The Scriptures as God-breathed: Implication for the Authority of the Scriptures

Abstract

The doctrine of biblical inspiration is the view that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the sacred texts so that the resultant Scripture is the word of God. To say that Scripture is “God-breathed” does not mean that the scrolls fell down from the sky. Inspiration, in this sense, is the supernatural force that moved the sacred writers to transmit what God has revealed using, human language. How does one understand the Bible as the inspired word of God despite the apparent and sometimes manifest inconsistencies that one finds in the Scriptures? Does inspiration imply divine dictation, as taught by the Augustinian school of thought? Is the Bible purely a product of human ingenuity as held by some humanists? Or are we dealing with a confluence of divine will and human ability? This is the problem that this article intends to address. This will be done by applying an exegetical study of the relevant Scriptural passages dealing on this subject.