'Men Moved By
the Holy Spirit Spoke From God' (2 Peter 1.21)
Charles e Whisnant
April 22, 2012
Series The Bible You Hold In Your Hand #14
THE QUESTION IS HOW DID THE HOLY SPIRIT PRODUCE THE
WORD OF GOD THROUGH HUMAN WRITERS?
Can God infallibly guarantee that any single human action will freely
occur if he cannot totally control all free human action ...? We believe not. God
can never guarantee that any human will freely do what he wants.
We
are teaching that, for anything to be Holy Scripture, its every word and
statement need not be positively and absolutely inspired in the author, with
the Holy Spirit supplying and forming in his mind the individual words and
statements. It is enough that the sacred writer be divinely drawn to write down
what he sees, hears, or knows otherwise, that he enjoy the infallible
assistance of the Holy Spirit to prevent him from mistakes even in matters he
knows on the word of others, or from his own experience, or by his own natural
reasoning. It is this assistance of the Holy Spirit that gives Scripture its
infallible truth
1A
What was the means whereby God had the Bible written by men?
2A Who
wrote the Content of Bible?
1. God 2.
God and Man 3. Prophets and
Apostles
3A
Did the human author have any freedom in
penning the book he was writing?
4A Was every word that was penned by the
author of scripture dictated by the Holy Spirit to men?
5A How is it that God "sovereignly
controls the mind and personality" of a biblical author so that his
"whole personality” expresses itself naturally to write exactly what God
wanted to be expressed?
6A How
did God bring the Bible into reality?
7A How
did God use men to write the Bible?
8A
Did God in the beginning
(before the foundation of the world ) decree a plan whereby He was going to
have men write the Bible?
9A T or F
God perfectly accomplished His will in the lives of genuinely free men
through the use of His omniscience.
10A What is
the definition of Spiritual confluent
inspiration?
11A
Can God infallibly guarantee
that any single human action will freely occur if he cannot totally control all
free human action.? That is if the
writers of the scripture were to put in words what came to their mind, would it
still be the Word of God?
Our
objective in these lessons is to bring some clear light as to how God brought
about the writing of the Scripture. That is a challenge for sure. That is how can we make the doctrine become
perspicuous? (Clearly expressed and therefore easily understood)
Scriptural
inspiration has traditionally been understood by Christian theologians to be
plenary, verbal, and confluent. (when things come together like God and the
writer.)
12A
The historic position of the Early
church fathers that Scripture is characterized by plenary, verbal inspiration. What does that mean?
13A Were
the writers like a flute-player breaths into a flute? Or were the writers like
a divine plectrum?
We
want to suggest how the plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture
is compatible with Scripture's being a
truly divine-human product?
How can one hold to the verbal inspiration of
the whole of Scripture without lapsing into a dictation theory of inspiration
which, in effect, extinguishes the human author?
I
want to suggest how God brought about the writing of the Bible.
A theory of
divine inspiration based upon God's middle
knowledge is proposed, according to which …
God
knew what the authors of Scripture would freely write when placed in certain
circumstances. By arranging for the authors of Scripture to be in the
appropriate circumstances, God can achieve a Scripture which is a product of
human authors and also is His Word
