Is the Bible human literature?

[Daniel_Fisher]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

I do tend to agree with you, though, @St.Roymond , that it’s probably just mincing words at this point if one was splitting hairs about “God choosing every word”, but that being different than God ‘dictating’. It seems to me that if we understand ‘dictating’ as consisting only of the normal process of one agent being physically present with another, and verbally delivering a message for the other to be taking down, then that strict understanding of dictation will of course probably allow just about everyone to escape the apparently unwanted charge of thinking scripture was dictated.

Mervin,

Respectfully, this is not splitting hairs. “Dictation” is categorically different than what we affirm. Like in another universe kind of difference. To claim that we essentially are peddling some kind of dictation under a different name (again, I say as respectfully as I can) betrays an unwillingness to even try to understand what we evangelical inerrancy-affirming / verbal-plenary-verbal inspiration-affirming Christians are actually affirming. It is ungracious in the extreme.

An obvious example - we believe that God intended every single word David penned in Psalm 51, to give us a God-intended example of what true repentance looks like. But it isn’t like God was repenting and dictating his [God’s] prayer of repentance to or through David; and David was somehow just the amanuensis or transcriber, conveying God’s repentance over God’s sins to us.

We understand that the words of Psalm 51 are indeed God’s word, and intended word-for-word by God just as we verbal-plenary-inspiration-affirming evangelicals profess… but they aren’t “God’s words” in the strictly literal sense of God speaking them, or dictating them, or controlling David to say things he would not have otherwise said on his own. THEY ARE DAVID’S OWN WORDS, BASED COMPLETELY ON HIS OWN EXPERIENCE, PASSIONS, AND PERSONALITY. Put another way, it is God ordaining the circumstances, shaping David’s heart, planning even David’s own sins, so that David would pen these words of repentance from David’s own perspective, experience, guilt, desperation, and turmoil… but all in such a way as was so ordained and worked by God so that the words are a perfect, God-inspired example so that we would have this perfect example of what true and real penitence looks like, and so the words that David prayed in repentance are the very words that God wanted written, word-for word. But these aren’t “God’s [dictated] words” as if God himself is the one expressing repentance.

How one could look at that and say, “Well, it’s practically the same as dictating” I honestly can’t even fathom. And if someone actually does so claim, then I can confidently assert that they aren’t even trying to understand the position they are critiquing.