Biblical Inspiration and Truth

Authority level: Dogma
This article contains claims at more than one doctrinal grade. The summary shows the highest represented grade.
GuideDivine inspiration is revealed doctrine; the article also summarizes the Magisterium's authoritative explanation of scriptural truth and human authorship.
Contents

Biblical Inspiration and Truth is How Catholic teaching understands Scripture as God's word in human words and truthful for the sake of salvation.[1][2]

Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology that the human writers and canonizers of the Bible were led by God with the result that their writings may be designated in some sense the word of God.[7] This belief is traditionally associated with concepts of the biblical infallibility and the internal consistency of the Bible.[8]

God and human authors

Catholic teaching attributes Scripture to God as author while insisting that its human writers were true authors who used their own abilities, languages, literary forms, and historical settings. Inspiration is therefore not normally understood as mechanical dictation.[3]

Because every assertion belongs to a concrete literary form, responsible reading first asks what a text actually affirms. Poetry, parable, law, theological narrative, proverb, and apocalyptic vision communicate truth in different ways.

Truth for salvation

Dei Verbum teaches that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach the truth God wished to consign to the sacred writings for the sake of salvation. This formulation joins confidence in Scripture with careful interpretation of authorial intention, genre, and the unity of revelation.

The charism of the sacred writers

Inspiration is a divine action in and through genuinely human authors. The Holy Spirit does not use them as unconscious instruments or dictate every book in a uniform voice. They employ their abilities, languages, memories, research, sources, literary artistry, pastoral judgment, and cultural inheritance. God works so that, as true authors, they consign to writing everything and only what he wills for the canonical text. Divine and human authorship therefore apply to the same writing at different levels rather than dividing verses between divine and merely human portions.

The charism belongs to the production of the scriptural books for the Church. It does not make every source an author consulted, every later copyist, or every interpretation inspired in the same sense. Nor does it mean the human author comprehended the full reach of divine intention. Within the unity of salvation history, persons and events can possess a significance disclosed only by Christ and the canonical whole. The spiritual senses rest on this divine authorship while remaining anchored in what the text communicates through its human form.[4]

Truth expressed through human language

Because God is truthful, the inspired books teach truth without error. Identifying that truth requires attention to what the human authors affirm, to literary genres, and to the unity of God's saving plan. Poetry need not be prose report, parable need not name historical individuals, and phenomenological description need not teach a scientific model. These distinctions specify the assertion; they do not create a protected religious message inside an otherwise deceptive text. The whole canonical book is inspired, while its sentences perform different literary acts.

The phrase for the sake of our salvation in Dei Verbum describes God's saving purpose in causing Scripture to be written. It cannot be used to exclude any genuine assertion that appears inconveniently historical or connected to created reality. At the same time, Scripture was not given as an encyclopedia answering every modern technical question. Catholic interpretation avoids both a restrictive inerrancy that protects only explicitly spiritual claims and a literalism that assigns ancient authors intentions and standards foreign to their texts.

Canonical reception and ecclesial reading

The Church recognizes inspiration by receiving the canon within apostolic Tradition. This judgment does not bestow divine authorship after the fact; it identifies writings already given by the Spirit as a normative witness to revelation. Canonical reception also means that no book stands alone. Difficult passages are read in relation to all Scripture, the living Tradition, and the coherence of faith, with the Old and New Testaments joined in the one economy centered on Christ.

Study within the believing Church

Inspiration reaches its ecclesial purpose when Scripture is proclaimed, studied, prayed, preached, and obeyed. Textual criticism and historical research serve access to the human words; theology attends to their place in the divine plan; the Magisterium authoritatively guards interpretations touching the deposit of faith. No office excuses careless exegesis, and no scholarly method becomes a substitute for faith. The Spirit who inspired the books enables the Church to hear them as God's Word while calling every reader to intellectual humility and conversion.[5][6]

Theopneustos

At 2 Timothy 3:16 (NRSVue), it is written: "All scripture is inspired by God [theopneustos] and is useful for teaching".[9]

When Jerome translated the Greek text of the Bible into the language of the Vulgate, he translated the Greek theopneustos (θεόπνευστος[10]) of 2 Timothy 3:16 as divinitus inspirata ("divinely breathed into").[11]

Some modern English translations opt for "God-breathed" (NIV) or "breathed out by God" (ESV). The -tos ending in the Greek theopneustos also designates a passive construct whereby the subject God is breathing out the object (scripture).

