All Scripture is GOD-BREATHED

tonychanyt · Mar 15, 2024

2 Timothy 3:

16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,

Strong's Greek: 2315. θεόπνευστος (theopneustos) — 1 Occurrence

While we can't be 100% certain, the evidence suggests that Paul likely coined the term θεόπνευστος. It's at least the first recorded use of the word in extant Greek literature. Soon after he used the term, others followed suit. In any case, the concept wasn't Paul's original.

At Biblehub, 13 versions use inspired by or of God; 10 versions use God-breathed

What is the mechanical process of God-breathed?

One way was described in Numbers 12:

8 I speak with him [Moses] face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the LORD. Why then were you unafraid to speak against My servant Moses?

There were other methods. Job 32:

8 But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.

I'd define God-breathed as the process of a sacred word/thought breathed out by God's Spirit to inspire a human's spirit to record it in a human language.

David experienced this in 1Ch 28:

11 David gave his son Solomon the plans for the portico of the temple, its buildings, its storerooms, its upper parts, its inner rooms and the place of atonement. 12 He gave him the plans of all that the Spirit had put in his mind for the courts of the temple of the Lord and all the surrounding rooms, for the treasuries of the temple of God and for the treasuries for the dedicated things.

The communication was quite specific and detailed.

19 “All this,” David said, “I have in writing as a result of the Lord’s hand on me, and he enabled me to understand all the details of the plan.”

Jeremiah experienced this in 36:

4 Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote on a scroll at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD that he had spoken to him.

The LORD spoke the words to Jeremiah. Jeremiah dictated them to Baruch. Baruch wrote them down. But the king didn't like it and destroyed this scroll.

27 Now after the king had burned the scroll with the words that Baruch wrote at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: 28 “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned.

Once again, Jeremiah was inspired and obeyed.

32 Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them.

Note that this 2nd scroll was not identical to the first one, even though both were inspired. In both cases, 1 Thess 2:

13 When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God

More generally, Ecclesiastes 7:

28 while I was still searching but not finding— I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all.

In the above, did the writer of Ecclesiastes quote from the mouth of God?

I don't think so. God inspired him generally to write this book of Ecclesiastes. Regarding this particular verse, the stress is on the I, the author himself. He inserted his personal opinion or bias here.

In the NT, Peter wrote in 2 Peter 1:

16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. …

20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Is the Bible inerrant?

The word "inerrant" is not in the Bible. I prefer to stick to the wording of the Bible. Scripture was God-breathed. The Spirit breathed out a sacred word/thought to inspire a human's spirit to record it in a human language.

See also

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Appendix

There is a bit of circular or more formally recursive reasoning in this OP: I believe that the Scripture is God-breathed because the Scripture says it is. This is an axiomatic tautology.

What is the alternative?

Let proposition L1 = Scripture is a lie.

L1 is self-contradictory and self-destructive and cannot be asserted logically as true.

BTW, I haven't proven that Scripture is true. I merely assume it because assuming the opposite is nuts.

KevinT · Mar 23, 2024

Thank you for this post. I searched for "Word of God" and found it. Looks like no one has responded to you yet.

I think the easiest/simplest way to consider the Bible is that every word therein comes directly from God. Like downloading a pdf document straight from heaven. But I don't think this is correct, for reasons you rightly point out above. Furthermore, I feel thinking this way sets up a trap to fall into when, for example, there might be slight discrepancies between the 4 Gospels. Was there 1 blind beggar (Luke 18:35) or were there 2 blind beggars (Matthew 20:29)? This is a trivial example that can be easily explained if we understand that each gospel was the personal recollection of events from their lives, written down likely years afterwards. Does this mean that the event never happened? No.

So a ditch on one side of the road is that every word in the Bible comes directly from God. But a ditch on the other side of the road is that scripture is just the words of men, and that they were not inspired by God.

My middle-road belief is that God gives understanding to humans, who then do their best to explain a truth to their fellow humans. He has done this through visions and direct communication with prophets, and likely through gentle nudges of understanding later through the Holy Spirit. But all communication is subject to possible confusion related to language, differences in culture, etc. etc. Paul wrote (1 Cor 11) that it was naturally proper from a woman to keep her head covered. And apparently this commonly understood at the time. But today, in Western culture, a woman with an uncovered head is the norm, and it is not considered immoral to be seen in public with an uncovered head. Actually, in the OT description of Tamar tricking Judah into sleeping with her in Gen 38, she covered her head with a veil -- showing that a covered head at that time was a sign of a prostitute. Thus something that may be true in one time may not be true in another time. And the more specific an instruction is, the more likely it is to rapidly become untrue in a different context.

Ultimately I think the answer is for us to keep reading the Bible, and try to extract the truth we can, while constantly asking God for wisdom and understanding.

All Scripture is GOD-BREATHED

tonychanyt

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KevinT

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All Scripture is GOD-BREATHED

tonychanyt

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