- INSPIRE
ɪn.spaɪ(.ə)r verb. Breathe (air) in; inhale. - 2. Fill with a positive, creative feeling; encourage.
- 3. Fill with the urge or ability to do or feel something; provoke.
- [Inspiration
ɪn.spə'reɪ.ʃən noun.]
Whenever we Christians talk about inspiration, whether we refer to inspired prophets, inspired teachings, inspired writings, or even inspired music, we generally assume God did the inspiring. (Specifically
One word we regularly translate “inspired” is
2 Timothy 3.15-16 NIV - 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God a may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
People tend to fling around the word “inspired” as if it only means we had a brainstorm. That’s not what theónefstos means at all. It’s God involved with, behind, this creation process. It’s the Holy Spirit,
This is what Christians tend to believe about the books and letters which make up the bible: It’s inspired. The Holy Spirit got its authors to describe God with infallible accuracy.
Some Christians believe this God-breathed inspiration isn’t true of anything else. God inspired the bible, and that’s all. When God inspired Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles, it was only so they’d write him some bible. Since the bible’s done,
And on the other extreme we have Christians who believe God inspires every act of human creativity. (Or even animal creativity; they’ll talk about bird nests and beaver dams as inspired.) Whereas I’m pretty sure if every time your kid builds something of Legos it makes you drop to your knees and praise Jesus for his gifts of creativity, you need a psychiatrist. Of course humans create; creativity is something God innately built into us. It’s not always inspired by God. Often it’s inspired by the hopes it’ll make us famous, or make us money. Yep, this is true of Christian artists too. I’ve seen the Jesus junk they sell at Hobby Lobby. Saying the Holy Spirit is behind all that crap? Dirty, dirty blasphemy.
But I digress; I’m trying to write about bible. And yes, the bible’s inspired. People had God-experiences, and wanted to record them for posterity. God dropped various ideas in people’s heads, and they wrote those down too. King David wrote poetry, and God nudged him to write really good poetry. Peter, John, James, Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Sosthenes had some good advice to give fellow Christians, and God nudged them to give profoundly useful advice. Inspired people wrote it, inspired Christians compiled it, and inspired Christians uphold it.
True, inspired people were and are fallible humans. But as people follow the Holy Spirit, he guides us to truth,
High and low views of inspiration.
Christians imagine inspiration works a whole lot of different ways, and theologians put these ideas on a spectrum. Looks a bit like yea:
In general a
The problem with high and low views? They’re quite subjective. Fr’instance calling the bible “a really clever book”: Some Christians are gonna figure that’s exactly the sort of reverence we should have for God’s word, and counts as a high view. But in my experience, people say “clever book” because they hesitate to say “inspired book”—so it’s not all that high a view. No doubt you’ll look at my chart and wonder, “Why’d Leslie put that there?” and wanna move it around. Or add and subtract stuff. Because it’s all based on what we think best describes the bible.
It’s a pretty common tactic among people who believe outrageous things about the bible, to claim everybody who disagrees with them has a “low view.” (’Cause the low view is bad, I guess.) Fr’instance
You see the problem. “High view” and “low view” become a litmus test for self-righteousness. Because all true believers should have a high view like they do. They’re the true Christians… and they’re not so sure about everyone else.
Meh. My criteria in creating that inspiration-spectrum chart is that we humans are creatures of extremes. The middle of the road (i.e. the middle of the chart) is right on. Going in the “high view” direction starts treating the scriptures as if they’re another incarnation of God, an avatar. Going in the “low view” direction starts treating the scriptures as slightly better than pagan mythology… or even no better. Both extremes are wrong. Stay in the middle.
High and low views miss the point of inspiration anyway. The scriptures, the books of the bible themselves, are indeed holy and inspired. But what makes ’em have value, what makes ’em come alive, is the Holy Spirit. The only way the bible has any power and authority is when the Spirit gets involved in its reading and interpretation. Without him, the bible’s nothing.
Like Paul and Timothy described the gospel:
2 Corinthians 4.3-7 NIV - 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
- 7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
The apostles preached the very same gospel… and reached two different types of listeners. Some were receptive and became Christian. Others were doubtful and remained non-Christian.
Now the apostles’ message was in spoken form, not written; 2 Corinthians was written much later. Principle still applies either way. The message wasn’t wasn’t mighty and effective because the apostles were great men and brilliant speakers: It did its thing because the Holy Spirit empowered it to. But when people resist the Spirit, the gospel to them is clear as mud.
Same with the bible. The Spirit makes light shine in the darkest corners of our minds, and makes the scriptures make sense. When he doesn’t, or when they won’t let him, they’ll remain dark and confused,
Inspired writings for inspired people.
True, I’ve met Christians (and likely so have you) who don’t see the bible as anything special. It bores them, so they don’t read it. But the vast majority of Christians I’ve met, though they’re not always so disciplined about reading it, do consider the bible awesome. Inspiring, shall we say.
The bulk of people who don’t find the bible so interesting,
In my experience, very few have ever read a bible, and if they did it was with a lot of skepticism. They found it uninteresting. Or weird. Or old-timey. Or even bothersome, ’cause they really didn’t like certain commands. Or they found the genocidal passages in Joshua, or the freaky visions of Revelation, and it bugged ’em, and they don’t want to read any further. The bible doesn’t resonate with them.
And why would it? They don’t have the Holy Spirit in them to make it resonant. That’s right: He’s a necessary component when we read the scriptures.
In college I studied Shakespeare. My professor made a point of highlighting various passages which the casual reader might miss. Like words which didn’t mean in the 20th century (yeah, I went to school that long ago) what they did in the 16th. Or the medieval philosophy Shakespeare had, which informed his value judgments and influenced his plots. He helped bring depth to Shakespeare, made his plays make sense, and made them more interesting.
The Holy Spirit does much the same with the bible. Really, he does a way better job of it. My Shakespeare professor found it really hard to break through to those students who didn’t care about Shakespeare, who only took the class to fulfill their upper-division English requirements. (I’ve always been a fan, so no such problem for me.) But the Holy Spirit can tap our brains and emotions in a way no professor can.
So if you’ve the Spirit in you, someday you might be reading the scriptures half-heartedly… and a passage plows into you like a sleepy truck driver. That’d be the Holy Spirit, waking you up better than adrenaline.
Folks who don’t understand the Spirit, have a bad habit of assuming the bible does all this stuff by itself. They take the 2 Timothy quote and claim the bible teaches, disproves, corrects, and instructs in rightness. But that’s not what Paul wrote! He wasn’t describing what the bible does, but how we Christians can use the bible. The bible’s an inanimate object, and we and the Holy Spirit have to animate it.
And we especially have to animate it with the Spirit. Without him, the bible doesn’t get anything done! How can it?—again, it’s an inanimate object. As demonstrated by every pagan who reads the bible, yet don’t profit by it. As demonstrated by many Christians who resist the Spirit and teach unfruitful, godless, downright stupid things about the scriptures.
See, inspiration isn’t limited to writing the bible. It’s part of reading the bible as well. It was written by God’s people, to God’s people. The writers assumed their readers care about God, same as they. Why read their words otherwise?
And those of us who care about God are gonna take the scriptures seriously. We’ll seek God through its words… and find him, ’cause he’s not hiding.
