Brisbane priest responds to Abp. Phillip Aspinoll

How does plenary inspiration differ from regular inspiration

Agsin I am not sure what you’re trying to say

Have you considered having less prevarications and circumlocutions in your phrases, just plainly say what you’re intending

 

There’s ‘verbal’ inspiration, and then there’s ‘concept’ inspiration. The former means that the Bible is true in what it says, whereas the latter means that it is true with regard to what it intends to teach.

 

So the ‘Bible as inspired’ only means it’s true conditionally and not in every part and in every single way? Not every part of it is actually fully inspired?

So, ‘inspired’ but not ‘fully inspired?’

 

It isn’t clear to me what kind of distinction you’re trying to make.

 

If I say the Bible is inspired, does that mean that every part of it is fully inspired or not?

And if yes, then what will ‘plenary inspiration’ add to it

 

What do you mean by ‘inspired’? That God chose the words, and the human author was passive in the process of writing it?

 

Verbal plenary inspiration is the idea that every word in the bible was chosen by God intentionally, and for a specific purpose.

The traditional, patristic, view of scripture that the Anglican church holds to is not that. We believe the bible to be the [inspired] work of God. We believe it to be a complete work of truth. We consider that any lessons to be learned from the bible are incapable of failing in their aim of delivering the reader to salvation. There is no lesson contained within that will lead you away from God. And each lesson contained within was inspired by God.

But each and every single word was not. It is the message that is inspired, not the words on the paper. This is why we can use multiple translations, and reconcile that the Gospels tell the same stories in different ways. Because its what we learn from it that matters, not the words we read. The doctrine of inerrant verbal plenary inspiration is modern, American (although not actually started in America, but certainly popularised there) and almost exclusively Evangelical. The Anglican church is an ancient church, and a global church, that holds views on the bible in line with the Church fathers, with the very people that canonised the texts, and passed down their understanding of what it meant from bishop to bishop all the way through to the modern day.

I have no idea what any of this has to do with what we were talking about. No one in this thread has said the bible is not inspired.

 

It doesn’t say dictated, it says inspired, so the Holy Ghost is behind the words of the scripture; I dunno, what do our classic theologians teach on this matter?

 

The truth is being twisted here. The 'exercise of authority' is not the same thing as 'possessing authority' (or to phrase it differently, 'being by nature authoritative'), and equating the two is a serious fallacy (which you plainly depend heavily upon, as you say: "more importantly..."). For example, the laws on the nation's books are authoritative, but those laws do not in any way exercise authority; laws don't ride around in cars and arrest people, police officers do that. The Bible is God's word written and is composed via dual authorship (by coincidence my rector spoke on that very point in today's sermon) of the human individual wielding the quill and the Holy Spirit inspiring the human to ensure that God's Truth was written. Thus the Bible is, by its nature and being, filled with authority even though it is God who has exercised, is exercising, and will exercise the authority.

That is absolutely, positively bass-ackward. The Church's teaching is based on the teachings and revelations provided by God to mankind, whereas the Bible is the physical instrument by which those truths are preserved and the written record containing God's wise teachings and revelations to us all. It is the Church's duty to testify of God's truth to the world, and this process of testifying includes the transmission of the Biblical text and the truth contained therein; the Church may certainly explain the difficult passages and expound upon what the Bible contains, but the Church's "historic teaching" is in no way the basis of God's truth; those teachings can only interpret the truth, and that truth is found in the written word of God.

God's word is truth (John 17:17), and God's word (and truth) existed long before the Church existed. God's word to us preexisted the actual writing, for He knew it before the world was created. Since God deposited the truth we need in written form, He (not the Church) gave us the Bible. The Church met in council and discussed the matter of the various writings, recognizing the ones that virtually all within the Church (spread throughout many localities) already agreed were inspired of God, and (after discussion) set aside in a separate category those writings which were not so agreed upon by the universal Church-at-large (even though some local churches were reading them and holding them in high regard, these latter writings either contained errors or were not discerned to be similarly inspired by God). If one wishes to be entirely literal, then it was tanners and scribes who created the Bible; but as far as the Church should be concerned theologically, God created and gave us the Bible. The Church-at-large simply recognized God's handiwork and stated some guidance upon that.