Theologian C. H. Dodd suggests that it is "probably to be rendered" as: "Every inspired Scripture is also useful".[12]

Daniel B. Wallace states that numerous scholars believe that the proper translation should be: "Every inspired scripture is also profitable". Wallace, however, criticises this translation; he proposes the translation "every scripture is inspired and profitable".[13]

Evangelical viewpoint

Evangelicals view the Bible as superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the writers' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style.[14] This divine involvement, they say, allowed the biblical writers to communicate without corrupting God's own message both to the immediate recipients of the writings and to those who would come after. Some Evangelicals have labelled the conservative or traditional view as "verbal, plenary inspiration of the original manuscripts", by which they mean that each word (not just the overarching ideas or concepts) was meaningfully chosen under the superintendence of God.[15]

Evangelicals acknowledge the existence of textual variations between biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches. They see these as complementary, not contradictory, and explain them as the differing viewpoints of different writers. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew was intended to communicate the Gospel to Jews, the Gospel of Luke to Greeks, and the Gospel of Mark to Romans. Evangelical apologists such as John W. Haley in his book Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible[16] and Norman Geisler in When Critics Ask[17] have proposed answers to hundreds of claimed contradictions. Some discrepancies are accounted for by changes from the master manuscripts (which are alleged to contain very nearly the original text and) that these alterations were introduced as copies were made (maybe of copies themselves), either deliberately or accidentally.

Three basic approaches to inspiration are often described when the evangelical approach to scripture is discussed:[18], p. 239

  • Verbal plenary inspiration: This view gives a greater role to the human writers of the Bible while maintaining a belief that God preserved the integrity of the words of the Bible. The effect of inspiration was to move the writers so as to produce the words God wanted.[18] In this view the human writers' "individual backgrounds, personal traits, and literary styles were authentically theirs, but had been providentially prepared by God for use as his instrument in producing Scripture".[19] However, the theory nuances that "God so mysteriously superintended the process that every word written was also the exact word he wanted to be written—free from all error".[20]
  • Verbal dictation theory: The dictation theory claims that God dictated the books of the Bible word by word, suggesting the writers were no more than tools used to communicate God's precisely intended message.[18]
  • Dynamic inspiration: The thoughts contained in the Bible are inspired, but the words used were left to the individual writers.[18] This suggests the underlying message of the Scriptures are inspired, while the exact wording is dynamic.
  • Partial inspiration: the Bible is infallible in matters of faith and practice/morals, yet it could have errors in history or science (e.g. the Big Bang could be true, and the Genesis creation account is more allegorical than historical).[21]
  • Intuition theory: The authors of the Scriptures were merely wise men, so the Bible is inspired by human insight.[21]

Theories seeing only parts of the Bible as inspired ("partial inspiration")[22] meet with insistent emphasis on plenary inspiration on the part of its proponents.

Lutheran and Reformed viewpoints

The Apology of the Augsburg Confession identifies Holy Scripture with the Word of God[23] and calls the Holy Spirit the author of the Bible.[24] Article 3 (entitled 'Of the Written Word of God') of the Belgic Confession, a Reformed confession of faith, states "We confess that this Word of God was not sent nor delivered by the will of man, but that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, as the apostle Peter saith (2 Peter 1:21). And that afterwards God, from a special care which He has for us and our salvation, commanded His servants, the prophets and apostles, to commit His revealed Word to writing; and He Himself wrote with His own finger the two tables of the law. Therefore we call such writings holy and divine Scriptures."[25] Here a consensus with Lutheranism is apparent, namely, that Scripture is conceived of as being the 'Word of God' by virtue of its principal author, the Holy Spirit, which used human authors as instruments to write Scripture without superseding their humanity.

According to Frederic Farrar, Martin Luther did not understand inspiration to mean that the scriptures were dictated in a purely mechanical manner. Instead, Luther "held that they were not dictated by the Holy Spirit, but that His illumination produced in the minds of their writers the knowledge of salvation, so that divine truth had been expressed in human form, and the knowledge of God had become a personal possession of man. The actual writing was a human not a supernatural act".[26] John Calvin also rejected the verbal dictation theory.[27]

Luther asserted that "He [the pious Christian] should not doubt that however simple they [the Scriptures] may seem, these are the very words, deeds, judgments, and history of the high majesty and wisdom of God; for this is the Scripture which makes fools out of all the wise".[28]

The doctrine of sola scriptura was one of the central teachings during the Protestant Reformation. It teaches that the Bible is the final authority for moral, spiritual, and for some, civil matters. As Luther said, "The true rule is this: God's Word shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel can do so".[29]

