The Bible and Dictation Theory

The idea that Scripture was “dictated” by God arose during a particular period of Christian history when there was sharp opposition between Catholic and Protestant ideas. This opposition started with the Reformation, although the understanding of Scripture that I will describe was developed by theologians a little later in time than the Reformers themselves. These theologians are sometimes called Protestant orthodox or Protestant scholastics (because they worked to elaborate Protestant ideas in a coherent system). It is worth trying to understand a little of what they were trying to do because so many of their assumptions and arguments continue to find their way into common understanding and become our own assumptions without critical reflection about them.

In order to criticize practices of the Catholic church that Protestants understood to be abuses, Protestant scholastic theologians turned to Scripture. In Protestant understanding, practices that were not found in Scripture could be criticized and corrected on the basis of Scripture. Catholics could counter that Scripture itself was established by the Church (through its decisions about what belonged in the collection). The Protestant scholastics in return established a doctrine of Scripture that would establish Scripture’s authority over the church.

The systematic argument that Protestant theologians made included the following points:

1. The church did not establish the canon, but merely recognized the authenticity and value of each book by their own internal marks as having been inspired by God.

2. Saving knowledge of God comes to us by revelation (it has to be disclosed and can’t be figured out by reason), and Scripture contains this revelation.

3. God is the ultimate author of Scripture. The humans who wrote the manuscripts received the words by “oral dictation,” so the human agents are sometimes described as “hands” or “secretaries” (or even the “pens”) of God.

4. The supernatural agency that assures Scripture’s accuracy is called inspiration. God inspired the writers of Scripture to write down what God wanted them to say. This inspiration works to secure accuracy, not only for revelation but also for mundane matters–-such as matters of history–that are recorded in the Bible. God inspires the “secretaries” to write exactly these words.

5. Scripture has authority because it is authored by God. By delivering God’s words, the Bible acts, then, as the sole source and norm for Christian faith.

6. Scripture teaches everything needed for salvation. It is perfect and sufficient for salvation, but only when taken as a whole. No single passage or book taken separately teaches by itself what is needed for salvation. Taken as a whole, Scripture is perfect and sufficient.

7. Scripture is understandable (perspicuous). It cannot serve as the source of what we need to know for salvation unless it can be understood. Perspicuity does not mean everyone will understand, but rather that the Bible is capable of being understood. Interpretation is required to understand, and the only reliable and infallible interpreter of scripture is the Holy Spirit. It is our job to figure out and be open to the meaning the Holy Spirit intends.

8. Salvific understanding is not gained by mere clarity of ideas. Understanding must be illuminated by the Holy Spirit so it takes effect in our lives.

This view of Scripture secured a way for Protestants in the cause of Reformation to criticize the Catholic Church, but its way of doing so (God’s inspiration ensures accuracy that extended beyond salvation to matters of fact) meant that any mistake in Scripture that called its reliability regarding factual matters into question would also put its reliability about salvation at risk because the accuracy of inspiration would break down.

This view made faith in what the Bible said especially vulnerable as scientific explanations advanced. The Protestant scholastic view lessened in influence through the Enlightenment, but a form of it was revived in the early 20th century (as verbal inspiration theory) in response to questions raised by the theory of evolution and to the direction of biblical scholarship. Its ideas persist at least as assumptions of many Christians in our time.

The dictation view of Scripture was born through a time of deadly polemic, and its newer version can continue to be divisive and dangerous when embraced in later times. By covering it here, I am not commending it to you. Rather I want to point out it has a specific historical origin and has not in this form been the common understanding of Christians for all time (as far as I know Eastern Orthodox Christians were not affected by the Protestant scholastic view). Theologians before the Reformation may have assumed some of the things the Protestant scholastics articulated, but this carefully thought out system (especially the way of understanding inspiration) was not developed until the period of Protestant Orthodoxy. Although some folks who still embrace many assumptions of this system turn to justify it in the Bible itself (see 2 Timothy 3:16) Scripture itself never outlines the full scope of these ideas.

What can be affirmed about these ideas? The Protestant scholastics who formulated this doctrine were suspicious of human institutions and realistic about human fallibility. They looked beyond human actions and creations to God alone to establish the truth. This is a good impulse, well worth preserving.

The Protestant scholastic solution regarding how to understand inspiration in the writing of Scripture, though, has not been able to bear the weight of advancing human knowledge. Attempts are often made to try to correlate human discovery with what the Bible says (for instance to reconcile the age of the earth with the description of creation in Genesis and with the timeframe of biblical genealogies), but these attempts are usually convincing only to people who already accept the doctrine of scripture and are unwilling to revise it. There are those who recognize the importance of inspiration, but seek an alternate understanding, for instance that God inspired ideas rather than words, or that God’s inspiration illumined the writers about salvation so they could record what readers need to know to be saved (but in a way that does not require that every detail in the Bible be correct).

Many Christians have discovered that God’s ability to speak to us about our lives through the Bible does not depend on reconciling descriptions in the Bible with disciplines of study such as science and history. There is theological understanding of God’s truth (for instance about God’s care for the world and our responsibility in that care) in the biblical accounts of creation that does not disappear when the timing of creation is questioned.

The idea that we could definitively describe the way God operated to inspire the writing of the Bible is at odds with the idea that I articulated in my first post of this Substack (Introducing Thoughtful Theology) that our language about God always falls short of who God is. It is more appropriate to affirm that the Bible is a vehicle to bring us into relation to God. God who transcends our world uses the witness of people who have been in our world to disclose God’s self to us so we can be in relationship. I turn to talk about disclosure in the next post.