Dave

The “proof” text for this question is in 2 Timothy 3, isn’t it? Which talks about all Scripture being God breathed. It makes me think of other places in Scripture that talk about God breathing. I’m instantly taken to Genesis where God breathes, and what happens? Something comes to life. And then I’m taken to Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones. God breathes and an army of dead bodies also comes to life.

And so one of the one of the things I would feel about the scriptures being God breathed is that somehow they bring God to life. They bring the reality of Jesus to life.

Simon

In that sense it’s better to describe the Bible as expired. It’s something that comes out of God into the world.

Dave

Yes, because one of the ideas that was quite prevalent at the time – I think it was Philo the Jewish philosopher who had this idea that inspiration was literally God breathing into this passive human being who acted like a Dictaphone.

Whereas the sense of God breathing life into something is a much more active idea, so inspiration is about people becoming and being living, active witnesses to the life of God.

Craig

The text that came to mind for me was that comment at the end of John’s gospel. It says there were so many more things that could have been written about Jesus but there wouldn’t have been enough papyrus to contain them if we they’d all been written down. So you think, OK, the writers decided to record what seemed to be the most important things to say about Jesus, and the stories they left out were repetitions or were maybe things Jesus said that they didn’t understand at the time. But none of these things seem to matter too much if we are take the possibility that actually the spirit inspired the process.

I think of the number of number of preachers who muse aloud about how wonderful it would be if we had access to everything Jesus said, and I’m sitting thinking “would that be any better? Would it be easier to discern what was most important?” I think it would be harder because we seem to have a distillation of what is most important. Less is more, surely. 

I love John’s Gospel, where John has chosen a whole lot of detail the other gospel writers didn’t include. So he’s made his own editing decisions, and he’s put together a gospel which is for a particular purpose. He’s made lots of editorial decisions in order to produce a unique account for his own purposes, Jesus really shines through.

So I’ve got a feeling that the inspiration happens at so many different points in the process. The spirit quite clearly inspired Jesus to act as he did, and Jesus knew his father, or was getting to know his father, depending on how we understand the humanity of Jesus to work. And then those who witnessed it have to rely on their memories, and turn what they saw into stories that could be told until they could be written down. Then there is the way the Spirit is involved in helping the witnesses to interpret what they had seen, maybe limited by the degree to which they understood what Jesus meant.

And then all we read on the page is somehow brought to life by the spirit who lives within us and combined with what we’ve learned about the culture in which it was written.

So the whole process is a glorious mishmash, and the Spirit is hopefully involved in every part of it.

Julie

Yeah. I think it’s a mysterious partnership between God and people that just sums up what you said. We don’t know how exactly it was inspired. We humans love to figure out how everything works – as a scientist I can say that, but sometimes you gotta just go “I don’t know how this works”! And it’s God, and it’s amazing. And so whether it’s in the writing, or the reading, or the breathing, God’s in it. 

I was reminded that at college one of our tutors said “Jesus was fully human and fully divine, so can we not view the Bible in same way?” Yeah, it’s fully human and fully divine. And somehow it’s a mystery.

Roy

I don’t know if this is influenced by having celebrated our wedding anniversary recently, but didn’t somebody say it’s like God’s covenant of love? The Bible describes God’s relationship with humanity through that of relationship, a covenant.

I only have three letters from my wife that I’ve kept from the very early days of our relationship, when we met and fell in love. When I looked at them last week, on our anniversary, I’m thinking, gosh there was a lot more than information conveyed in them. There was love, there was deepening of relationship, there were memories that filled my life with joy and there’s something special in the power of those narratives.

I think the work of the Holy Spirit is in that mysterious connection between God and the recipient who is reading Scripture. Walter Brueggemann, The wonderful theologian and Old Testament scholar, who died earlier this year, talked about the inspiration of Scripture, emphasising the Bible’s voice, like it’s a living voice that can bring transformation and highlight issues of justice and transformation. There’s something more going on than simply a text on a papyrus or whatever. God is behind it, that human and divine element mixed together.

…to be continued.