Inspiration Understood by Analogy
It may seem as though there are naturalist and supernaturalist extremes of God’s interaction upon Scripture: the former excludes divine agency from explanation, and the latter exaggerates divine agency to the exclusion of human instrumentality. It would be better to call the latter “hyper-spiritual” rather than supernatural, since we do want to emphasize a supernatural power and design behind the whole. This goes hand in hand with a distinction that has been made between extreme and weak authorship:1 the former characterized by a zero-sum game where God guarantees all that is said only by snuffing out all other agency; the latter characterized by God influencing, while not determining. In achieving the proper balance, it is often helpful to gain clarity by means of analogies. When we move into the realm of concrete analogies there is always a danger, of course, but with the right measure of caution these can be an accurate bridge.
Analogies to Inspiration
One of the earliest Christian apologists, Athenagoras, imagined the relationship between God and the human authors as that of a flutist and his flute.2 Thus the important dimension of breath was retained, and though the wood of the instrument may be seen as entirely passive, yet the sound is owing to the shape of it and so can represent real instrumental (no pun intended) causality. Similarly some of the Reformed orthodox thought of all of the inspired human authors in a way analogous to how Paul utilized Sosthenes, or Jeremiah had Baruch—namely, as an amanuenses.3 Of course that imagery instantly brings to mind the idea of strict dictation.
The word that Warfield gave to the process of inspiration is the word concursive. Similar to the category within the classical doctrine of divine providence that we call “concurrence,” so here, it is inevitable to conjure in our minds images of a duality of related phenomena—whether two streams of water, or two wind currents, or two parts of a machine, but, in each case, one of them is dominant over the other. In the case of this concursive operation, the divine “breath” is dominant over the thoughts and verbal expressions of humans.
Warfield wrote,
“Into the natural life of man God intrudes in a purely supernatural manner, bearing a purely supernatural communication … yet it would seem inherent in the very employment of men as instruments of revelation that the words of God given through them are spoken by human mouths.”4
And he continues that, “the completely supernatural character of revelation is in no way lessened by the circumstance that it has been given through the instrumentality of men.”5
There is an analogy that has always been used to two builders to a building: the architect and the physical builders. They both “built” it, but in two different senses. I think this is useful and accurate as far as it goes. The analogy gets us a step away from what idea and word formation are, but it does at least capture the way in which we must view two senses of the same activity. Warfield took an architectural analogy that was designed to cast shade upon the doctrine and he turned the idea on its head for good. He said,
“As the light that passes through the colored glass of a cathedral window, we are told, is light from heaven, but is stained by the tints of the glass through which it passes; so any word of God which is passed through the mind and soul of a man must come out discolored by the personality through which it is given, and just to that degree ceases to be the pure word of God. But what if this personality has itself been formed by God into precisely the personality it is, for the express purpose of communicating to the word given through it just the coloring which it gives it?”6
Kevin Vanhoozer points to the God-world relationship as a fitting analogy to the God-Scripture relationship, so long as we do not get our picture of that God-world relationship from models outside of Scripture. This shows “the extent to which one’s doctrine of Scripture depends on one’s doctrine of God and the God-world relationship.”7
The most intriguing analogy for many that has been used is that between inspiration and incarnation. Warfield allowed that there are similarities. However the dissimilarities are decisive: “There is no hypostatic union between the Divine and the human in Scripture,” and thus “there can exist only a remote analogy.”8 Still, he concludes, it may at least be useful in illuminating that “as, in the case of Our Lord’s person, the human nature remains truly human while yet it can never fall into sin or error because it can never act out of relation with the Divine nature.”9
The similarity between inspiration and incarnation goes beyond the matter of concurrent agency. Scott Swain remarks that
“Scripture is God’s word in ‘servant form’ … God condescends to us in covenant communication because God condescends to us in a covenant friendship. And friends must speak the same language. The humble form of Scripture is closely related to the humble form that God assumed in the incarnation, for prophets and apostles are swept up in the mission of God’s incarnate Word.”10
A Duality of Sources in Dual Agency
Ordinarily when we are speaking of “sources” of revelation, it is crucial to distinguish between the principium essendi, namely God, and the principium cognoscendi, namely Scripture. In speaking of this duality of sources, we have prioritized God as the Revealer, only in two different ways—that is, with respect to the order of being and with respect to the order of knowledge. When we speak of other “sources” we are really speaking of things like media through which the truth about God is processed by the mind. This is an oversimplified picture, but it is sufficient to introduce a further distinction that has been made about two modes of the information passing to (and through) the inspired authors.
