How do you understand the Inspiration of Scripture.
Most Christians affirm that Scripture is inspired, but it seems there is quite a bit of difference in defining what it is. Some would say the writers wrote what the Holy Spirit dictated, while others would say the writers were inspired from faith and wrote for faith. I think the different understanding of the inspiration of Scriptures inform our understanding of the primacy of Holy Writ.
Comments
In that sense, while I have great respect for it as an authority on Jesus Christ, especially for anyone who would call themselves Christian, I don't have a particularly high view of its divine inspiration.
I also feel like expressing an opinion on a serious question of this sort is like binding a steel rod to your head during a thunderstorm. Such is faith.
An analogy for me is the harmony and discord of music. There I know and experience inspiration in listening. “Ode to Joy”, the sublime “Pearl Fishers” duet by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill. That’s much more than an aesthetic appreciation. I’m uplifted. So it is with the most sublime scriptures. But definitely not with all scriptures.
I think it’s perfectly possible to sit, as the Reformers say, under scripture, recognise and accept the challenges and also be honestly aware of what is going on in me at the same time.
I’m a part of a Christian Community and that’s important. It’s a help in recognising inspiration in others. in the midst of our fallibilities. It’s important to recognise my, and their, fallibilities. It can also be inspiring. I’ve had some of that this week.
Pretty well where I'm at, given that this is another of those things that are much discussed because none of us really knows.
Forgive me, but that's about what scripture does to you, not about how it was done.
As Christians coming to those same words two thousand years or more later then regardless of the mode of inspiration we still need to do our due diligence to understand those words - using the skills of translators to give us the words in English (as most don't read Greek or Hebrew), ideally multiple translators taking particular care where they may disagree, and commentators. We still need to know the culture that these words were written in and to, how people in that time and place would have understood those words, what issues and concerns were being addressed. And, after all that we still need to work through how those words would apply to our lives today.
This is inspired because it is also the gradual revelation of God to people as much as they can handle and accept.
And they can then inspire us in our seeking of the divine. We are on the same journey, so they can teach us.
I like the music analogy, because my experience is that music “speaks” directly, touching the heart and the mind.
To quote myself, I do sit under Scripture, but that doesn’t stop me having questions and provisional opinions. And to quote the Northumbria Community, to which I also belong, the ‘heretical imperative’, (the freedom to question) is a good thing.
I’m not the measure of anything! But it’s probably better to say that scripture inspires me, rather than the other way round.
Do you mean the Quran is 'expired' rather than 'inspired'?
'Men (people) moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.'
The Incarnation is the key to all of this.
If Christ can be God and human at one and the same time so the Bible can also be divinely inspired and humanly constructed at one and the same time and the Church can both be a 'divine' and also very human institution at one and the same time.
Most debates about 'inerrancy' and 'infallibility' in relation to inspiration etc leave me cold. Not because I don't think they are important but because they almost inevitably, in my view, lead to a form of brittle reductionism.
It all becomes very 'Scholastic' in the negative sense.
It really isn't. The Quran is the final revelation of God to humanity. The Bible is an earlier revelation. Unless you're a Mormon. Or a Scientologist. Then, you have other, newer books.
I heard the other day about someone who lost their faith because they found out that the Petrine epistles may not have been written by the Apostle Peter himself.
Babies and bathwater...
All or nothing thinking can be very dangerous.
I've read that a lot of the impetus behind terms such as inerrant and infallible is to do with Scottish common sense philosophy whatever that is/was.
If there is inspiration, then it happens through the ongoing miracle of the Incarnation - human beings with the Holy Spirit within them - which at least can be all of us - understanding themselves and life in the light of that spirit.
I'd say that your understanding of what Muslims believe about it doesn't not make it the last revelation of God/Allah/YHWH. The Bible is an amazing anthology. The Quran is an amazing testament. "All truth" would seem to include them both. And others.
I suspect it's a reference to the Scottish Enlightenment.
There is a bigger difference. Christians believe that God's last revelation to humanity was in the person of Jesus Christ, and the Bible is how humans learn about him. Muslims believe that God's last revelation to humanity was the Quran, and the Prophet Muhammad is how humans learned about it.
