The Word of God?

Friar Jack has some interesting thoughts in his latest E-spiration. Writing about the inspiration of Biblical texts, he says,

We know the entire Bible is God’s inspired word, though the Gospels and Epistles enjoy a kind of preeminence. The Gospels are the account of the life, ministry and saving death of Jesus, the Word made Flesh, and the Epistles give us a development of Christian doctrine in the formative years of the infant Church.

It is understandable that some statements in the Bible are more important than others. For example, Jesus' words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and the Our Father are more important than something from Proverbs, such as “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Additionally, Paul’s magnificent description of how Jesus “became like us in all things but sin” carries more significance and importance than a list of dietary rules and regulations found in Deuteronomy. Still, everything is inspired.

What does the Church mean when saying that the Bible is the inspired word of God? You will find that there are various interpretations of inspired among many Christian denominations. Some will say that every word in the Bible is God’s direct word and that the Scripture writers were simply taking dictation from God. That’s why, for example, some Christians will say that—no matter what we discover about the universe and planet earth—God created it all in six days (with one day of rest). After all, they say, the Bible says “six days” and that’s that. It’s God’s word. Catholics don’t see it quite that way.

The Catholic Church teaches the following on the Bible’s authors:

"To compose the sacred books [the Bible] God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more." (Catechism of the Catholic Church #106)

...The Scripture writers were not stenographers simply taking dictation from the voice of God. They wrote as themselves, which is why you find different writing styles among them. The Greek of Mark's and Luke’s Gospels are quite different, Mark’s being rather plain in comparison to Luke’s much more polished text. However, each author wrote what he believed to be the Good News based on what that he witnessed with his own eyes and heard from others who knew Jesus.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke say that Jesus went to Jerusalem one time during his ministry, while John’s Gospel has Jesus traveling a number of times. These differences in no way indicate error on behalf of the authors. Rather, they recorded what God wanted, but at the same time were using sources of information that varied from place to place. Yet, what each wrote is God’s Word. And that is the core of their mystery. They wrote what God wanted written, but God never took from them their own freedom or their individual personalities.

We do not know the true experiences of the Bible's writers and whether they felt inspired. Certainly the prophets of the Old Testament give that very impression as they chastised and challenged the Israelites in the name of God. But more likely the writers were doing what they thought they should be doing in writing the history of the Old Testament and the Gospels and epistles of the New Testament. The Bible's authors may not have at all felt inspired as we imagine it. But when they wrote (even while using their own words and expressions), the result was indeed the inspired Word of God, the Word of God in human language.

This is one of the sanest and wholest accounts of Scriptural inspiration I've ever read.

So often what, even today, we do and write and think and say seems just like our own ordinary attempts at following our Lord. and yet sometimes even in our own lives we can look back, years later, and see God's hand in it all. Certainly it seems to have been so for the people we revere as Saints. They themselves were often just as confused, and afraid, and tentative as any of us (think of Mother Teresa's recently published letters, and Fr. Alex Ayeung's wise and beautiful commentary on them) and yet they were faithful. As a blogging friend wrote to me recently, when we accept to be Christ's, we are not sacrificing anything for him: we are the sacrifice. This is not, she went on to say, heroics - no sheep ever volunteered for the slaughter. It is just the bare faith that if we are crucified in Christ, either literally or metaphorically, then we will be raised in him. She is so right.