I think I titled the next chapter in my book When People Speak for God rather pretentiously: Authority and Truth. That’s what we’ll be discussing today in my Sunday School class.
As I was reading the chapter, I came across the following, which ties into several things I’m thinking about these days:
There is, however, a deeper claim that’s involved in both the virgin birth and the resurrection. These doctrines state that God is fundamentally interested in communion with human beings. In the virgin birth we have the statement that God is prepared to share our form and our condition and to become a part of that history. In the crucifixion, God says that he is prepared to carry that sharing all the way, to experience death. In the resurrection, he states that despite his willingness to share it, he’s above it, and thus able not just to communicate with us, but to redeem us.… (pp. 135-136)
I call my view of inspiration incarnational, because I see God’s Word, however it is expressed when it is communicated with human beings, as a form of incarnation. The problem with this is that I think the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation is not well understood. (There is, of course, the sense it which it will never be well understood and will always be a mystery!) But the way people often hear the term “incarnational” in connection with inspiration is as a claim that the Bible is a mixture of divine and human. When I call scripture incarnational, I do not mean a mixture. I mean that it is all divine and all human. We can sense aspects of divine and aspects of human, just as we can with Jesus the man, but we cannot divide.
Inspiration is all-the-way incarnation as well. God’s power is contained in the finite form. What we need is ears to hear and eyes to see.
I’ll have more to say about this over the next few days.
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