The doctrine of Biblical inspiration is central to any effective defense of the Christian faith and serves a foundational element in any discussion on why the Bible is a reliable source of truth. Yet many Christians today undermine the doctrine of inspiration by either rejecting its claims flat-out or by neglecting attention to what such a doctrine requires – namely infallible and inerrancy. As Rev. JI Packer points out in his commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy “We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant.” (Link to Chicago Statement text)
In the New King James version, St Paul’s words in 2 Tim 3:16a are translated as “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God…” The phrase “inspiration of God” is related to the idea of breath and implies that Scripture is God-breathed (Greek: θεόπνευστος) and while this word itself only appears but once in the New Testament, the idea of God’s breath can be found elsewhere in the text of the Bible.
God’s Breath for Adam
Starting in Genesis we find Adam brought to life with two actions.
First, “God formed man from the dust of the ground” and Second, “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” The phrase “breath of life” in the Greek translation of the Book of Genesis shares the word for breath employing πνοήν ζωής to describe how God made Adam alive. The word for breath will also be used throughout the Bible in describing the third person of the Blessed Trinity as the Holy (ἁγίου) Spirit (πνεύματος). Christians recognize this connection between the breathing out of Scripture as spoken words by the Holy Spirit in the very words of our Creed when they proclaim, “And I believe in the Holy Ghost… Who spake by the Prophets.” And it is claimed in the New Testament itself by St. Luke (Luke 1:70) and the author of Hebrews (Heb. 1:1).
Beyond this we have the Hebrew collection of his spoken utterances collected into the medium of written books which were publicly breathed out before the people. This Scriptural tradition of God’s breathed word through prophets and repeated back to the congregation is therefore a type of re-creation of mankind. Christ himself speaks of the power of resurrection by speech in both his examples of Lazarus called from the dead and his words in John 5 where he assures his listeners with, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” (John 5:25). “For the word of God is quick…” writes the author of Hebrews in 4:12. ‘quick’ here is the archaic English phrase for living just as Adam’s first breath from God might be referred to as his quickening. The idea of God’s word as life-giving is drawn from the narrative of Adam’s creation, but also in the sense that men find life worth living as they live by his word. A sentiment echoed by our Lord who proclaimed, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
The Hebrew culture operates around the paradigm that God’s word and our covenantal faithfulness to its demands determine our outcome as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy, “…that thou mayest obey his voice… for he is thy life…” (30:20) There is therefore a clear connection in Hebrew literature itself to the idea of God’s spoken word and the gift of Life.
Expiration of Scripture
It is with this background on the significance of God’s breathed out word, that we move to understand the context of St. Paul’s doctrine of inspiration. Primarily, what St. Paul is interested in describing with the phrase “inspired” or “God-breathed” is that God is the one who is breathing out words. Dr. RC Sproul once quipped that a more accurate terminology would therefore be “expiration” because our God is more about the exhalation from God. While we can certainly draw out implications for the way God has communicated, St. Paul’s emphasis is on God as the authority, origin, and impetus behind the Scripture.
St. Paul includes the phrase ‘all’ to emphasize that divine source of inspiration applies to all of the Scripture. For the Christian, this all is significant in that the Old Testament canon is varied in the types of Scriptures it contains history, poetry, and prophecy. St. Paul is affirming the validity of these texts and without qualification. As a student of St. Peter and the Apostolic tradition, we can also infer that the historicity of the Old Testament was not in doubt during the life of Christ. Critics of the Reformation are quick to point out Dr. Martin Luther’s comments on James as the “epistle of straw” as the Great Reformers evaluated the theology of the letter through his narrowed lens of Reformation theology. In a similar vein, it would be unsurprising to see a figure like St. Paul, who struggled with Judaizers, taking opportunity to critique or even nuance his acceptance of the Old Testament canon to fit the distinctives of the Christian sect. Remarkably, St. Paul instead maintains a complete continuity of the entire Old Testament canon and takes it one step further by claiming that they, “are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
Claiming that the Hebrew scriptures point to Jesus is quite the claim for the former Pharisee who trained under Gamaliel. St. Paul’s conviction that the scriptures are God-breathed is therefore spoken from a mind with complete confidence in what is contained therein. The notion that the word of God had faithfully spoken to God’s covenant people is a conviction inherited from his devotion to them as an ancestral document, divinely preserved by real men in history, and confirmed by his experiences with Christ himself at the Damascus Road.
