I think it’s more than splitting hairs. A common Islamic perspective holds that the Koran was dictated by God, proved by how the human writer was illiterate. That view is better called “dictation” than God choosing people to write who have been prepared to write the right words by their life’s path. Nobody holding to verbal plenary inspiration is trying to show that the human writers were illiterate so the words must have come from God.
B. B. Warfield, a pioneer of verbal plenary inspiration, saw God’s designs determining their natural fruition in all the ways God speaks. For Scripture, that would be how God arranged people’s lives so they were equipped to produce the right words at the right time. For nature, that was how God set up natural processes – including evolutionary processes – so our world was equipped to produce the right creatures at the right time. Warfield’s view of inspiration led him to embrace both fully human authors and fully natural biological processes. God was sovereign over both, and both would accomplish exactly what God intended. To claim that God had to poof creatures into being without ancestry was a failure to see God’s wise sovereignty, just like claiming God could only get the right words by dictating them to human scribes.
Well stated. This is indeed a more robust view of inspiration. One drawback, though, is that it cuts away one key argument for inerrancy. It’s often said that the Bible is God’s word, and God cannot lie (and knowing all, cannot be mistaken), so the Bible has no errors. This syllogism depends on the Bible actually being God’s words in a direct way so that what is true of God applies to those words. But God cannot sin any more than God can be mistaken. God is not going to actually confess sin: that would involve either having sinned or now sinning by lying about having sinned. God’s word, written by human authors, can include confession of sin. And by the same logic, there’s no reason it can’t contain mistakes. It isn’t God’s word so directly that God’s attributes apply to it. You’ve eloquently showed this through Psalm 51.
By faith we can affirm that the Bible only includes the human mistakes God intended to be included. My favourite is Paul’s mistake about whom he baptized in 1 Cor. 1:13–16. Yes, Paul quickly realizes he’s made an error and takes steps to correct it before giving up. But that’s not the point. What I love is what comes next. From 1:17 to the end of chapter 2 Paul writes a masterful defence of why God uses imperfect messengers to proclaim – imperfectly – the gospel. Rather than hiding his mistake by telling his scribe to grab a fresh sheet and start over, Paul admits that he’s not perfect, yet that perfectly equips him to be God’s messenger:
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. … God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise … My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Paul’s flaws and flubs don’t empty the gospel of its power. They ensure that God’s power can’t be confused with human eloquence or brilliant rhetoric – or perfect recall of recent history.
After this long digression, Paul returns to his previous topic, though this time skipping over whom he baptized (compare 1:10–13 with 3:3–9). That means it’s likely we wouldn’t have the long passage between if not for Paul’s confused memory.
The passage contrasting God’s wisdom and human folly apparently wasn’t on his agenda, but by faith we can accept that it was on God’s. God ordained the circumstances, shaping Paul’s mind, planning even Paul’s own mistakes, so that Paul would pen these words from Paul’s own perspective, memory, frustration and shame … but all in such a way as was so ordained and worked by God so that the words are a perfect, God-inspired example of how even flawed people writing flawed words can point to God’s power and wisdom. And so, the words Paul wrote in error are the very words God wanted written, word-for-word.