JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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Verbal Inspiration
Historically the church has regarded the words as inspired. This means that the whole of
Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the biblical record was given by divine
inspiration. The implication is that the inspiration of Scripture cannot correctly be affirmed as a
whole without its parts, or of some parts but not the whole. It is of one piece.
This rests on the Jewish view which attaches importance to the very letters. This high
view of inspiration is seen in the great care in the transmission of the text. Without the concept of
verbal inspiration variations might have been not only more numerous but also much more
serious.
Liberalism contends that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is
rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. It also holds that the corruption of human
culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration. It is the conservative
position that God, who made mankind in His image, has used language as an adequate means of
communicating revelation.
Some argue that what really matters is what is said, not how it is said. The content of
Scripture, its ideas, truths, facts and insights, is what is inspired. For the rest, the writers have
complete freedom to state these as best they can according to their own background and
linguistic ability. This view holds that while the words are not inspired, what they express is.
Such a view tries to protect the Bible from being a mechanical document in which there
was no serious regard for the people "involved" in the writing process. Thus they were mere
secretaries that mindlessly or mantically dictated what God told them to write.
This is not the position of many who hold to verbal inspiration. It does not mean that the
writers of Scripture were mere writing machines (mechanical theory of inspiration). God did
not just dictate His words to them and they mindlessly wrote them down. It is obvious from the
writings themselves that each writer's personality is involved. Each writer has a style of his own.
Jeremiah does not write like Isaiah, and Peter hardly writes like Paul. Their educational and
cultural background seeps through in their writings.
The Bible, then, is confluent—both the words of men and the word of God. It has dual
authorship. It is God's Word about Himself which He has transmitted to us not by suspending the
faculties of the writers, but by working through them. Thus the Bible is a very human book.
However it is divine in that God worked through the instrumentality of human personality, but
so guided and controlled men that what they wrote is what He wanted written.
The liberal aversion to verbal inspiration is seen in their attempt to make a distinction
between words and content. If words were not inspired then we would be engaged in a process of
abstraction from history as though words had little or nothing to do with the abilities, experiences
and circumstances of the human writers. In such a case they would be transcendent oracles.