In order to insure the clarity of what inspiration is and is not, it is probably important to first state what inspiration is not. The following four points should be helpful. Inspiration is not:

1) mechanical dictation, or perhaps automatic writing, or any process which involves the suspension of the action of the human writer’s mind. Such concepts of inspiration are found in the Talmud, Philo and the Fathers, but not in the Bible. The divine direction and control under which the biblical authors wrote was not a physical or psychological force. It did not detract from but rather heightened the freedom, spontaneity, and creativeness of their writing.

2) an obliteration of the real personality, style, outlook, and cultural conditioning of the authors. This does not mean that God’s control of them was imperfect, or that they inevitably distorted the truth they had been given to convey in the process of writing it down. If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared Paul to write them and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.

3) a quality that keeps corruptions from intruding in the course of the transmission of the text, but only to the text as originally produced by the inspired writers.The acknowledgement of biblical inspiration thus makes more urgent the task of meticulous textual criticism, in order to eliminate such corruptions and ascertain what the original text was.

4) to be equated with the inspiredness of great literature, not even when the biblical writing is in fact great literature. The biblical idea of inspiration relates not to the literary quality of what is written, but to its character as divine revelation in writing.

Inspiration must be carefully defined because of the varied uses of this term and the wrong ideas about inspiration being promoted today, ideas that are inconsistent with what the Bible itself teaches regarding inspiration. Inspiration may be defined as God’s superintendence of the human authors of Scripture so that using their own individual personalities, they composed and recorded without error His revelation to man in the words of the original autographs.

This definition can be broken down into its various parts. In subsequent issues I will note several elements that are vital to the understanding of this key concept of inspiration. Hopefully you, my readers, are getting a better idea of what we mean when we say that the Bible is inspired. Ask yourself: What do I think about the Bible?