What Did St. Paul Know?
St. Paul, of all men, best understood the claims the Old Testament makes for itself insofar as it claims to speak as God’s revealed word and his own conversion experience with “scales” falling from his eyes he is able to see the Christ and hear his voice in these same traditional scriptures of his ancestors. Similarly, he is able to encourage Timothy, “from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures,” largely because this is his own experience. What Paul learned as the child called Saul is now the wisdom of Christ sufficiently revealed in ages past.
It is often pointed out that the canon of the New Testament is beyond the scope of St. Paul’s claims of inspiration in 2 Timothy 3 use of the word “scripture.” One primary evidence for this argument is the lack of a completed New Testament at the time of Timothy’s reception of this letter. Timothy may not at the time of Paul’s writing even have a copy of a Gospel and no piece of the New Testament would fit St. Paul’s expectation that Timothy had been trained in it since his childhood. Others argue that St. Paul’s “all” demands an acknowledgement of a completed canon which the New Testament and apostolic writers did not have sufficiently organized at this point in Church history. Yet these details do not prevent St. Paul from believing and teaching that Scripture beyond the Old Testament is inspired. As we can see in his letters to the church at Corinth, St. Paul believes he speaks with a divine authority. “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual” writes Paul, “let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 14:37). An individual with experience in rabbinical tradition would recognize that no previous spiritual leader could lightly take the mantle of prophetic voice, yet Paul clearly aligns his own words with the same weight as Isaiah or the like. St. Peter confirms Paul’s place as God’s mouthpiece in describing Paul’s writing as Scripture in his own Epistle. (2 Peter 3:14-16)
Beyond this Paul’s use of New Testament quotations as Scripture imply that he believes them to also possess a like authority. St. Paul’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper communicated to the Church at Corinth is based on quotations from the Gospel of Luke. Comparing 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 and Luke 22:19–20 reveals that St. Paul considers the Gospels to be authoritative as well. One of the more significant of these New Testament references is St. Paul’s statement, “that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:4). Yet where is this “third day” citation of the Scripture? St. Paul’s is looking to St. Matthew’s written testimony that, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40).
Inspiration and Inerrancy
Common objections to inspiration are related to the idea of Biblical inerrancy. If the Bible is God’s breathed word, it would be reasonable to expect it to reflect its author in perfection. Yet many struggle to accept the Bible as God’s word because of suspected errors or additions in the transmission of the text.
The Christian position is that the Scripture breathed from God is inerrant in its original manuscripts, often described as autographa, and this sense of perfection does not apply to translations and copies.
Yet St. Paul did also imagine that the inspiration of God was for a purpose and outlines this in the phrases, “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Profitable for doctrine explicitly outlines that God is knowable through his scripture and that Scripture itself is the tool that God has appointed for teaching who he is. The idea of reproof in the second statement relates to the power of Scripture to bring about conviction and serves as the means by which the Holy Spirit may persuade man to believe. St. Paul’s idea that the Scripture is for reproof echoes Jesus’s command to “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” (John 5:39). The authority of the Scripture is also seen in St. Paul’s perspective that the Scripture have a sanctioning authority over against the conscience and life of a man. When he teaches that Scriptures are for correction, he is also claiming that they may be appealed to straighten (as a literal translation of correction would be rendered) a man’s waywardness.
Finally, Paul’s view of inspiration is confirmed in that the Scriptures are places as model records for “instruction in righteousness.” It is this last characteristic that makes our Scripture the “Holy” Bible in that their contained wisdom reflects the divine approval of the author. St. Paul’s final piece conveys the idea that the Scriptures are not only good for us, but because they are from God, they represent the standard of God’s judicial approval.
Integrity of Manuscript Tradition
The turbulent world of textual criticism has been unable to shake scholarly confidence in the Scripture largely due to the work of faithful scholars who have been able to demonstrate the historic integrity of our received manuscript tradition. At the same time, it is the confidence gathered by St. Paul’s firm commitment to divine inspiration that encourages scholars to press forward against the doubts of liberal and neo-orthodox critics. St. Paul’s devotion to the Scriptural tradition is a reflection of his devotion to the God who speaks. Princeton theologian BB Warfield explained the significance of our doctrine of inspiration best in this succinct definition: “In a word, what is being declared by this fundamental passage is simply that the Scriptures are a divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them.” As did St. Paul believe, so does the faithful church believe.