God imbued His written word with authority ('authoritativeness' might be a more precise word) as He enabled people to pen it, a portion at a time. The Church could not give authority to the word of God any more than an ant could give authority to the sun which shines upon it. God gave some authority to the Church (as His written word tells us!), not the other way around.

Personally, I would have no problem with that. Light the bonfires! But, point taken about those particular passages in Deuteronomy and Revelation; some preachers have lifted them out of context, unfortunately.

 

And the Church therefore gets to decide what the Bible "intends to teach"? Even when their "interpretation" defies the very words of scripture? That is what some churches seem to think they can do. And that is why they come up with wonky new interpretations that match better with 'modern societal mores and norms' than with either the plain written words or the Church's age-old teaching.

 

Every (good) theologian I've ever read makes the point that the human writers of Scripture are not simply automatons taking dictation from the Holy Spirit. Their thinking minds are left intact, and they impart their individual styles and personalities to the text. (In fact authorial style is important to textual criticism since, e.g., though the book of Hebrews was traditionally ascribed to the Apostle Paul, it probably was not written by him; the style is so different from everything Paul wrote that it is unlikely -- though not impossible -- that he wrote it.)

However, it is wrong to say that the writers of the Bible were merely writing the 1st-century version of a blog post. They had received a special mandate from our Lord Jesus Christ, and that included passing on the teachings of Christ to the nascent Church.

The Holy Spirit did not simply inspire the writing of Paul; the Holy Spirit inspired Paul himself! From the road to Damascus until his execution at the hands of the Romans, Paul was a vessel shaped and molded by the Hand of God. As was Peter. As was John. As was James the Just, and so on with all the other faithful men who wrote the books of the Bible going back to Moses. Scripture is theopneustos, God-breathed, and it is not something that only happens when an Apostle puts pen to paper. Every breath that Apostles took was breathed out by God; when Jesus granted the Apostles his power to carry the Word into the world, and sent the Spirit to help them, this "breath" of God invested every waking moment of their lives ever afterward.

This is also why the Scriptural canon closed after the Apostolic age. The books of the New Testament come from the Apostles themselves, or from those who had direct witness from them. Not only fraudulent works were excluded; many works of good doctrine and sound teaching were excluded simply because they could not be traced back to Apostolic authority. Christ gave this divine task to his Apostles, and to no one else. This is why we cannot add to Scripture -- no one now living has the mandate of our Lord Jesus Christ to do so. And this is why we say the Bible is written by God himself. The Holy Spirit invested the men who wrote the books of the Bible and guided them, not just in the actual writing, but in the living out of God's word. The Holy Spirit lives in all of us, but not in the same way as the Apostles; the power given to them was unique, and not to be repeated.

 

Yes. That’s always been the case.

 

If you're a Roman Catholic, I suppose. But Protestants think otherwise.

Tyndale to a (priest) friend during conversation:

It's always been a core Protestant tenet that any person, with common education and comprehension, can read and understand Scripture. This is why Protestants wrenched the Bible out of the hands of the clerics and made it available to all. The perspecuity of Scripture is a point of doctrine among most Protestant churches (including our own). Yes, there are parts of the Bible that are difficult and need explanation; yes, the full counsel of Scripture must be learned under the tutelage of elders in the church.

But the Church does not impose a meaning upon Scripture. Scripture carries its own authority. The role of the Church, as Paul explains to his young pastor protege Timothy, is to use Scripture for "reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." The church teaches what's in the Bible (or at least it should). It does not decide what the Bible "really" says in any official capacity. Article VI of our own 39 Articles makes this clear when it says that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." The Church cannot force a meaning on Scripture that it does not already carry in itself*. And the believer must discern whether what they are hearing from the pulpit conforms to what they are reading in Scripture.

This is why the writers of the New Testament epistles always warn against false teachers and a return to the Gospel originally given to them by the Apostles, which is now enshrined in the books of the New Testament.

*I personally believe that Scripture carries a specific meaning in every verse (authorial intention), and that this one meaning can have many applications; and I think churches would do well to follow that guideline. But my point is that the only "official" interpretation the Bible should carry is the one carried by the plain meaning of the language in it. If you find yourself denying the plain language of Scripture and going off into the weeds on what it "really" means, you have left Scripture behind.

