When People Speak for God. Henry E. Neufeld
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a perfect God.
So if God if perfect, why can't he just see to it that we understand perfectly?
Well, he can. There is nothing preventing God from making certain that there is no doubt about his will. But a moment's thinking about your own life and looking around you at the lives of others should be sufficient to convince you that God has not done so.
Nonetheless there are plenty of people who still think God has communicated perfectly, and that we could get it all right if he would just do so. Generally people who think this belong to groups that continuously shrink and splinter, because every disagreement must involve someone who is too stubborn, too stupid, or too demonically controlled to realize their error.
Since the one under the power of demons is not going to admit he is wrong, the group will have to split according to who supports which of the contenders, and they will separate, bemoaning how the devil won again by blinding brother or sister so-and-so's eyes to the obvious truth.
God could also have created us with minds that were unable to incorrectly process data. He would have had to use a somewhat different process, because human evolution is not a tidy thing, and it has not produced a tidy human mind. Our perceptions are easily deceived, and we can be massively disagreeable. We're not even always—or even most frequently—certain of precisely why we made a decision. A couple of times when I was younger I bought a car and then regretted it later. Nonetheless, at the time I thought I was carefully selecting the car and buying it for all the right reasons.
Now I examine more testing data and let my feelings be overcome by actual test results. But there are still many things in my life that are not decided that way.
God chose to make us the way we are, capable of both major feats of learning and major disasters of stupidity, sometimes committed by the same person. Thus until we reach that other plane, we will have disagreements on what God meant, and it is very likely that all of us are wrong on some things.
It's easy to forget, but if you work with communications between devices, you learn right from the start that the speed of a connection is limited by the slower of the two terminals. Now many people, even communications professionals, don't recall the days of slow serial connections. You had hand-shaking to determine what sort of error correction each side of a connection could handle, and then you carried out communications using the best possible set of options.
It is the same way with our communication with God. It's limited not by who he is but by who we are. Any speculations of what God might have done are pretty useless in the face of what he has done!
God Speaks
Inspiration in Action
There are many theories about how God inspires people to write his message. In discussing inspiration, I'm going to start from within the Christian community and specifically with the Bible. This process allows us to examine the elements of inspiration based on material that at least one community regards as inspired.
This method is somewhat circular, but there is no generally accepted set of criteria by which one can determine what is and is not inspired. If there were such criteria, whatever document contained them would clearly be the most authoritative religious work, by which all others would have to be judged.
Because we must test something that claims to be from God by standards that claim to be from God, the process is somewhat circular, though we can anchor it to more objective standards at some point. It will be critical throughout our discussion to keep in mind one simple question: What is God trying to accomplish through inspiration?
It may seem that the answer is obvious—God wanted to give us information. But as we study claims of inspiration, from ancient scriptures to modern prophets proclaiming a current word from the Lord, I'd ask you to keep an open mind on this issue. We have no way to know just what God is trying to accomplish except through his revelation to us.
Typically, Christians have found proof texts in scriptures that make comments about inspiration. “All scripture is inspired (or God-breathed) . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16). “No prophecy of the scripture came by human will . . .” (2 Peter 1:21). These texts are not only used to prove the inspiration of scriptures, but they also provide the foundation for an understanding of how inspiration works.
We will never completely escape this type of circularity, though I think there are better ways to deal with the issue. Claiming that the Bible is inspired because it says so makes a very small circle. The Bible consists of many separate documents that were combined into the canon of scripture. Does a claim of inspiration in 2 Timothy apply to Genesis? If so, why? Should we perhaps be making our claims based on the authority of the church councils that settled the question of the canon? We're going to look at these issues further in the following chapters.
I most commonly hear 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted in this connection. I ask someone what inspiration means. “All scripture is God-breathed,” comes back the answer. “God-breathed” is supposed to be obvious, but somehow the passage doesn’t enlighten us as to what God breathes, how he breathes it, and what this means for the text, other than that it is profitable (2 Timothy 3:17). Another answer, that prophets speak as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), doesn’t really answer the question either.
The process of inspiration is important not only in terms of how we understand God to behave in connection with people, but also in telling us what we would expect to result. For example, those who believe that God dictates the precise words that a prophet or other inspired writer puts on paper must in turn believe that those words, and not just the message they express, are important, and that they must always be the best words for the purpose.
On the other hand, someone who believes that people receive impressions from God and then express them in human words will place a greater emphasis on the human side of the equation. The message is important, and it may be illuminated by knowing the person who speaks along with his or her cultural background and spiritual experience.
As the author of Hebrews expressed it:
1In old times God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets in many portions and in different ways. 2In these last days, however, he has spoken to us through a Son, one whom he has made heir of everything, and through whom also he created the universe. 3This Son is the brightness of his glory and the exact representation of his real essence. He sustains everything by his powerful word. He performed a cleansing from sins and sat down at the right hand of majesty in the {spiritual/heavenly} heights. — Hebrews 1:1-3 (HN)
God’s message came at different times and in different ways, a process that, according to the author of Hebrews, culminated in God’s message coming through a person, Jesus. In Hebrews 4:12 he continues by calling the Word “alive and active” again referring to the Word of God as portrayed in Jesus. Those who place a heavy emphasis on the words, rather than the message, should give serious consideration to the view of revelation expressed in the book of Hebrews. According to this one scriptural author, whom most scholars leave unidentified, inspiration doesn’t always work the same way.
I would suggest that instead of looking for statements about how inspiration works in the scriptures, we should look at the scriptures themselves. There are many clues as to how inspiration works in the stories and the records of those who were inspired. There is no good reason to assume that those who experienced inspiration would also feel it necessary to define it. In fact, when we look at the scriptures we see no real effort to provide us with a theory of inspiration. There were simply people who claimed that they had a message from God, and they expressed it with some force under their various circumstances.
If we look at the evidence of the text itself it doesn’t seem that in many cases we have words dictated by God. There are passages that claim to be “words of God” and others that don't. Perhaps it would be best to respect that distinction.
Other than Moses bringing the tablets of the law from Mt. Sinai, we don’t have material actually written by God. Moses himself has various scribes chronicle the activities of the Israelites as they travel through