Читать книгу When People Speak for God - Henry E. Neufeld - Страница 9

There are many theories about how God inspires people to write his message. In discussing inspiration, I'm going to start from within the Christian community and specifically with the Bible. This process allows us to examine the elements of inspiration based on material that at least one community regards as inspired.

This method is somewhat circular, but there is no generally accepted set of criteria by which one can determine what is and is not inspired. If there were such criteria, whatever document contained them would clearly be the most authoritative religious work, by which all others would have to be judged.

Because we must test something that claims to be from God by standards that claim to be from God, the process is somewhat circular, though we can anchor it to more objective standards at some point. It will be critical throughout our discussion to keep in mind one simple question: What is God trying to accomplish through inspiration?

It may seem that the answer is obvious—God wanted to give us information. But as we study claims of inspiration, from ancient scriptures to modern prophets proclaiming a current word from the Lord, I'd ask you to keep an open mind on this issue. We have no way to know just what God is trying to accomplish except through his revelation to us.

Typically, Christians have found proof texts in scriptures that make comments about inspiration. “All scripture is inspired (or God-breathed) . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16). “No prophecy of the scripture came by human will . . .” (2 Peter 1:21). These texts are not only used to prove the inspiration of scriptures, but they also provide the foundation for an understanding of how inspiration works.

We will never completely escape this type of circularity, though I think there are better ways to deal with the issue. Claiming that the Bible is inspired because it says so makes a very small circle. The Bible consists of many separate documents that were combined into the canon of scripture. Does a claim of inspiration in 2 Timothy apply to Genesis? If so, why? Should we perhaps be making our claims based on the authority of the church councils that settled the question of the canon? We're going to look at these issues further in the following chapters.

I most commonly hear 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted in this connection. I ask someone what inspiration means. “All scripture is God-breathed,” comes back the answer. “God-breathed” is supposed to be obvious, but somehow the passage doesn’t enlighten us as to what God breathes, how he breathes it, and what this means for the text, other than that it is profitable (2 Timothy 3:17). Another answer, that prophets speak as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), doesn’t really answer the question either.

The process of inspiration is important not only in terms of how we understand God to behave in connection with people, but also in telling us what we would expect to result. For example, those who believe that God dictates the precise words that a prophet or other inspired writer puts on paper must in turn believe that those words, and not just the message they express, are important, and that they must always be the best words for the purpose.

On the other hand, someone who believes that people receive impressions from God and then express them in human words will place a greater emphasis on the human side of the equation. The message is important, and it may be illuminated by knowing the person who speaks along with his or her cultural background and spiritual experience.

As the author of Hebrews expressed it:

¹In old times God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets in many portions and in different ways. ²In these last days, however, he has spoken to us through a Son, one whom he has made heir of everything, and through whom also he created the universe. ³This Son is the brightness of his glory and the exact representation of his real essence. He sustains everything by his powerful word. He performed a cleansing from sins and sat down at the right hand of majesty in the {spiritual/heavenly} heights. — Hebrews 1:1-3 (HN)

God’s message came at different times and in different ways, a process that, according to the author of Hebrews, culminated in God’s message coming through a person, Jesus. In Hebrews 4:12 he continues by calling the Word “alive and active” again referring to the Word of God as portrayed in Jesus. Those who place a heavy emphasis on the words, rather than the message, should give serious consideration to the view of revelation expressed in the book of Hebrews. According to this one scriptural author, whom most scholars leave unidentified, inspiration doesn’t always work the same way.

I would suggest that instead of looking for statements about how inspiration works in the scriptures, we should look at the scriptures themselves. There are many clues as to how inspiration works in the stories and the records of those who were inspired. There is no good reason to assume that those who experienced inspiration would also feel it necessary to define it. In fact, when we look at the scriptures we see no real effort to provide us with a theory of inspiration. There were simply people who claimed that they had a message from God, and they expressed it with some force under their various circumstances.

If we look at the evidence of the text itself it doesn’t seem that in many cases we have words dictated by God. There are passages that claim to be “words of God” and others that don't. Perhaps it would be best to respect that distinction.

Other than Moses bringing the tablets of the law from Mt. Sinai, we don’t have material actually written by God. Moses himself has various scribes chronicle the activities of the Israelites as they travel through the wilderness (Genesis 17:14, for example). This would appear contradictory to the notion that Moses himself wrote the Pentateuch, or that it was delivered as a whole by God to Moses. What need of scribes to record the details if God had provided the words already?

Elsewhere in scripture we have communication given through dreams, visions, direct prophetic oracles, and research. The books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles make reference to previously existing sources. Luke, in his gospel, makes a point of the research that he provided. John the Revelator seems to have concocted a special form of Greek, unless one assumes he simply made an exceptional number of errors in grammar, in writing the book of Revelation. I would suggest it is because he is so excited in the emotional state that results from receiving the vision, and that he struggles with words as he tries to describe what he has experienced. This again is far from verbal dictation.

We have prayers and stories that seem to express ungodly views such as Psalm 137:8-9 and parts of Judges 4-5. In Psalm 137 the Israelites wish that the children of the Babylonians be treated as they have been treated. This is a natural desire, but not exactly a forgiving one. In Judges 4 and 5 Jael receives the Canaanite king of Hazor as a guest and then murders him by stealth. Her actions are celebrated.

We have variations in similar stories that can be observed by comparing Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, or the four gospels in many cases. Clearly there is something more than verbal dictation going on here. In fact, there seem to be quite a number of “somethings” going on.

If you accept the Bible as your sacred book, you will likely also have to come to the conclusion that God has spoken in times past in very many different portions and in very many different ways.