Catholic viewpoint

The Catechism of the Catholic Church alleges that the Bible's human writers were "consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more".[30] The Catechism also claims that the Bible "without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures".[31] The Catholic Church holds the Bible as inspired by God, but that it does not view God as the direct author of the Bible, in the sense that he does not put a 'ready-made' book in the mind of the inspired person.[32]

Pope Benedict XVI gave the following explanation in 2007:[33]

The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject — the pilgrim people of God — and lives within this same subject. [...] [T]he individual author or group of authors [...] are not autonomous [...] they form part of [...] the "people of God," [...] the deeper "author" of the Scriptures. [...] [L]ikewise, this people [...] knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who — through men and their humanity — is at the deepest level the one speaking.

The Catholic view of biblical inspiration stems from the belief in the historical authenticity of the foundation of an infallible Church, and Jesus' grant of teaching authority to that church through his Apostles. Because the Catholic Church designated the biblical canon through its tradition, its authority to identify the inspired books is accepted, rather than any self-contained or inherent claims of the Scriptures themselves.[34][35][32]

Liberal Christian viewpoint

The typical view within Liberal Christianity and Progressive Christianity rejects the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired. Some advocates of higher criticism who espouse this view even go so far as to regard the Bible as purely a product of human invention. However, most form critics, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and Walter Brueggemann (1933–2025 ), still regard the Bible as a sacred text, just not a text that communicates the unaltered word of God.[36]

Neo-orthodox viewpoint

Emil Brunner (1889–1966) was one of the primary advocates of Neo-orthodoxy. He wrote: "[T]he Christian Church believes the Bible to be the Word of God", and that "Christian faith is Bible faith".[37] He also wrote: "Yes, God has made known the secret of His will through the Prophets and Apostles in the Holy Scriptures".[38] Brunner rhetorically asked, "Is the whole Bible God's Word then?"; Brunner answered, "Yes, insofar as it speaks of that which is 'here' in Christ".[39] Brunner's illustration, relying on the name of the label His Master's Voice, was: "If you buy a phonograph record you are told that you will hear the Master Caruso. Is that true? Of course! But really his voice? Certainly! And yet—there are some noises made by the machine which are not the Master's voice". Brunner adds: "[T]he Bible[...] makes the real Master's voice audible,—really his voice, his words, what he wants to say". Brunner ultimately concludes: "Only a fool listens to the incidental noises when he might listen to his Master's voice!".[40]

Other viewpoints

A 2011 Gallup survey reports, "A 49% plurality of Americans say the Bible is the inspired word of God but that it should not be taken literally, consistently the most common view in Gallup's nearly 40-year history of this question".[41]

