Although there are no inherent problems with dictation, there are indeed several definitive reasons to reject it as a description or explanation of biblical inspiration. We will discuss only three – the theory is false, irrelevant, and weak. Any of these reasons would be enough as a basis to reject it.

First, we must reject the dictation theory simply because it is false. It is not that dictation was impossible in principle, but it was not how Scripture was written – it was not how it happened. We mentioned that some parts of Scripture were written when the prophets recorded verbatim what they heard from God, but the whole Bible was not written this way, so that the theory fails to describe or explain the inspiration of the entire Bible. However, even if the entire Bible was written this way, dictation would still fail to describe or explain inspiration, at least because of the next two reasons.

Second, the dictation theory is irrelevant. Although it is called the dictation theory of inspiration, dictation has little to nothing to do with inspiration. Dictation describes how God speaks to a person or conveys that God speaks to a person, but inspiration refers to or must include what God does to a person as this person speaks and writes the words of God to produce an accurate product. Paul refers to the Scripture as God-breathed – something that came directly out of God. And Peter writes that men spoke from God as they were carried along. In other words, God did not just carry the prophets to hear his words, and then left them to relate what he said to the best of their human ability, but God carried them as they were speaking and writing his words.

God could dictate his words to an uninspired individual and the person could write down what he heard, but the product would still be an uninspired document, since without inspiration at the moment of writing, the authenticity and authority of the document would depend on the uninspired person's human ability to recall, arrange, and record what he thought God revealed. And there is no guarantee that he would not subtract from or add to what he heard.¹⁵ In fact, God could speak from heaven, and some would say that it thundered (John 12:29). Paul says that the Scripture is God-breathed, and not that the prophets heard God-breathed words which they then tried to relate without any divine guarantee of success or perfection.

For this reason, I wrote earlier, "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." I said "apparently" because the truth is that, when the subject is inspiration, no part of the Bible was actually written by mere dictation. Even when dictation was involved, if we were to associate "inspiration" with what Paul and Peter are talking about in the passages that we examined, then inspiration must at least refer to how God carried along the human writers as they were speaking and writing the words of God, and not just when they were hearing the dictation.¹⁶

Therefore, if the Scripture was nothing more than dictated, then it was not inspired. And even if the original dictation was God-breathed, unless God ensured by his omnipotence that his words were faithfully recorded as the human writers wrote, we still cannot say that the written product is God-breathed. The dictation theory is irrelevant because it addresses something other than the question at hand, that is, whether the written product is the infallible and inerrant revelation of God. As we have seen, Paul's answer is that "All Scripture is God-breathed," regardless of whether it was dictated or not dictated, or whether we are referring to the narratives, the prophecies, or the genealogies.

 

Notes

¹⁵ Of course, the person is still not autonomous in this case, but it would be God who controls him to produce a flawed document. But if this is the case, then the document is not rightly described as inspired, and still less infallible, inerrant, or God-breathed. It would be just another flawed piece of writing produced under God's ordinary providence.

¹⁶ It could be that they were also "carried along" by God as they were hearing his words, but it remains that the only issue of immediate relevance is whether they were carried along when they were speaking and writing.

(to be continued)

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