Now, because Christians affirm that God inspired every word in the Bible and not just the general ideas, critics sometimes allege that this amounts to claiming that God gave the Scripture by dictation, while the prophets served as secretaries and wrote them down. Then, on this basis, the critics attack the inspiration of Scripture by pointing out that such a dictation theory is inconsistent with the actual characteristics of Scripture. This is because the various documents in the Bible apparently reflect the different backgrounds, personalities, conditions, and circumstances of the human writers. But if Scripture came by God's dictation, then supposedly there should not be these variations.

Theologians are quick to deny this dictation theory of inspiration, charging the critics with attacking a straw man. Many of them would approach the issue from a perspective similar to Michael Green's, stating that inspiration does not imply dictation, but it even required active cooperation from the human writers, only that God "superintended" their writing so that the product is jointly human and divine, and at the same time exactly what God intended to set in writing.

However, this falls short of a biblical answer, and is itself ensnared by false assumptions. We have already said something about this above when we interacted with Michael Green, but here we will apply and extend what we have said to address the dictation theory in particular.

But before explaining why we must reject the theory, we should point out that there is nothing inherently wrong, repugnant, or impossible about dictation. If God had chosen to speak his words to the prophets and have them write down what they heard, then that is how the Bible would have been written, and there would be nothing wrong with it. In fact, some parts of the Bible were apparently written this way. The prophets would say something about the contexts and the circumstances, and then relate a verbatim quotation of what God said to them.

Even if we were to apply dictation to the whole Bible, there still would not be any inherent difficulties. The objection stems from the fact that the Bible reflects a variety of writing styles and personalities. However, God is not a man and does not have the limitations and narrowness of a man's mind. He could have dictated different parts of the Bible in different ways to reflect his intellectual immensity. The essential issue is whether this multifaceted revelation nevertheless exhibits a perfect internal harmony. If it does not, then whether God gave the Scripture by dictation is the least of our problems, but if it does, then this harmonious variety found in Scripture cannot be used to argue against a dictation theory of inspiration.

(to be continued)

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