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.
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