The Bible and Inspiration

Defining Biblical Inspiration

A short, working definition of biblical inspiration:

“The Bible owes its origin to a divine all-powerful being
who has revealed his message via human writers; it is revelation inspired by God.”1

Conservative Christian theologians believe God intentionally communicated to mankind through the unique styles, worldviews, and cultural contexts of particular human agents.

Simply: God’s message via human words.

Alternate Definitions

Other views that hold to the inspiration of Scripture include:

  • Dictation: God overrode the writer’s individuality and consciously or unconsciously caused them to write every word as He directed
  • Theology-only: God only inspired the portions of Scripture that communicate theological directives– all else is attributed to human agency
  • Human-only: astute human authors, having unique insight into God’s mind, wrote without God’s involvement2

While each view represents some degree of confidence that the Bible is inspired by God, each also has particular challenges.

Errancy and The Bible

Some popular challenges to the inspiration of Scripture include:

  • contradictions within the biblical text
  • unscientific claims within the Bible
  • modifications to the text as it was copied/transmitted through the centuries

As even a simple web search will demonstrate, scholars address these (and other) arguments to either deny or champion the concept of biblical inspiration.

Behind Disclaiming Inspiration

Simply put, many people do not like what the Bible says. They realize that if taken at its word, the Bible would require a different way of thinking, of believing, of acting, of living. Over-focusing on the Bible’s purported shortcomings allows for a dismissal of its authority.

From a scholarly perspective, Surface of the Deep recognizes that there are anomalies in the Scriptures, but also asserts that most of these can be attributed to poor handling of the text, innocent misunderstandings, or intentional biases. Furthermore, the rare unanswerable issues found in the Bible have no bearing on its theological messaging. Therefore, SOTD recognizes that the Bible is fully inspired by God, profitable for all matters of faith and practice, worthy of reading, study, and devotion, and should be approached with full faith and force as dire revelation from God.

1 William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, Third Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 211.

2 Adapted from J. Ireland, “Inspiration, Doctrine of The, History of,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).