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.
...I think my entire just got deleted. Thanks, Google commenting system.
ReplyDeleteMain point: The ontology is the basis for the function of the text. You seem to be equating "God-breathed" with the usefulness of the text, but that's an unfounded reading. Rather, the inspiration of the text is the entire reason it is true, over and against the false teachings Timothy is surrounded by.
So when you make the statement:
>This leaves the inerrant nature of the original texts of the Bible unexamined
That seems entirely unfounded to me. If a text has error, did God inspire the error? Is that error useful for training in righteousness? The inerrant nature of Scripture is not only examined, but is in fact the very basis for its functional benefit in the Christian's life. Functional beneft doesn't limit or define the Bible's inerrancy, and neither the Greek grammar nor Paul's argument seems to support a reading that would equate inspiration with functional use.
Functionality is not the only thing involved in inspiration, but it seems to me that the second half of the v. 16 is given over to the function of Scripture. I do not examine inerrancy in the essay, because it is mainly concerned with translations, which most scholars do not say is inerrant. The question is, does a translation have a functional value in the life of the believing community that fits the four categories that Paul writes is the function of the biblical text? That is not a question concerning inerrancy, and my essay does not touch on the nature of the manuscripts, which is another conversation. Errors certainly crept into the text through transmission, although often overly critical scholars overblow that, in my opinion.
DeleteHi Joel, I think you are absolutely correct in your 'functional inspiration' model. As the other comment indicated about the "usefulness" of scripture, it is not that functionality and usefulness are confused, it is that functionality has a broader yet targeted aim within the life of the church (and world), whereas the usefulness is a byproduct of that functionality.
ReplyDeleteAs you also said, the scriptures can be inspired to achieve the divine function without any concern for notions of verbal inspiration or inerrancy. Those particular attributes that we of the enlightenment might hope for are redundant within the objective of the overall functionality and providence of God for the church and the greater world. Christians tend to be very afraid of any talk of the bible being errant, which is a modern day anxiety which we have projected onto the text itself. I once did this myself. I thought it was impossible to talk about error and faithfulness in the same breath. That fear I had, which many other likewise have, is a forced view of scripture coming from the holiness/puritan/fundamentalism that I once mistook for being historical and traditional christianity. I was wrong. I was ignorant. I now fully accept the inspiration of the scriptures in the same tradition that Paul had in mind as he claimed inspiration outside of a canonical framework. God is alive in history and God works through errant humans along with their errant texts and God achieves his plan within inspired functionality of the human scribes and prophets who were mostly obsessed with sociological and political concerns within the time they lived. That God can 'appropriate' those texts and still make them function is truly inspiring.
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ReplyDeleteI think i was deleted too?
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