Dr. David F. Watson recently published an article for Firebrand in which he presents several objections to biblical inerrancy (or "verbal inerrancy"), a doctrine articulated in the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and affirmed by every member of the Evangelical Theological Society. In this series of posts, I respond to the objections presented by Watson. In this first post, I consider Watson's assertions concerning the nature of inspiration.
Notice first how Watson characterizes the doctrine of inerrancy in his account of I. Howard Marshall:
Marshall rejects the idea that all of the Bible constitutes divine speaking. In other words, he rejects verbal inerrancy. He holds that we do see examples of divine speaking in the Bible in prophetic utterances. Yet not all the Bible came to the biblical writers in the same manner that the words of the prophets came to them. God has inspired the biblical writers in different ways.
A few paragraphs later, Watson states this:
Following J. I. Packer Marshall adopts a view of "concursive action" regarding the inspiration of the Bible. This is the idea that both human beings and God were involved in every aspect of the formation of the Bible, from oral traditions to written accounts to canonization. God and humans worked side by side throughout the entire process. God has worked in and through people providentially to guide the formation of the canon throughout its entire development.
Watson thus presents Packer as guiding Marshall to an understanding of inspiration that is superior to the one implied by the doctrine of inerrancy. However, Packer was one of the theologians who produced the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy! The notion of "concursive action" that Watson describes is explicitly articulated in the Statement. The Statement affirms that God "utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared" (p. 5). The Statement emphasizes that these writers acted "in freedom" (p. 7) and denies that God "overrode their personalities" (p. 5). Thus the Statement insists that the Bible must be read as a "human production":
Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions. … However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman's milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence. (p. 9)
With respect, I would challenge Dr. Watson to produce the name of one single evangelical theologian who would deny that "human beings and God were involved in every aspect of the formation of the Bible." Likewise, I would challenge Dr. Watson to produce the name of one single evangelical theologian who would affirm that "all of the Bible came to the biblical writers in the same manner that the words of the prophets came to them." (In the opening verses of his Gospel, Luke himself tells us that the production of his narrative involved gathering and arranging source material.)
The Chicago Statement certainly affirms "that all of the Bible constitutes divine speaking," in the sense that "what Scripture says, God says" (p. 8). However, this is no radical position. It simply reflects the way the New Testament writers describe the Old Testament. Notice, for example, how the author of Hebrews reads the Old Testament as divine speech, even when the human author is talking about God in the third person (e.g., the quotation of Psalm 104:4 in Heb 1:6-7).
Just as the New Testament writers viewed the words in the Old Testament as the words of God, so the early church fathers viewed the words in the New Testament as the words of God. Consider the following excerpt from a recently discovered sermon by Origen, a Christian theologian born in the second century:
Masters have received the command from Christ, the one speaking in Paul, "Grant to slaves justice and equality" [Col 4:1]. (Hom. Ps. 7.2)
Notice that Origen hears the words of Paul as the very words of Jesus. This is not, by the way, a controversial point in the sermon that Origen feels compelled to defend. He simply asserts it as something his audience already understands and believes.
In conclusion, inerrantists obviously do not believe that God simply dictated the Bible to the human authors. Inerrantist do believe that God in his sovereignty guided the production of the Bible in such a way that the words of Scripture are rightly considered the very words of God. However, in holding this view, inerrantists are simply affirming the traditional view of Scripture which the church has held since her inception.