The inspiration and authority of Scripture

Breathed out by God

The last lesson ended with God's word reaching us in Scripture. But what do Christians mean when they call a book, written by people over many centuries, the word of God? Paul gives the classic answer in a letter to Timothy.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

"God-breathed" is a single Greek word, theopneustos (θεόπνευστος), made from ‘God’ and ‘breathe’, and found nowhere else in the New Testament. Scripture is not a collection of human thoughts about God; it is what God has breathed out, as a speaker breathes out words. Our word inspiration comes from the Latin Bible, which rendered the term divinitus inspirata, ‘divinely inspired’.

Peter describes how this happened.

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one's own interpretation. For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:20-21

The Greek verb behind ‘carried along’ is the one Luke uses of a ship caught in a gale: "we gave way and let ourselves be driven along" (Acts 27:15). Yet the authors were not dictation machines. Paul can ask Timothy to bring the cloak he left at Troas (2 Timothy 4:13), and admit in the middle of a letter, "beyond that I do not remember if I baptized anyone else" (1 Corinthians 1:16). God did not erase the writers' personalities, languages and memories; he used them. So the church confesses that Scripture is fully human words and fully God's word at once.

How Jesus read the Scriptures

The deepest reason Christians hold this view of Scripture is that it was Jesus' own. He said that "not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished" (Matthew 5:18). In an argument that turned on one line of a psalm he added, "the Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35). And when he was tempted in the wilderness, he answered not with a miracle but with what was written.

But Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

Matthew 4:4

Rabanus, a ninth-century teacher quoted in the Catena, draws the lesson: "as the body of man cannot live without earthly food, so cannot his soul without God's word" Rabanus.

Scripture also has a purpose, and it is not to satisfy curiosity. The holy Scriptures "are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy 3:15). John says of his Gospel, "these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:31).

Jesus told people who studied the Scriptures closely but would not come to him, "These are the very words that testify about Me" (John 5:39). Chrysostom comments that such readers gained little from them, "thinking, as they did, that they should be saved by the mere reading of them, without faith" Chrysostom. Scripture is read rightly when it leads us to Christ.

The Westminster Confession (1646), the confession of the Presbyterian churches, gathers this teaching in its first chapter. The books of the Old and New Testaments are given by inspiration of God to be "the rule of faith and life". Everything necessary for God's glory and our salvation, faith and life is either set down in Scripture or can be drawn from it by good and necessary consequence. Not everything in it is equally plain, but what we must know and believe for salvation is clear enough that "not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding" of it Westminster Confession, ch. 1. Protestants often call these the authority, sufficiency and clarity of Scripture; how they relate to tradition is where the churches differ.

Where Christians differ

Every church confesses Scripture as the word of God. They differ in how they state two things about it.

The first is how to describe its truthfulness. Many evangelicals speak of inerrancy. The Chicago Statement of 1978 affirms that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is without error in all that it teaches, including what it says about history and the natural world, while insisting that each text be read according to its literary form and the conventions of its time Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Other evangelicals, and many theologians in mainline Protestant churches, prefer to speak of infallibility. Scripture never misleads us in what it teaches for faith and life, they say, and to hold every incidental detail of history or nature to the same test mistakes what it was given to do. Both views confess that Scripture is wholly trustworthy in what God means to teach, and both read it with attention to context and genre. For hard passages, see Does the Bible contradict itself?.

The second is how Scripture relates to tradition. The churches of the Reformation (Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian, Anglican, and many others after them) confess sola scriptura, ‘Scripture alone’: Scripture is the final authority for faith and life, and the creeds, the Fathers and the church's customs, precious as they are, serve under it and are tested by it. This was never a rejection of tradition; the Reformers confessed the Nicene Creed and quoted the Fathers constantly.

The Catholic Church teaches that Scripture and Sacred Tradition flow from the same divine source and together form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which the Magisterium, the church's teaching office, interprets with authority, not as standing above the word but as its servant Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum. The Orthodox churches receive Scripture within Holy Tradition as its highest witness, read in the whole life of the church through which the Spirit has led it: the Fathers, the councils and the liturgy.

In the fifth century Vincent of Lérins wrote that Scripture is sufficient in itself, but because people interpret it in so many ways, we should hold "that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all" Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory. Christians of every tradition still treasure his words. Whatever their differences, none of these traditions treats Scripture as a merely human book, and none tells us to read it in isolation, as if the Spirit had never taught the church before us. For whether the Bible can be trusted, see Can the Bible be trusted?.

Reading in the Spirit, with the church

To believe that Scripture is God's word changes how we read it. After his resurrection Jesus "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45), and the Spirit who breathed out the words still opens the minds of those who read them. So Christians open the Bible with prayer, read it with the faith of the church, and ask for grace to live what they read.

Scripture is daily bread, and "a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105). For practical help in reading it, see How should we read the Bible?.

Practice