By Peter Krol
If you’d like a brief explanation and defense of the traditional Christian doctrine of dual authorship, check out this excellent piece by Robert Cara.
Who wrote the Bible? Yes, God did. He is the divine, ultimate, and primary author. But in His providence He used humans, the secondary authors.
By Peter Krol
Lewis Varley addresses a matter commonly raised by both Muslims and secularists against the Christian doctrine of special revelation: How can a book produced by humans be inspired by God or accurately communicate divine speech and intentions? Isn’t God—according to the Christian conception—so far above us that human speech and human writing is utterly unable to adequately communicate his will?
Varley offers a number of helpful responses:
Here is a taste:
It comes as no surprise that our friends who deny that God could inhabit a human body would also deny that God’s words could also be human words. To deny the character of Scripture as a divine-human book is, by extension, to deny that God could ever come into our world, our times, our lives, but must inevitably be detached from us. To affirm the divine-human word is to affirm God’s immanent involvement in our everyday, often ordinary, lives.
By Peter Krol
Just a few years back, Michael F. Bird released a book called 7 Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible. I haven’t read the book, but this summary article is well worth your time. Bird’s seven things:
With these 7 precepts undergirding our approach to the Bible, our study will be greatly improved.
By Peter Krol
Talbot Davis makes a helpful point about the process of divine inspiration with respect to the letters of Paul:
Muslims contend that the Koran is straight dictation — all Allah, with no Mohammed filter at all.
The Christian conception of the bible is quite different. We
believe the God-breathed message of the Word gets delivered most
compellingly through the passions and personalities of the various
authors.Because if God can take a curmudgeon like Paul and turn him
into a composer of inspired texts, imagine what he can do with you and
me.
Davis explains Paul’s use of a scribe, to whom he dictated his letters. Along the way, Davis shows us that this in no way undermines the doctrine of inspiration, but rather upholds it and makes it uniquely Christian.
By Peter Krol
Sometimes conservative evangelicals get nervous when scholars start talking about the Bible’s “editors.” But there can be no doubt that it was so. Michael Heiser explains it briefly at the Logos Talk blog:
Consider the first four verses of the book of Ezekiel:
In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the Chebar canal, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month (it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin), the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the Chebar canal, and the hand of the Lord was upon him there. As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal.
The first two verses use the first person (“I”), which leads us to believe that Ezekiel himself is writing. But then there is a switch to the third person in verse three, as though the writer was not the famous prophet (“to Ezekiel”; “him”). Then it’s back to the first person (“I”) again in verse four. What’s going on? Can’t Ezekiel decide if he’s writing or not?
There’s no multiple personality disorder here. The switch between grammatical persons is simply the tell-tale sign of an editor. Someone other than Ezekiel inserted verse three to make it clear that the prophet wasn’t crazy: The prophet saw God and was led by the Spirit to describe what follows in the book.
Check it out!