 

There is nothing inherently Roman Catholic (or even controversial) in acknowledging that the apostolic teaching preceded the apostolic scriptures. The Church produced the Bible, not the other way around.

Even a cursory knowledge of the controversies of the 4th century puts such simplistic notions to rest. The Church may indeed override the plain sense of a passage in order to arrive at a true teaching concerning God or Christ. For example:

Thus, for instance, "My Father is greater than I," which had been understood even by St. Athanasius of our Lord as God, is applied by later writers more commonly to His humanity; and in this way the doctrine of His subordination to the Eternal Father, which formed so prominent a feature in Ante-nicene theology, comparatively fell into the shade.
https://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter4.html
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The so-called perspicuity of Scripture is not an apostolic doctrine. It was in fact the teaching of the Fathers that Scripture is obscure, and this is why the Fathers, especially the Eastern Fathers, favored negative theology and allegorical interpretation. They didn’t derive these approaches from the NT; they were imposed on the text, by the same Fathers who helped define the core dogmas of the Faith.

 

That is one of the doctrinal beliefs of the RCC I found repugnant. Have a look at this diagram I whipped up.

Properly, scripture is paramount by itself (nothing else on the same level), and while we primarily allow scripture to interpret scripture, we also utilize a combination of church teaching and reason (in equivalent measures) to interpret scripture. Reason should not rule tradition, nor should tradition rule reason, but both are of equal value and necessity.

 

As I said above:

The first of the genuine Pauline epistles appeared around the year 50 C.E. For nearly two decades, oral tradition was the sole source of information about the Gospel, and remained the primary source in many areas for long after that. The Bible isn't the Qur'an: it didn't just fall from the sky, whole and entire, ready to be applied to each and every situation or controversy that might arise. It was produced, gradually, consisting of disparate writings that slowly coalesced into a recognized unity of work, in a process that took several centuries.

 

People often make this mistake about music notation. The development of music notation didn't "create" music theory -- it merely codified something that was already common practice. Theory follows practice.

Christian doctrine was already well-formed by the time the Apostles started writing their epistles and memoirs. The written documents did not create Christian doctrine; they simply codified teachings already in common practice. The Council of Jerusalem around 50AD established the unity of doctrinal teaching between Paul, Peter, and the rest of the Apostles. The concept of the Holy Trinity, for example, was well-understood before the name was applied much later. Christ's teachings established Christian doctrine; the Apostles then carried those teachings into the world as preachers and pastors.

God wrote the Bible for us, through the Apostles, so that we would remember.

 

Relevance?

Evidence?

This is a bare assertion. Neither ‘direct dictation’ nor ‘plenary verbal inspiration’ can claim to be the Anglican view.

 

"Coalesced"... that word makes the Bible sound as if it just sort of 'formed' or 'fell into place' piece by piece through natural forces. Sort of like wisps of water vapor "coalescing" to form a cloud. It disregards the amazing way that all the seemingly disparate books blend together in fulfilling a single divine purpose (pointing people to the One who created us) and unite in relating a singular concept (namely, the mighty hand of God and His actual involvement with His creation). It ignores the way in which the various books build upon one another and often quote one another, joining together in weaving a picture of God's character like an intricate tapestry. It discounts the supernatural and effectively belittles God by discounting His role in planning, designing, and bringing to fruition His written word.

No other publication in history has ever effected so much positive change in the world. The Bible's message was the driving force behind the development of thriving western civilization by influencing millions of people to act with honesty and morality, to respect the lives, liberty and property (human rights) of others, to pursue the sciences, to labor with diligence, and to promote literacy and equality (read The Book That Made Your World by Mangalwadi). It is not a simple collection of dusty, old writings bound together and enclosed by a cover. The Bible is a receptacle of divine truth designed and created by the power of God. It reveals the Creator, points mankind toward Him, and glorifies Him. The Bible is God speaking to us. It is the publication of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with a very long preface, and that Gospel is the power of God (Rom. 1:16).

...when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe (1 Thess. 2:13). This is functionally true of the entire Bible: it is not the word of men, but the word of God which effectually works on and in the hearts of those who hear or read it.

Please elevate your view of holy scripture!

 

I’d put it like this: