Is the Bible human literature?

[St.Roymond]

@Roy

How anyone got “Malta” from “Μελίτη”, which in Latin letters is “Melitay”, has got to be weird.

Not really. Malta was apparently named (by the Greeks and Romans) for honey, for which the word is μέλι, for which to make a place name gets the ending -τη, thus Μελίτη. The island has its own indigenous and unique species of bees, so it is presumed that the honey stood out from other types.
The native name seems to have been “Malttha”, but neither the Greeks nor Romans were very particular about honoring native (“barbarian”) names when they had their own.
And yes, there’s that other island called Μελίτη, but apparently duplication didn’t bother anyone either.

[Roy]

@St.Roymond

@Roy

How anyone got “Malta” from “Μελίτη”, which in Latin letters is “Melitay”, has got to be weird.

Not really.

You know you’re replying to yourself, right?

Malta was apparently named (by the Greeks and Romans) for honey, for which the word is μέλι, for which to make a place name gets the ending -τη, thus Μελίτη. The island has its own indigenous and unique species of bees, so it is presumed that the honey stood out from other types.
The native name seems to have been “Malttha”, but neither the Greeks nor Romans were very particular about honoring native (“barbarian”) names when they had their own.

I didn’t know that. Thanks.

[St.Roymond]

@Roy

You know you’re replying to yourself, right?

Different perspectives.

[Daniel_Fisher]

@St.Roymond

@Daniel_Fisher

I also believe that God chose every word, as do/did the signers of the Chicago statement. And yet we all deny dictation just fine.

So God took over the mind of the writer?

Um, no.

@St.Roymond

If God chose every word then it was either dictated or a form of possession.

Um, no.

[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.

[Daniel_Fisher]

@St.Roymond

@Bill_II

I found an interesting take on B.B. Warfield’s view of inspiration. He proposed God would foreknow what each writer would do in a given set of circumstances. Then He simply setup the circumstances so the writer would chose the word that He wanted of the writer’s free will. This way the words are exactly what God wanted while being the product of the writer’s free will.

Yeah, that view of Warfield’s disgusted me the first time I read it! A classmate summarized it well: “Makes Yahweh a manipulative SOB, eh?”

I fail to see that if God worked behind the scenes, so to speak, specifically to avoid any manipulation of the writer whatsoever, how one concludes that Yahweh would be being manipulative by intentionally avoiding any such manipulation?

Besides, don’t all Christians agree that this is what happened with Pilate and the crucifixion? That what Pilate et al did according to their own free choices was nevertheless according to God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge? How exactly would that be any different?

[Bill_II]

@Daniel_Fisher

I fail to see that if God worked behind the scenes, so to speak, specifically to avoid any manipulation of the writer whatsoever, how one concludes that Yahweh would be being manipulative by intentionally avoiding any such manipulation?

If God worked behind the scenes setting up the circumstances that He knows will result in the writer choosing the words that He wants and you don’t consider that manipulation? Setting up circumstances is manipulation and it is supernatural manipulation at that.

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@Daniel_Fisher

Pilate did what God’s power and will had decided beforehand should happen?

Pilate was manipulated by the Pharisees. Whether they were working under God’s guidance will depend n whether you think as a Jew or not.

Your view of God seems to be very low inasmuch as you seem to think humanity cannot do any good without Him. That is a very poor view of God’s handiwork in creation If humanity is the pinnacle of creation then God did a pretty bad job of it from your perspective.

Either that, or God deliberately made us inadequate, either way it don’t look good on God!!

Richard

PS
If God did author Scripture why are there errors in it?

[Andy7 (Andy)]

My thought on the question of the OP is “Yes and No”.

I think C.S. Lewis made a helpful point when he described the writings of the Bible as put down by human authors, and “taken up” into the service of the divine. Lewis called this a “bottom-up” understanding of the inspiration of Scripture. Lewis’ view has been nicely laid out in @jstump 's book “The Sacred Chain”, pp. 49-57.

The other point I would make is that insights and understandings which we bring to the interpretation of the Scripture are to be tested in the faith community. I don’t mean just my local church, but the community of believers in Christ throughout history.

