Revelation and Inspiration : the Ground for a New Approach

Should theological scholarship be satisfied with alreadyexisting theories about revelation and inspiration, or is there room for development of a new understanding of the way in which the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures were originated? In this article I probe the question of the ground or basis for developing a new approach to this doctrine. Further aspects of the topic will be considered in later articles. It seems clear, to begin with, that according to Scripture itself, both revelation (e.g., Dan 2:28; Gal 1:12; Eph 1:17; and Rev 1:l) and inspiration (eg., 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Pet 1:21) are acts of God. Without attempting at this point to define these terms precisely, we can say that revelation involves God's action in the process of generating ideas in the mind of the prophet, whereas inspiration involves God's action in the process through which the prophets wrote down the revealed ideas and produced the Bible.' It follows that any interpretation of the revelation-inspiration process will be conditioned by the prior understanding of God and human beings that theologians consciously or unconsciously assume in discussing the origin of the Scriptures. When students of theology are able to realize that the natures of the two agents involved in the revelation-inspiration doct r ine God and the human spokesperson-are interpreted in diverse ways, they will have discovered why so many different and mutually exclusive interpretations of the very same process have been produced by theological reflection.