The Upper Register Blog

In view of the recent controversy concerning Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns, I found some great quotes by B. B. Warfield in his article on Inspiration (in the old ISBE edited by James Orr). Note that this is in the sub-section titled “Human element in Scripture.” 

No ‘prophecy,’ Peter tells us (2 Pet. 1:21), ‘ever came by the will of man; but as borne by the Holy Ghost, men spake from God.’ Here the whole initiative is assigned to God, and such complete control of the human agents that the product is truly God’s work. The men who speak in this “prophecy of scripture” speak not of themselves or out of themselves, but from “God”: they speak only as they are “borne by the Holy Ghost.” But it is they, after all, who speak. Scripture is the product of man, but only of man speaking from God and under such a control of the Holy Spirit as that in their speaking they are “borne” by Him. 

It seems to me that Enns argues for a different theory of divine authorship than the organic theory of Warfield. For Enns, divine authorship consists merely in God’s providence in sovereignly developing the cultural horizons of the human authors and guiding them to write down what they wrote, with all of their enculturated foibles, messiness, non-historical myths, diversity, and bizarre second temple hermeneutical behavior. Due to the sovereignty of God, the end-product is what God wants us to have, warts and all. The Bible is therefore God’s “gift” to the church. How do we get divine “revelation” out of this thoroughly human document? Well, the church has to take this “gift” and perform some sophisticated hermeneutical operations — e.g., non-harmonistically comparing the theological diversity, separating the kernel of theological truth from the chaff of mythical story-telling, discerning how the whole narrative fits together via a first naive reading followed by a second Christotelic reading, and so on. Once we’ve done all that, then somehow this messy book can function as a rule of faith and practice, although our theological formulations will always be provisional and constantly changing as we engage in various enculturated missional contexts. 

For Warfield, by contrast, divine authorship consists in a most intimate, active, and internal divine concursus, working in and with the human authors, so that God himself is speaking, addressing, and revealing truth to us, by taking up, using, controlling, and cleansing from error the human authors’ will, thoughts, cultural upbringing and experiences. The Bible is thus much more than a gift to us that we then use as a tool for doing missions and theology. It is divine speech directly addressing us to which we must submit. It is the words of God in and through the words of men, words that God himself has taken up as an instrument in order to become a vehicle of his own direct revelation and communication.

Note how the NT writers often say that God or the Holy Spirit spoke through the mouth of the prophets (all quotes from NASB):

“… as He spoke by [dia] the mouth of His holy prophets from of old” (Lk 1:70)

“… the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by [dia] the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time” (Acts 3:21)

“… who [= the Lord who made the earth and sea and all that is in them] by the Holy Spirit, [through] the mouth of our father David Your servant, said …” (Acts 4:25 - although the preposition dia is lacking in the second clause, it is probably to be supplied from the previous clause, “by [dia] the Holy Spirit”)

“He [the One who swore in His wrath that they would never enter His rest] again fixes a certain day, ‘Today,’ saying through [en] David after so long a time …” (Heb 4:7 - Semitic instrumental en)

In addition, Matthew often uses a similar construction albeit with divine agency implied by the use of the divine passive, e.g., “Then what had been spoken [sc. by God] through [dia] Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled” (Matt 2:17; cp. 4:14; 8:17; 12:17; etc.).

Passages such as these support Warfield’s organic theory because they bring together both the human and the divine element, but place the accent on the divine element — it is God who is speaking, but he is doing so “through” (dia) the human authors.

Now it’s important to point out that this is not a dictation theory of inspiration, as if the will, mind, experience, and culture of the human authors are totally bypassed. There are actually three theories on the table here (at least in this discussion):  the dictation theory, the organic theory (Warfield), and Enns’s theory. Enns’s critics — whether Greg Beale or some of the faculty at WTS – are not fundamentalists. They do not deny the human element of Scripture nor do they wish to defend a dictation theory of inspiration. Their concern, rather, is to uphold the precious truth that Warfield articulates here (same article):

The gift of Scripture through its human authors took place by a process much more intimate than can be expressed by the term “dictation,” and that it took place in a process in which the control of the Holy Spirit was too complete and pervasive to permit the human qualities of the secondary authors in any way to condition the purity of the product as the word of God. The Scriptures, in other words, are conceived by the writers of the New Testament as through and through God’s book, in every part expressive of His mind, given through men after a fashion which does no violence to their nature as men, and constitutes the book also men’s book as well as God’s, in every part expressive of the mind of its human authors.

Can Enns say that? In view of his argument that large swaths of biblical history are essentially ANE myth and that the NT writers engaged in strange second temple hermeneutical practices, Enns seems unable to affirm that “the control of the Holy Spirit was too complete and pervasive to permit the human qualities of the secondary authors in any way to condition the purity of the product as the word of God” (what a great sentence!). On Enns’s view, the product is impure. It is thoroughly enculturated into its own milieu, even to the point of containing myths presented as if they were straightforward history.

Later in the article, Warfield speaks of God’s providence in preparing the human authors to do their work. It would seem that Enns would go along with that section. But in a subsequent section titled, “‘Inspiration’ More than Mere ’Providence’,” Warfield explains that providence is not enough and that there was an additional divine operation called “inspiration” which elevated the words of the human authors beyond their mere human capacity:

This is the reason for the superinduction, at the end of the long process of the production of Scripture, of the additional Divine operation which we call technically “inspiration.” By it, the Spirit of God, flowing confluently in with the providentially and graciously determined work of men, spontaneously producing under the Divine directions the writings appointed to them, gives the product a Divine quality unattainable by human powers alone. Thus, these books become not merely the word of godly men, but the immediate word of God Himself, speaking directly as such to the minds and hearts of every reader. The value of “inspiration” emerges, thus, as twofold. It gives to the books written under its “bearing” a quality which is truly superhuman; a trustworthiness, an authority, a searchingness, a profundity, a profitableness which is altogether Divine. And it speaks this Divine word immediately to each reader’s heart and conscience; so that he does not require to make his way to God, painfully, perhaps even uncertainly [sounds like Enns!], through the words of His servants, the human instruments in writing the Scriptures, but can listen directly to the Divine voice itself speaking immediately in the Scriptural word to him.

One does not come away from reading Inspiration and Incarnation with the sense that Enns would be able to say that we “can listen directly to the Divine voice itself speaking immediately in the Scriptural word to [us].”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Inerrancy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.