Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
......the Bible proposes a god that cannot exist because of the very qualities is suggests it has. If a god did divinely inspire the Bible, the god of which the the Bible defines is not that god...
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I find that people make broad assumptions about what is meant by "divinely inspired", and end up with a concept that is both indefensible and contrary to what how it functions in the Bible. In actual fact, the word that this term is translated from appears only once in the entire Bible, and only a few more times in the entire collection of classical Greek literature. It is most literally interpreted "God breathed," but even this does not bring us much closer to its probable meaning.
Most Christians assume inspiration to mean something like "spoken"—the idea that God "breathed out" from his mouth the very words of the Bible, or something like "emanating from God's essence"—the idea that the Bible is infused with his character or being. The first definition is not probable, because it comes across as a very odd way to say that God dictated the words of scripture. If this is what Paul meant, then he would have certainly said that scripture is "God spoken" rather than "God breathed". The second definition is closer to how the term functions—that God's breath produces a special quality, but most conceptions also carry with it the unnecessary freight of being a
perfect representation of his character. Human beings were said to have been animated in exactly the same fashion (Gen 2:7), and yet the Bible is pretty consistent in its presentation of humanity as tragically flawed.
Why do we assume a burden of perfection for one product of "divine inspiration" but not for another?