I am reading Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You”. Here is an interesting passage:

Succeeding generations corrected the errors of their predecessors, and grew ever nearer and nearer to a comprehension of the true meaning. It was thus from the very earliest times of Christianity. And so, too, from the earliest times of Christianity there were men who began to assert on their own authority that the meaning they attribute to the doctrine is the only true one, and as proof bring forward supernatural occurrences in support of the correctness of their interpretation.

This was the principal cause at first of the misunderstanding of the doctrine, and afterward of the complete distortion of it.

It was supposed that Christ’s teaching was transmitted to men not like every other truth, but in a special miraculous way. Thus the truth of the teaching was not proved by its correspondence with the needs of the mind and the whole nature of man, but by the miraculous manner of its transmission, which was advanced as an irrefutable proof of the truth of the interpretation put on it. This hypothesis originated from misunderstanding of the teaching, and its result was to make it impossible to understand it rightly.

There is much more that Tolstoy wrote, but this gives an indication that these types of discussions are not unique to the 21st century.

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@Bill_II

Scripture says just like you can start with another dogma and argue that is what Scripture says. Fundamental problem being Scripture doesn’t actually “say” anything.

That might be taking things a little too far. Scripture has to have a purpose other than confusion or contradriction.

The pont is that if you take it as both litteral and inerrant (or even just inerrant) you are misunderstading the purpose and content. Scripture is our understanding of God and it changes (dare I say evolves).

Scripture is a journey, not the destination,

Otherwise we end up believing exactly what the Jews did before Christ. Part of Christ’s mission was to correct misunderstndings in their Scripture, so why should we try and find that understanding instead of the one Christ wanted us to have?

Inerrrancy focuses too much on the minutia, and ignores the bigger picture of God.

Richard

[Bill_II]

@RichardG

That might be taking things a little too far. Scripture has to have a purpose other than confusion or contradriction.

And given the large range of possible purposes proposed for Scripture even the purpose is something you assume and then apply to the text.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

Just having listened to a Holy Post Plus bonus interview with Dave Ripper about his book about Dallas Willard, he reminded me of what Willard had written in “Divine Conspiracy” which I happily have on hand, and is pertinent to this topic. Here are a several paragraphs Willard wrote under the heading “My Assumptions about the Bible”

It is tempting in such a project to enter the conflict—long-standing and currently at the boiling point—about the accessibility of the “real” Jesus and his words to us now. Because I do not do so, I will simply state my assumptions about the Bible: On its human side, I assume that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

On the divine side, I assume that God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human beings worldwide. Those who actually believe in God will be untroubled by this. I assume that he did not and would not leave his message to humankind in a form that can only be understood by a handful of late-twentieth-century professional scholars, who cannot even agree among themselves on the theories that they assume to determine what the message is.

The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God’s kingdom. Any other approach to the Bible, I believe, conflicts with the picture of the God that, all agree, emerges from Jesus and his tradition. To what extent this belief of mine is or is not harmfully circular, I leave the philosophically minded reader to ponder.

Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God (pp. 4-5). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Skye Jethani, while concurring and admiring Willard’s views of all that was also still wishing Willard was still around so he could “argue a bit” about some of this (and I’m with Skye in this too) … With such a prevalent attitude (in America especially) of “It’s just the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and Me” and the damage that shallow interpretations and misunderstandings have produced among Christ’s body and the world, how can our notion of the divine protection and supervision of scriptures be squared with all the fallout that so obviously is not of Christ? (My paraphrase of Skye’s more briefly expressed concern - which I put in my own words here.) One part of a good answer to that which Ripper thinks Willard would have is that it’s never just “the Bible, the Holy Spirit and me” - it should be “the Bible, the Holy Spirit, Me, and the church”. That is, we do need to lean on others, including our heritage of received wisdom from church fathers and mothers through history. Devoid of community to hold us accountable, we’ll end up misapplying all sorts of things.

Oh - and one other thing from Ripper’s work about Willard that I think is insightful: Willard didn’t see the Bible so much as “progressive revelation” as he did “progressive apprehension of God”. I.e. I think this means Willard just wanted to be more explicit that the progression is happening in the audience, not in God’s character or communication abilities.