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The Right Wing:
The Illumination View
 Illumination view of inspiration claim that
scripture contains the noble insights of
great people of faith. It equates
illumination to inspiration.
 It claim divine inspiration for only certain
portions of the Bible that the writers could
not have known naturally.
The Left Wing:
The Intuition View
 This view holds that the writers were inspired
only in the sense that from time to time
their natural religious insight and genius
were deepened and heightened to discover
“divine truths”.
 It is human intuition rather than divine
revelation.
Objections to the Liberal Views
 Man is the most active, if not the only agent
actively involved in the process of the
discovery of divine truth.
 It makes human reason or feeling the final
judge of determining which part of the
Bible is divine and which part is human.
 It is not biblical. It neglects what the Bible says
about itself.
The Right Wing:
The Existential View
 The Bible as a means of a personal
encounter by God with man in an act of
revelation and the meaningless ink blots
on the pages leap from the Bible to
speak concretely and meaningfully.
 At this “moment of meaning”, the Bible
becomes the word of God to the
individual.
The Left Wing:
The Demythologizing View
 This view holds that the Bible must be
stripped and divested of religious myth in
order to get at the real message of God’s
self-giving love in Christ.
 Hence, the Bible becomes a revelation when
proper demythological interpretation is
done.
Objections to the Neo-Orthodox
Views
 The Neo-Orthodox View, like the Liberal View,
is naturalistic. It sets aside the supernatural
nature of the Bible.
 The locus of revelation is too subjective.
Depends on the human agent.
 It is certainly unbiblical. It failed to consider
what the Bible said about itself. “Godbreathed” writings.
The Right Wing:
The Verbal Dictation View
 Every word of the Bible was given,
according to this view, to the prophet
who served as a secretary for the
dictation of God.
 The illustration of Moses is sometimes cited
as the modus operandi of inspiration
(Exodus 24:4), which amount to
mechanical dictation.
The Left Wing:
The Dynamic View
 This view suggested that it is not the words but
the thoughts or ideas that God inspired.
 To them, God gave the thought and the prophet
was ‘free’ to record it ‘in his own words.’
 It explains the obvious personality and literary
differences but maintain it to be God’s
word because the message came from God.
Objections to the Conservative
Views
Verbal Dictation View
 It does not accord with what the Bible teaches
that God used human agents not as
passive receptors but as active contributors
in its writing.
 It denies the presence of differences in
personality, literary styles, etc. which are
obvious in every book of the Bible.
Dynamic View
 It explains the Bible’s humanity but in so
doing weakens its divinity.
 The Verbal dictation deifies the human
aspect of the Bible while the Dynamic
view humanizes the divine.
 The alternative, and the one that is biblical, is
that ALL THE WORDS (verbal) which are
written are God-breathed (pasa graphe
Theopneustos – 2 Tim. 3:16).
 God gave FULL (plenary) expression to His
thought in the words of the biblical record.
 He guided in the very choice of the words used
within the personality and the cultural
complex of the writers so that, in some
inscrutable manner, the Bible is the word
of God while being the words of men.