I have worked at an institution which interacts with Christ believers from all over the world for the last several years, and have also learned quite a bit about Church history and the impact that the Bible has made in various societies. This impact has been through translation into the various languages of peoples around the globe. It does not seem to me that a purely ontological approach to inspiration of Scriptures takes the fact that it is through translation, not the original texts, that the Bible has made its greatest impact. This is not to say that the original texts of the Bible were not inspired, and owe their existence to the Holy Spirit guiding the producers of those texts. It is just that this is an inadequate place to leave the discussion given how Christ believers have interacted with the Bible over the centuries.
A more adequate approach is to consider the functionality of the Bible in our discussions of inspiration. We can even start with the same text, 2 Tim 3:16-17, where Paul gives basically a discussion of inspiration that is functional. The Bible does certain things in the church. It is "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16)." When we look at how the Church fathers understood the term theopneustos "God-breathed," it basically conforms to this functional view. Certain writings were useful for the church.
The Bible in translation fits the bill for what Paul says in 2 Tim 3:16-17 concerning what Scripture does, how it functions. Such an approach to inspiration, although in some ways frightening, as it is a step away from arguing that inspired equals inerrant, which virtually no one argues for translations, fits what 2 Tim 3:16 says about what the function of a divinely inspired text is.
The above approach to inspiration more accurately reflects how the Bible has operated in Christ believing communities from the beginning. It has made its biggest impact in translation. This leaves the inerrant nature of the original texts of the Bible unexamined, which is not the interest of this essay in the first place. It is an approach to inspiration that relies on the Holy Spirit's work in Christ-believing communities as an essential guide to faithful theological reflection and praxis as God's Word is contextually embodied in every culture and leaves its indelible, transformative mark.
