Three Minute Theology 2.2: A God-Breathed Book

When I was a kid, one of my aunts had an antique stereoscope in her living room.

The stereoscope was sort of a 19th Century version of the 3-D TV.  They came with a collection of black and white photographs that looked three dimensional when you viewed them through the viewer.  Each photograph had the same image printed on it twice, and the stereoscope played with the depth perception of your eyes, making the two images fuse together into a single, 3-dimmensional scene.

If you only looked through one lens, the picture was flat and two dimensional, but when you looked through both lenses at the same time, it took on 3 dimensional depth and life.

The Bible is like this, in some ways.

There’s a place in the New Testament where it says that the Scriptures are “God-breathed”—that they were spoken by God.  Theologians sometimes use the term “Inspiration” to talk about this, the idea that God himself “breathed-out” the words of the Bible; and Christians believe quite strongly that the Bible is the Inspired Word of God—that when we read it, we’re actually hearing from God himself.

But how should we understand this?

               

Some people approach the Bible as though it were literally dictated by God, that the humans who wrote it were just recording word-for-word what they heard God say, as clearly as if he were speaking to them on the phone. 

Others dismiss the idea of divine inspiration altogether, and feel the Bible’s just a human record of people’s ideas about God.  An interesting book, but not anything God wrote.

Both of these approaches—seeing the Bible as simply a human creation, or seeing the Bible as something dictated word-for-word by God—are kind of like looking at a stereoscope through only one lens.  The picture is going to be flat.

If we really want the Bible to come to life, we need to view it through both lenses at once: it’s a human book, that people wrote and edited and crafted, and, at the same time, it’s a divine book, that God spoke, and shaped and inspired.  

Maybe a musical analogy will help.  Different musical instruments have different tonal qualities and character, depending on the material they’re made of and how the notes are sounded.  A trumpet is bright and explosive.  A clarinet is breathy and earthy.  A kazoo is nasally and playful.  The same musician could breathe into each of those instruments, and her breath would produce three very distinct sounds.

She could play the exact same song on all three instruments, the very same notes, and no matter how good she is, the clarinet won’t ever sound like a trumpet and the kazoo will never sound like a clarinet.

               

If the musician is God and her breath is God’s Spirit, and if the different instruments are the different authors who actually wrote the Bible, this is a useful way of thinking about “Inspiration.”

Because the authors who wrote the various books of the Bible had each encountered God in a unique, unrepeatable way; and then, while God’s Spirit was working in their hearts, they recorded what it was God was saying to them through that encounter.  Like a musician picking up an instrument, God’s Spirit was “breathing through them,” determining the song that came out.

But at the same time, they were writing as people, with individual personalities and perspectives and passions, all of which determined how they would tell the story, choose the words, record the message. 

Just like a clarinet doesn’t stop sounding like a clarinet, or a trumpet like a trumpet, just because it’s the same musician playing both, the fact that God was speaking through them doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also them speaking; and even though the words were their words, it’s still God’s Word we’re hearing when we read them.

Or, like it says in one place, the Sacred Writings don’t have their origin in human beings, but human beings spoke from God, as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.