“Did God Write The Bible All Alone Or Did God Have Human Help?”

Welcome back!

The role of human writers in the Bible is probably the most debated, contested, and complicated topic in the evangelical world. Although I am making a complicated topic too simplistic, the basic question is this: Did God write the Bible all alone or did God have human help?

This is the question that definitively separates evangelicals from non-evangelicals. It is also the question that continually roils the evangelical world, as evangelicals dispute among themselves how human beings played a part in writing the Bible.

When I enrolled as a Master of Divinity student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I was so ignorant of the evangelical world that I didn’t even know that this question was the heart of the matter.

My enrollment at Gordon-Conwell is an object lesson in the wisdom of that old adage. “Look before you leap.” This is wise advice…and if I had heeded that advice, I would never have enrolled in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. I am embarrassed to admit that I tend to be more of the leap-before-you-look type–the kind of person who dives off the diving board before checking that there is water in the pool.

Actually, I’m not that foolish about diving into swimming pools. But when it came to enrolling as a student at an evangelical seminary, based solely on the recommendation of the minister of the church I was attending, I took a giant leap into a swimming pool without checking out the pool before I jumped in. The pool did have water. However the water was filled with prowling, hungry sharks. (By the way, this is the same minister who told me in my second year of seminary that I no longer had the right to pray because I was disobeying God by attending seminary.)

And so, I enrolled as a student at an institution that defines itself by its relationship to the Bible as the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God.

The sixty-six canonical books of the Bible as originally written were inspired of God, hence free from error. They constitute the only infallible guide in faith and practice. Article I of Gordon-Conwell’s Statement Of Faith

My sink-or-swim immersion into an evangelical seminary made me painfully aware that the nature of scripture as the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God was the central defining issue of the evangelical world.

Since then, I have observed how rarely non-evangelical Christians understand the power of this claim in the evangelical world. Non-evangelicals often caricature evangelicals as simply “fundamentalists,” without understanding how either evangelicals or fundamentalists define themselves.

I’ll leave the shark tank metaphor to use a metaphor from photography. The claim that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God becomes a polarizing filter in the evangelical world.

A photographer puts a polarizing filter in front of the camera lens to reduce glare. The polarizer also has the tendency to turn so-so pictures into spectacular ones. If you see a dramatic photo with stunning white clouds against a brilliant blue background, you are probably seeing the effect of a polarizing filter.

The filter blocks some reflected light rays. This means that the filter enhances some light rays as it blocks others. This is also what happens with the polarizing effect of the doctrine of the Bible as “solely” the Word of God. The claim that God is the sole author is dramatically enhanced. The claim that humans had any part as authors is blocked.

Despite the faith claim of the evangelical world that the Bible is solely the word of God, based on the 1646 “Westminster Confession of Faith,” many evangelicals are not so willing to deny any role to human authorship. This is especially true for biblical scholars.

I’ll end this post here by introducing a recent situation involving the evangelical seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, and one of its tenured professors, Dr. Peter Enns. Professor Enns wrote a book, Inspiration and Incarnation, in which he urges readers to understand the Bible as both divine and human. As a direct result of this book, the trustees suspended Enns as a professor.

“Trustees said it appeared that Enns had defied the school’s founding principle, based on the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, the core creed of the Presbyterian tradition. It says that Scripture is solely the word of God and proclaims the “infallible truth” and “entire perfection” of the Bible.” Westminster Trustees

I will continue with this story in another post.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

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Do you know that you are the product of all the stories you have learned throughout your life? Most of us try to live with stories that don’t serve us. This is especially true with Bible stories. To find out why most of the Bible stories you learned about Jesus and money are not true, be sure to visit Going Broke With Jesus.