C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 73 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session is the bridge of the whole course: what you believe about inspiration will quietly determine how you interpret every page of your Bible. The teachers separate three words Christians constantly blur, walk the full spectrum of views from a purely human book to a divinely dictated one, and land on a paradox: Scripture is one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man. Then comes the warning about a heresy most Bible-loving people have never heard named.
Inspiration bridges everything behind and ahead: behind it lie transmission and canon, ahead lie the sessions on hermeneutics, and without a considered doctrine of inspiration, interpretation collapses into folk hermeneutics, habits absorbed rather than examined. How God got his words into this text determines how those words are to be read. The teachers call the doctrine the sine qua non of evangelical theology, the watershed issue: in most circles, what marks an evangelical today is not evangelism but a view of Scripture.
Revelation is God’s act of revealing truth, through nature and through his word. Inspiration is God’s act of guiding the writers of Scripture, giving them his words while fully utilizing the human element, to produce the Scriptures. Illumination is God’s act of enlightening people to understand his revelation and its bearing on their lives. The distinction carries everything: inspiration is objective, the voice of God on the page; illumination is subjective, gradual, mixed with our misunderstandings, incapable of self-verification. When David looked at the stars and wrote Psalm 19, revelation met inspiration and Scripture resulted; when we look at the same stars, or read his psalm and something connects, that is illumination, real but fallible. We often say inspired when we mean illumined, and the dictionary’s broad uses of the word must not be read back into the Bible’s narrow one.
The line between the words can move in one direction only. Matthew read the Old Testament and saw fulfillments no one had seen; John announces a new commandment, to love one another, that is as old as Moses, made new because Christ’s self-sacrificing life redefined what love had always meant. In each case an inspired writer’s illumination, once written under the Spirit’s carrying, became inspired Scripture, moving from the subjective column to the objective one. That door is closed to us: unless someone bears the verified marks of a prophet, their best illumination remains illumination, never to be written down as thus says the Lord.
Two passages anchor the doctrine. In 2 Timothy 3 Paul writes that all Scripture is theopneustos, God-breathed, strictly breathed out by God rather than breathed into, and profitable to equip the man of God for every good work; Paul is not mentally listing which books existed yet, he is speaking of the concept: whatever is Scripture is God-breathed. In 2 Peter 1, no prophecy of Scripture came from one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. The teachers correct a famous misuse: the connecting for shows the verse is about the writer, not the reader. It does not forbid private reading, as some Catholic apologists claim; it guarantees that what Paul wrote was not Paul’s private theory about God but God’s word through Paul. The verb is pherō, to carry: as wind fills a sail and bears the ship along, the Spirit carried the authors, not bypassing them but taking them where he willed.
A preview of the hermeneutics to come, given as homework: read Genesis and look for the faith of Abraham. It is not there. Genesis presents Abraham as a man of obedience and uses the word believed of him only once, at Genesis 15:6; it is the New Testament, in Romans and in Hebrews 11, that names him the great man of faith. We read Genesis through lenses the later Scriptures ground, usually without noticing, and learning to notice is what the coming sessions are about.
The theories of inspiration run along a spectrum. The natural view says gifted men wrote out of their God-given abilities alone: one hundred percent man, the Bible as great literature, inspiration in the sense a painting is inspired, congenial to minds that shy from the supernatural. The illumination view adds a divine assist: the Spirit moved certain men to write above their natural capacity, mostly man with God’s help at the edges, as a friend might fix your spelling: the fingerprint of God, the teachers say, but not the hand of God.
The partial view holds that Scripture is inspired only in matters of faith, practice, and doctrine, while history, science, genealogies, and greetings are merely the record of men: the call of Romans 12 is God’s, but bring my cloak is just Paul. The teachers observe wryly that whatever we confess, many of us functionally live this view, reading only the parts that feel inspired. Degree inspiration goes differently: all of Scripture is inspired, but in accommodating language, a kind of baby talk, so the creation account may borrow the cosmology of its day, the firmament and the waters above, and the flood account may accommodate the flood stories of the surrounding nations, with the message, God made all things, God judges the earth, carried intact inside forms that need not be precise. The parallels between Genesis and older Babylonian and Egyptian creation accounts drive this view, and the teachers note honestly that some respected evangelical theologians hold it, and that C. S. Lewis himself, literary critic that he was, held something like the partial view and is hard to place on the chart at all.
