Ramifications of the Inspiration of Scripture – Part 2

Last week I began to give some ramifications of the doctrine of inspiration. Today I will give two more ramifications.

3. The Bible is written in real human language, following human standards of communication, literary conventions, and genres (law, history, poetry, proverb, etc).

The Bible is not written in ‘heavenly language’ but rather the real human languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It follows the normal rules of language and thus should be read as we read other documents in these languages.

Furthermore, the Bible uses many different genres to express God’s revelation. These include law, history, proverbs, poetry, letters, and apocalyptic. When encountering these genres in Scripture, the reader should read them following normal rules for the particular genre. This means that poetry should not be read as if it was law, nor should proverbs be read in the same manner as apocalyptic. Each genre has its own characteristics and appropriate rules for interpretation and these should be carefully observed and followed as we encounter them in the Scripture.

4. Human authors of Scripture exhibit variation in style, vocabulary, genre, and literary competence.

One can not help but notice how different are the writings of Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel, John, Paul, and Peter. They each employ distinctive styles and vocabulary. Some biblical authors use a more polished style, while others write in simple forms. This does not undermine God’s revelation, for God spoke through these human authors using their own distinctive style.

This also means that it is proper and indeed important to study the totality of each human author’s writings to understand specific passages written by that author. Paul and John may use different words to express the same concept. Moses might convey a truth using law and particular words while David will use different words in a poetic form. Yet, they speak harmoniously without contradiction.

Next week we will look at two more ramifications of the inspiration of Scripture.

In Christ,

Bret