References

  1. 1.Dei Verbum — Sections 11–13 on inspiration, truth, and divine condescension
  2. 2.The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture — Pontifical Biblical Commission study; official Italian text
  3. 3.Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu — Original languages, textual criticism, literary forms, historical setting, patristic interpretation, and the sacred writer's intention
  4. 4.Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church — Methods, literary forms, human authorship, spiritual senses, ecclesial interpretation, and actualization
  5. 5.Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus — Foundational modern magisterial teaching on inspiration, divine authorship, truth, exegesis, and apparent conflict
  6. 6.Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 29–49 — The Church as the home of Scripture, the soul of sacred theology, historical and theological exegesis, and fundamentalism
  7. 7.Metzger, Bruce Manning; Coogan, Michael David (20 December 2001). The Oxford Guide to Ideas & Issues of the Bible. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 216–. ISBN 978-0-19-514917-3.
  8. 8.Gerhard Maier: Biblische Hermeneutik (= TVG Monographien und Studienbücher. Band 355). 7. Auflage. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 2011, ISBN 978-3-417-29355-5, S. 94.
  9. 9."2 Timothy 3:16 – New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition". Bible Gateway.
  10. 10."2 Timothy 3:16 Interlinear: every Writing is God-breathed, and profitable for teaching, for conviction, for setting aright, for instruction that is in righteousness". www.biblehub.com. Retrieved 2023-03-06.
  11. 11."Read the Bible text :: academic-bible.com". www.academic-bible.com. Retrieved 2023-03-06.
  12. 12.Dodd, Charles Harold (1986) [1929]. The Authority of the Bible. Library of constructive theology. London: Harper and Brothers. p. 15. ISBN 0-00-625195-1. OCLC 559048103.
  13. 13.Daniel B. Wallace (1996). "Part I: Syntax of Nouns and Nominals — Adjectives III. – The Relation of Adjective to Noun – 4. Some Exegetically and Theologically Significant Passages". Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. pp. 313–314. ISBN 0-310-21895-0. Many scholars feel that the translation should be: 'Every inspired scripture is also profitable.' This is probably not the best translation, however
  14. 14.Ryrie, C.C. (1972). A survey of Bible doctrines. Chicago IL: Moody.
  15. 15.Young, Edward Joseph (1957). Thy Word Is Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. p. 27.
  16. 16.Haley, John W (1874). Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. W.F. Draper.
  17. 17.Geisler, Norman (1992). When Critics Ask. Wheaton IL: Victor Books. p. 604. ISBN 0896936988.
  18. 18.[18.2][18.3][18.4]Lea, Thomas Dale; Griffin, Hayne Preston Jr. (1992). The New American Commentary (1, 2 Timothy, Titus). Vol. 34. Nashville TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers. ISBN 0805401342.
  19. 19.Myers, A.C. (1987). "Inspiration". Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans. p. 27.
  20. 20.Plummer, Robert L. (2010). 40 questions about interpreting the Bible. Grand Rapids MI: Kregel Publications. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-8254-3498-3. OCLC 435422984.
  21. 21.[21.2]Huffman, Justin (July 18, 2017). "The Inspiration of Scripture". Baptist Bible Hour. Archived from the original on September 25, 2017. Retrieved December 18, 2017.
  22. 22.For example: Elwell, Walter A., ed. (1984). "Verbal Inspiration". Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Baker Reference Library (2 ed.). Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic (published 2001). p. 1242. ISBN 9780801020759. Retrieved 2017-08-29. The spirit of the Renaissance, developments in philology and textual criticism, the emergence of ideas of the partial inspiration of the Bible in some quarters, and the initial expression of philosophical views that would find their culmination in the Enlightenment - all helped to stimulate theological reflection. And the refinement of plenary and then verbal inspiration were among the consequences.
  23. 23."God's Word, or Holy Scripture" is a phrase in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. II: "Of Original Sin"
  24. 24."the Scripture of the Holy Ghost". Apology to the Augsburg Confession, Greeting, ¶ 9
  25. 25.The Three Forms of Unity. Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press. 2021. p. 2. ISBN 9781954887176.
  26. 26.Farrar, F. W. (1886). History of interpretation. London: Macmillan and Co. p. 339.
  27. 27.Farrar, F. W. (1886). History of interpretation. London: Macmillan and Co. p. 345.
  28. 28.Hannah, John D. (1984). Inerrancy and the Church (PDF). The University of Michigan: Moody Publishers. p. 113. ISBN 9780802403278.
  29. 29.Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles II, 15.
  30. 30."Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, § 106". The Vatican. 4 Nov 2003 [1993].
  31. 31."Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, §107". The Vatican. 4 Nov 2003 [1993].
  32. 32.[32.2]Durand, Alfred (1910). "Inspiration of the Bible". The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
  33. 33.Ratzinger, Joseph (2007). Jesus of Nazareth. Translated by A. J. Walker. London: Bloomsbury. p. xx.
  34. 34.Brom, Robert Henry; Carr, Bernadeane; Keating, Karl, eds. (August 10, 2004). "[Tract] Proving Inspiration". Catholic Answers [Magazine]. When Brom was Bishop of San Diego, he gave his official imprimatur to this tract. Before she retired from being Director of the Diocesan Institute, Ms. Carr gave her official nihil obstat to this tract. Keating was the founder of the Catholic group behind this magazine. Any anonymous author can submit a piece.
  35. 35."Scripture and Tradition". Catholic Answers. 19 November 2018.
  36. 36.Walter Brueggemann; William Carl Placher; Brian K. Blount (2002). Struggling with Scripture. Westminster John Knox Press. pp. 7–. ISBN 978-0-664-22485-1.
  37. 37.Brunner, Emil (1936). Our Faith. Chapter 2. Is the Bible the word of God?. p. 7.
  38. 38.Brunner, Emil (1936). Our Faith. Chapter 2. Is the Bible the word of God?. p. 8.
  39. 39.Brunner, Emil (1936). Our Faith. Chapter 2. Is the Bible the word of God?. p. 9.
  40. 40.Brunner, Emil (1936). Our Faith. Chapter 2. Is the Bible the word of God?. p. 10.
  41. 41.Jones, Jeffrey M. (July 8, 2011). "In U.S., 3 in 10 Say They Take the Bible Literally". Gallup.