Or at least that's my understanding as both a non-Christian and a non-Muslim.
I think there's variance as to the degree of "Divine Dictaphone" thinking from Christian to Christian, but your sense matches mine. Jesus was the incarnation and the Bible was the record of his life, by degrees divinely directed.
Mohamed's text, by contrast, was supposed to be God's verbatim transcription, which is why it's really important for followers of Islam to learn the text in its original language.
I had a friend who was a professor of modern Arabic who complained about Muslims who'd come to her class expecting to learn classical Arabic, which they wanted to learn exclusively to read the Quran. It was awkward.
It's a pseudepigraphical anecdote written 500 years after it was set, and it shows. It's too good.
That process, best described as part of the process of lower criticism (the collection and assembly of the texts) is well documented, generally accepted, certainly by Protestant scholars. But it mostly postdates the writings of the Reform theologians (e.g Luther, Calvin).
And that does produce tension.
All very, as in completely, 110%, natural Alan. I'm fully aware of the oral tradition, of the story. It all fits in the story, and the history, of Judeo-Christian belief, of belief.
The PA is the most sublimely beautiful story in the story. That and Mary Magdalene at the tomb. Jesus saying her name. Also only Johannine. Late C1st at best.
No wonder they selected them.
Mass of documents? From the C1st?
I'm sorry, but his own words come back to me, not as he meant, '“So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.".
In all of infinite 99.99..99% unknowable, ineffable physics and that which emerges from it, show me why it's more than belief. Show me the Spirit. Show me Love. Apart from that which emerges in us. That we breathe. Show me impossible, unnatural Love. The story of transcendent Judaism as a whole is far, far from it. Inspiration.R.Us, from the the neuron up.
Of course if you don’t believe that human beings are in some sense, made in the image of God you will believe it’s just natural.
(“Total depravity” is often misunderstood to mean human beings can’t do anything good. It certainly means all human behaviour is affected by pervasive sinfulness. For example, unselfish kindness, certainly an act of love, may also connect with a selfish desire to be well thought of. That doesn’t mean the unselfish act is not good.)
Well, I'm skirting close to the wind, trying to orbit close to inspiration. If divine love(=inspiration) looks natural, then it's not behaving un/super/naturally. If everything that occurs occurs as if the supernatural didn't inspire it. do it, create it, why invoke that infinite superfluity? Apart from as a bias?
To borrow an analogy from Fr Gregory who used to frequent these boards, divine inspiration/intervention isn't to be seen like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animation of a giant foot descending from the clouds and splattering whatever it treads on.
Rather, it is a process of God working in and through all things, often imperceptibly.
That's my both/and take, I'm afraid. Human beings writing, compiling, editing and canonising scripture but with God the Holy Spirit working in and through that process.
Modern scholarship can help us see the development of scriptural texts, doctrines and creedal formularies. Just as modern science can help us see how life on earth developed.
These things are only a 'threat' if we take a somewhat woodenly fundamentalist line in our understanding of these processes.
If presented with irrefutable evidence of the existence of the divine then believing isn't having faith, it's just following the evidence.
Faith is to believe, to trust, to follow when there isn't irrefutable evidence.
As @ThunderBunk helpfully put it, in this world God is present Incarnationally. To any measure that could be applied, Jesus was fully human, yet he was also God. To any measure that can be applied, the Church is a group of human beings, yet also the Body of Christ. To any measure that can be applied, Scripture is the work of human beings, yet God breathes through it.
Faith is to see that beyond what can be seen there's the unseen God.
Absolutely. In the absence of anything miraculous in the text, i.e. something that cannot be there naturally, a six+ sigma wossname, anachronism, or anywhere in nature; nature, phusis, physics, the 0.00..001% of it that we can ever possibly understand and the 99.99..99% that we never can, explains everything.
They're synonymous. Faith, inspiration - it's all one monist thing - emerges in biased neurons.
God can breathe any time He likes that we might know it.
I think there's a paradox here.
