66 that are somehow on the same level as The 66. God Breathed The 66, humans penned, end of story. So a humanly written Confession may have been ambiguously worded in saying “We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired…” - but is that statement really incorrect? Divinity (God) used (inspired) Men to Write the Holy Bible. Is that really in question? I think not, and I still maintain he is creating an argument that is simply isn’t there.

And this gets really down to understading how to read the Greek, which is far above my level of knowledge, but I know there are people here who are expert in that practice, so help me out.

When I look at 1 Timothy 3:16, I see a process - all scripture is God-breathed. Some translations say “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” - is that a bad translation? Because that translation describes a process - it is given by inspiration. It doesn’t say the scripture itself is God breathed, it says that God breathed is the process by which scripture was written.

So help me out in understanding how to properly translate and understand the Greek, please. Or is there no consensus even with that?