The doctrine of verbal inspiration should not be confused with a kind of mania that eliminates human agency.[1] When the Bible and the later Lutheran scholastics speak of verbal inspiration, they do not mean that God took over the minds of the prophets and apostles so that they ceased to function consciously as the men they were.
Nevertheless, it is very common to hear modern scholars and theologians attack the theologians of scholastic orthodoxy for essentially teaching such a doctrine. For example, Matthew Becker suggests that verbal inspiration and inerrancy erase human agency in the production of the Scriptures.[2] Becker claims Johann Gerhard taught that divine inspiration makes the inspired author like a flute played by God.[3] Such a claim lacks validity: Gerhard never uses such an analogy in his treatment of inspiration.
The manic concept of inspiration actually is present not in the Protestant scholastics but in the Ante-Nicene fathers. Indeed, one finds the flute analogy for divine inspiration in the second-century apologist Athenagoras.[4] As men of their time and cultural milieu, these theologians often borrowed this concept of inspiration from earlier Jewish and Hellenistic sources. Within the Palestinian Jewish tradition, the intertestamental Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) speaks of Moses receiving the Torah as a whole on Mt. Sinai in the form of heavenly tablets.[5] This concept suggests an extraordinarily crude notion of inspiration as a kind of literal dictation.
Likewise, pagan Hellenistic culture possessed a concept of prophecy that was manic. Inspiration was understood as a state wherein the rationality and self-consciousness of the individual disappeared and was replaced by the divine agent, whatever form that might take.[6] Taking over this conception as part of their cultural assimilation, some Hellenistic Jews (notably Philo of Alexandria) came to think of Moses and the prophets as entering a kind of trance state brought on by the power of the Spirit.[7] Although Hellenistic Jews and the later Ante-Nicene fathers generally did not think the prophets and apostles had behaved in an irrational manner in the state of inspiration,[8] they nevertheless did speak of God taking over their minds.[9]
Although admittedly there are portions of the Bible where those prophesying enter into a trancelike state (1 Sm 10:10–12; 19:24), there is no evidence to suggest that such a state led to the production of the Scriptures themselves. Indeed, writings like the Psalms embody a genuinely human voice that prays, laments, repents, and praises God. At the same time the Psalms repeatedly are referred to by Jesus and the New Testament authors as divine prophecy and therefore the very voice of God (Mk 12:35–37; Jn 10:30–36; Acts 4:25–26; Heb 2:6–8, etc.).
[1] Franzmann, “New Testament View of Inspiration,” 746.
[2] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305–6.
[3] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305.
[4] See Leslie William Barnard, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 76.
[5] Leslie Baynes, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE–200 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 110.
[6] See Christopher Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 124–42.
[7] For example, Philo writes of prophecy: “No pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own; he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances . . . when knowing not what he does he is filled with inspiration, as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citadel of his soul to a new visitor and tenant, the Divine Spirit which plays upon his vocal organism and dictates words which clearly express its prophetic message.” Philo, De specialibus legibus 4.49. Cited in Henri Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 503.
[8] Charles Hill, “‘The Truth above All Demonstration’: Scripture in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 81–83.
[9] Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” 503–4; Preus, “View of the Bible,” 363.
From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 132-133.