I have been sharing in this article various thoughts about the driving force underlying the creation of the writings of Sacred Scripture. The word that is usually used to signify this driving force is inspiration. As I have already shared, there have been many different understandings about inspiration. What is the relationship between the divine and the human in the origin of Scripture? Although our Catholic doctrine recognizes that in the origin of Scripture there is both a divine and human factor, it also insists that these two factors are not on the same level, but that there is an instrumental subordination of the human factor to the divine. The pattern for this relationship is to be found in Scripture itself in passages such as Acts 4:25 where God is said to utter the words of a psalm through the mouth of David. The verse in Acts is:

Sovereign Lord, who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them, you have said by the Holy Spirit through the lips of our father David your servant….

This instrumental subordination of man to God in the production of Scripture is emphatically and frequently expressed in the patristic comparisons used to illustrate the role of the human authors in composing the sacred books: They are the mouth, finger, minister, or deacon of God. The idea implicit in these images for the divine-human relationship was put philosophically and abstractly in the Middle Ages in such statements as that of Thomas Aquinas: The principal author of Sacred Scripture is the Holy Spirit; man was the instrumental author. Even though this instrumental subordination of man to God was an assured result of medieval speculation on Scripture, it did not play an important role in later theological thought until it was revitalized in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the influence of Leo XIII, Benedict XV and Pius XII.

Interest in the nature of inspiration is an aspect of theological speculation that has been developed only in modern times, as a result of the gradual discovery of the complexity of the literary artifact that is the Bible. It was not until true Biblical study and criticism developed, that the Church really began to think about the true nature of inspiration as it is applied to the Scriptures. What is the relationship between God and Man in the production of these sacred writings? I will continue sharing history and ideas.