At the far end stands mechanical dictation: God simply used the passive hand of man to write his words, one hundred percent God, zero percent man, the human author a pen and nothing more. This is how Mormonism describes the giving of its book, letter by letter, and how Islam understands the Quran. Within Scripture itself, only something like the tablets of the ten commandments, written by God’s own hand, in two copies with all ten words on each, approaches dictation. As a theory of the whole Bible it fails on its face, for reasons the next section makes plain, and the teachers rank it, together with the natural view at the other extreme, as equally erroneous and equally destructive.
The evangelical doctrine refuses the spectrum’s arithmetic altogether: verbal plenary inspiration holds that all of Scripture, not merely its concepts or its doctrinal matter, was inspired by God, who fully utilized the human element within man to produce the Scriptures without error. Not fifty-fifty, not ninety-ten: one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man, a paradox held in tension like the truth it mirrors. The terms are battle scars: verbal, every word and not just ideas, answers the degree view; plenary, all of it and not just parts, answers the partial view; and the vocabulary hardened in the controversies that began with the higher criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and came to full articulation in the inerrancy debates of the twentieth. The proof that man was not bypassed is on every page: no uniform divine handwriting, but Paul’s emotions, John’s vocabulary, the structure of Hebrews, personality everywhere.
A final chart asks where, exactly, inspiration resides. In the mind of God alone, so that truth is finally unattainable to finite minds, the instinct of the Christian East? In the mind of the author, so that Paul received perfect thoughts but might fumble the writing? In the message proclaimed, the neo-orthodox view associated with Karl Barth, where the closed Bible is not inspired but becomes the word of God in the encounter of preaching? In the message received, the postmodern step further, where inspiration happens differently in every reader? The teachers answer: inspiration lies jointly in the mind of the author and in the written words, a both-and that cannot be split, while everything on the receiving side of the chart is illumination, real, subjective, and never to be confused with the objective voice of God in the text. And this settles the method of all interpretation to come: because the text cannot be severed from its author’s mind, the interpreter’s task is authorial intent, why Paul wrote Romans, what Ezekiel was facing, never a bare text floating free of the man God carried.
The first heresy the church fought denied not Christ’s deity but his humanity: docetism, from the Greek dokeo, to seem, the Gnostic claim that the Son only seemed to have a body, since matter was evil. The teachers name its modern cousin: biblical docetism, an approach to Scripture that neglects the human element entirely and reads the Bible only as the book of God, often downstream of dictation thinking. Its fruits are familiar: opening the Bible at random for a personal message; assuming every verse applies directly to you, the fate of 2 Chronicles 7:14, a promise to Israel claimed for one modern nation alone; treating chapter numbers, verse numbers, and even canon order as inspired; ignoring the writer’s personality, situation, and genre; assuming everything recorded in the Bible is asserted as true, as though the speeches of Job’s friends carried God’s endorsement; and insisting everything be taken literally, though no one has yet gouged out an eye over Matthew 5. The Bible, like the Lord it reveals, must be received as fully divine and fully human; to deny either nature is the same old heresy in a new binding.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why do the teachers call this session the bridge of the course?
2. Which set of definitions matches the three key terms?
3. What is the crucial difference between inspiration and illumination?
4. How does John’s new commandment illustrate illumination becoming inspiration?
5. What does theopneustos strictly mean?
6. What does the connecting for in 2 Peter 1:20 and 21 establish?
7. What picture does the verb pherō give of the Spirit’s work in the authors?
8. What will the homework reader discover about Abraham in Genesis?
9. What separates the illumination view of inspiration from the natural view?
10. What drives the degree-inspiration view, on the teachers’ account?
11. Which books do the teachers name as claiming mechanical dictation for themselves?
12. What do the words verbal and plenary each answer?
13. What evidence shows God did not bypass the human authors?
14. Where do the teachers locate inspiration on their final chart?
15. Why is Karl Barth’s view named on the chart?
16. Which reading habits does biblical docetism produce?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
The teachers say many Christians confess verbal plenary inspiration but functionally live partial inspiration, reading only the parts that feel inspired. Where does your own reading skip, and what would it mean to receive the genealogies and greetings as God-breathed too?
Illumination is real but subjective, gradual, and mixed with our misunderstandings. How do you test what you believe God has shown you in Scripture, and what keeps that testing from becoming either cynicism or credulity?
The session ends by comparing the Bible to Christ: fully divine, fully human, with heresy on either side. Which side do you drift toward, treating Scripture as a magic book or as merely human literature, and what would reading it as both look like this week?
The anchor of the doctrine, from 2 Peter 1: no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: take up the homework assignment and read Genesis looking for the faith of Abraham, noticing what the text actually says of him and where the language of faith truly enters; and work the discussion questions in community. The course turns next to proving inspiration: how the claim that this book is God-breathed can be justified without arguing in a circle.