The Workings of Inspiration
To say that the Scriptures are inspired is to affirm that God has breathed into these writings his Spirit of Truth. But this assertion raises many questions and problems. How could God inspire someone to write exactly what He wanted, without making the human author a mere puppet or robot, controlled in every way by the will of God? Did the human authors of these Scriptures, therefore, lose their freedom while God took over their minds? Or did God dictate his very own words, as the Muslims believe of their Koran, making the writer no more than a scribe?
God, we know, respects our human freedom and our human nature too much to subject them to any treatment which would demean them. Not even to provide us with his Word would God ever deprive us of our essential freedom by taking over our mind and treating us as a mere automated robot.
Nor did He choose to dictate his Word to us. This is obvious from the fact that each book of the Bible reveals the human qualities of its author. You can detect and recognise, for example, the education and sophistication behind the Gospel of St John and the writings of St Paul; equally, the lack of refinement and want of elegance in the Gospel of St Mark. Their human literary and intellectual talents, or lack of them, are on display for all to see. John wrote as John; Paul as Paul; Mark as Mark; and the same with all the sacred authors of the Old and New Testaments. It is supremely evident that they had neither been dictated to by God nor controlled by Him. They were writing as freely as I am writing this.
So what exactly was God doing? To speak of a divinely inspired author is to speak of a person who is so in tune with God’s Mind that what he wants to write is exactly what God wants him to write. Mark writes freely exactly what he wants to write, using all his own mental powers and talents, but because he is so attuned to the mind of God under inspiration he writes only what God would write. Like two violins playing the same note; each sound is created by the skill of the player, each is individual and independent, but both are totally attuned to each other, producing a single sound. God’s Mind and the human mind, God’s Word and the human word coincide and concur, making inspiration something totally beyond the normal laws of nature.
So the Church reached the all-important conclusion that each book of the Bible has two genuine authors at the same time, one divine and one human. God is the real Author of Mark’s Gospel but equally so is Mark. God is the real Author of Jeremiah’s prophecies, but equally so is Jeremiah. And so with the history books of the Old Testament, the Wisdom Books, the Psalms; so also with the Letters of St Paul, the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse of St John, and every other book in both Old and New Testaments of the Bible. This has huge implications for our whole approach to the Sacred Scriptures and especially to the way we use them in prayer.
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