For a lot of conservative thinking - and I don't necessarily mean to use the label as an epithet - there needs to be a corral. There are rules, you follow them. The rules tell you how to act, and we all must agree to the rules for the sake of getting along together.
You can attach this kind of thinking to big name thinkers across cultures. Thomas Hobbes and Kung Fu Tzu (latinized Confucius) come to mind as big examples.
And deep down, you can't really trust people to do that, so you..as I would put it snarkily...outsource your conscience to a document. The Constitution, the Magna Carta, The Analects, the Bible, the Decalogue, etc. You often know these texts because people insist that they be written with Capital Letters. They are Important.
If we can't trust each other, we can't trust ourselves, we can trust...the text! Even better if the text has a veneer of divine gloss to is, a divine grace given by God!
And across the board, you get an entire school of scholars who study these texts and understand them because, truthfully,, the truth is rather tricky to implement. This si why texts like the Talmud exist. And I think every school of law has a version of that, let's not pick on any particular ethnic group.
Trouble is that you can't really do that. You can't erase yourself from your interpretive act, whether you're a pew-warming fundamentalist or a highfalutin biblical scholar. It's all the same. And I did have an African American professor warn us about the hazards of treating "the consensus of biblical scholarship" as if it were some kind of objective read. There is no objective read. It's always a dialog with a text.
The paradox is that - I suspect - if you are irresponsible in your need for textual authority, you will project your own ego onto the text and instead of using the text to do what you say you're trying to do - to restrain your selfish wants and desires - you'll end up using it to magnify and even deify them.
And lest conservatives think I've got a target in mind, liberals do that too. We all do.
Let's just try to be honest about it. I do, as a Christian, feel forced to accept Scriptural authority because I can't realistically say I know anything of Christ that wasn't learned through the Church, and in the end, all of that goes back to the Gospel. But I don't think it's appropriate - for me - to use the Bible like it's an all-encompassing everything-explainer. I think that's an abuse of the text that ultimately leads to the abuse of people.
Calling the text inerrant or infallible is dangerously, dangerously close to calling yourself inerrant and infallible if you're careless. I know I'm too fallible to know what infallible looks like. It's enough work trying to clean up my own folly.
54. Be very, very careful what you wish for, and be thankfuul for small merctes.
Nope squared. We'd understand our dead coming back instantly. Or some lesser demonstration that all is well for all. Why should I be careful? If the Love that isn't there were, it would be obvious. And it could not harm me.
Shucks, you're welcome. I think some of those notions have been rattling around in my brain for years, so I'm glad to have had the opportunity to write them down.
Genius is often often in going to the next step that nobody else has: belief in infallibility and inerrancy is self belief. By analogy, when we read we feel subconsciously as smart as the writer. I worked that out decades ago, and hey presto, some man of letters said it on BBC Radio 4. Damn I consciously felt smart!
And it's all so pathetically obvious in hindsight...
I do get a kick out of it when I read an insight in an editorial that I thought of myself. That happens sometimes.
But then, prophecy is often just seeing what's happening around you. I remember in seminary, folks would be like "Hey! Jesus was written in the gospels as having predicted the downfall of Jerusalem! That means someone wrote those bits in after the fall of Jerusalem!"
And I'm like "Or...maybe he was just savvy enough to realize that going toe to toe with the Roman Empire wouldn't end well for his compatriots and tried to gently warn them that they were all going to die for their arrogance?
There's a comment on divinity there somewhere.
As a simplification, the prophets are inspired to declare a message as in "The Word of God came to XXXX". Then the sages come to own, or even control the message.
Then along comes another prophet that challenges the control of the sages. E.g The Story of Ruth challenges the Deuteronomic law against Moabites, Isaiah and Acts challenge the law against eunuchs.
This repeats, though a certain group may say inspiration has ended. E.g Torah, Tanakh, Christian Canons.
(There seems to be some similarity with the five kingdoms of the ancient world, with the current kingdom being the one without end.)
Ruth seems to me as much a product of the sage-tendency as of the prophetic tendency, and while Jonah is about a prophet it's not by a prophet.