The Reformed theologian of the turn of the seventeenth century, William Ames, gave this description of the process:
“The Holy Spirit employed the work of these men with some variety, for some of the things they would write were altogether unknown to the writer beforehand, as is sufficiently shown in the history of creation past and in the prediction of future things. But some things were known to the writer beforehand, as is evident in the history of Christ written by the apostles. And some of these things were grasped by a natural knowledge, and others by a supernatural one. In secret and unknown matters, divine inspiration supplied all things by itself. In those matters that were known to the writer or were able to be discovered by ordinary means, the writers also added their devout study, with God assisting in such a way that they did not err in writing. In addition, the Holy Spirit aided them with his sweet accommodation so that each and every writer made use of the modes of speaking that were most fitting to his person and condition.”11
This distinction has occasionally been marked in terms of direct inspiration versus revelatory direction—a distinction which Shedd endorsed12—though, when stated in this way, and without carefully mapping out the two as Ames did, can give the impression that those matters, or even whole books of the Bible, that contain largely narrative substance, are not inspired, but only in a weaker sense, superintended.
Bavinck had what we might call a dynamic view of inspiration. This was a function of what has been called his “organic motif” that colored the whole system of his theology.13 This too is an example of analogy, but it is a more comprehensive piece of analogous reasoning because it marks a basic way that Bavinck attempted to communicate his whole system of dogmatics. When it comes to the organic relationship between God’s Word and the human words, the divine and human form a unity, yet the divine precedes.
On the other hand there is something more unique about the kind of inspiration that Bavinck had in mind. It is both God-breathed and God-breathing. The latter is not meant so as to contradict biblical sufficiency. It is simply that its attribute of divine inspiration is true not only of the animation of Scripture’s original human writers but that there is also an ongoing quality that drives its intended audience toward their end.
In the Word, the divine condescends in the human so that the human may participate in the divine. Evangelicals might want to call the one “inspiration” and the other “illumination” to avoid confusion, but one can see some of what Bavinck is doing. It may appear to be a kin to Barth’s view. However, the crucial difference is that here, the relevant aspects of human nature are sanctified by grace.
He also offers descriptions which seem identical to the general Evangelical doctrine: “Divine inspiration is above all God speaking to us through the prophets and apostles, so that their word is the word of God. What has been written is ‘that which has been spoken by God.’”14 However, Scripture is also the “organic principle, the seed, the root, out of which the plant of dogmatics grows.”15 This is, finally, not to be confused with the view of John Henry Newman, where Scripture was like a seed and tradition the progressing organism. The reason that these cannot mean the same thing is that Newman was also assuming that both Scripture and tradition are equal as sources, whereas Bavinck, while speaking of Scripture, church, and Christian consciousness as “sources,”16 unequivocally held the Bible over the other two. Although Bavinck criticized much post-Reformation dogmatics for entertaining a too mechanistic view of Scripture.17
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1. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Holy Scripture,” in Michael Allen and Scott Swain, ed., Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016)
2. Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians.
3. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, II:226; cf. Calvin, Institutes, IV.8.9.
4. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 85.
5. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 86.
6. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 155-56.
7. Vanhoozer, “Holy Scripture,” 34.
8. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 162.
9. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 162.
10. Scott R. Swain, Trinity, Revelation, and Reading (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 69.
11. William Ames, Medulla, 1.34.5.
12. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 90-91.
13. cf. James P. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: T&T Clark, 2012).
14. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:429.
15. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 158.
16. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:61, 85, 86.
17. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 165.
