What it means for the Bible to be inspired

When Christians say the Bible is inspired, or that it is the word of God, that phrase can be misunderstood. Some people think the Bible is the word of God because God penned every word in it and used some kind of heavenly parcel delivery service to send it down to earth. But Jews and Christians have always known that the parts of the Bible that came directly from God, such as the Ten Commandments God wrote on the tablets at Mount Sinai, are few and far between. Instead, it was human beings who picked up pens and wrote the Bible’s original manuscripts.

A more common mistake is to believe that although human beings wrote the physical words found in the Bible, they were only the mechanical authors of Scripture. According to this view, none of the Bible’s texts came from the human authors’ minds, but from God’s mind alone. The human authors either recorded the revelation God audibly gave them or God took control of their bodies and wrote his revelation through them. As Protestant author Jasper James Ray put it, “The very words of the Bible were given to the authors, and not just the ideas they convey. The writers were not left to choose the words.”[1]

This brings us to our first rule for reading the Bible: The Bible’s human authors were not divine stenographers. The idea that the human authors of Scripture recorded what God said just as a stenographer records courtroom testimony is common in certain kinds of biblical fundamentalism, which, according to the Pontifical Biblical Commission:

seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human … for this reason, it tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the Spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods.[2]

But this “dictation theory” of inspiration doesn’t make sense of passages like 1 Corinthians 1:14-16, in which Paul wrote: “I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.)”

Paul didn’t write down whatever God told him because God would have known who Paul baptized. Instead, Paul used his own ideas and own words to write to the Christians in Corinth. That being said, God is still the author of Scripture even if the Bible’s human authors used their own words and ideas when they wrote the Bible. According to Dei Verbum:

The books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself. In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which he wanted.[3]

Another way to understand the inspiration of Scripture is to compare it to the Incarnation. When God the Son became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, he remained a divine person with a divine nature; but in becoming man, God the Son acquired an additional human nature. Christ’s humanity did not affect his divine nature, but neither was Christ’s humanity “swallowed up” in his divinity. Christ was and still is fully God and fully man.

During his earthly ministry, Christ was the eternal and omnipotent God, but as a man he possessed human limitations that do not belong to the divine nature. For example, he would thirst (John 19:28), grow tired (John 4:6), and even weep (John 11:35). The Second Vatican Council taught that Christ “has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.”[4]

Just as Christ is God’s Word that became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), Scripture is God’s word made into written characters that dwells among us.[5] Dei Verbum taught: “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.”[6] Pope St. John Paul II agreed and said in an address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, “After the heavenly glorification of the humanity of the Word made flesh, it is again due to written words that his stay among us is attested to in an abiding way.”[7]

This analogy also illustrates a similarity between people of the first century who rejected Christ’s divinity because all they saw was his humanity, and people of the twenty first century who reject the Bible because all they see are the limits of its human authors. As Scott Hahn says,

To put it bluntly, the written word of God strikes many as too human to be divine. Unnumbered intellectuals throughout history have thus faced the scandal of the Bible and chosen to reject it. In this way too the inspired Word treads the path of the incarnate Word and mirrors its mystery.[8]