Verbal inspiration

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Caravaggio's painting from 1602 illustrates how an angel literally leads the hand of the evangelist Matthew while he is composing his gospel .

Verbal inspiration describes a form of the doctrine of inspiration , according to which the Bible is inspired by God right down to the wording . Traditionally connected with this is the belief in the infallibility and consistency of the Bible.

Occurrence and formation

The doctrine of verbal inspiration was developed in the 17th century within the so-called Lutheran Orthodoxy in order to secure the Protestant principle of writing ( sola scriptura ) against the teaching of Catholic theology , according to which not only the Bible , but also church traditions are authoritative for believers. It was claimed that the Holy Spirit the authors of the books of the Bible not only the facts entered (suggestio Rerum) , but also the exact wording virtually dictated 've (suggestio verborum) . In this understanding of Scripture, God actually becomes the author of the Bible, who only used its author as a writing instrument.

A similar understanding of Scripture can be found in the sense of Augustine . It penetrated Catholic theology as part of neo-scholasticism , but today it is essentially represented by parts of the evangelical movement and, to a limited extent, also by Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christian religious communities. A well-known verbal inspiration document is the Chicago Declaration on Inerrancy of Scripture.

According to Gerhard Maier, the verbal inspiration does not depend on the concept of dictation. You refer to the original text . Historical research and verbal inspiration are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to be a legal biblicist to defend verbal inspiration. It is logically consistent and closed, it brings the absolute of revelation to bear and gives certainty about the God-given content of scripture. The concept of inspired scripture is essentially consistent with the Jewish interpretation of the time of the apostles. According to James I. Packer , the Bible is the connection between the events through which God revealed himself in the past and the knowledge of God in the present. Therefore inspiration should be treated as a sub-point of the teaching on the revelation of God and not the other way around. It seems biblical and correct to expand the idea of ​​revelation and incorporate inspiration into it.

According to Howard Marshall, the theory of Benjamin Warfield and his successors sought to mediate between different theological schools of thought. His theory would see the action of the spirit in the fact that God did not choose the method of dictation, but inspiration led to the same result. Although the biblical writers wrote with complete freedom, God empowered and guided them to write exactly what God wanted. René Pache assumes that when the original texts were being written down, the Holy Spirit guided the authors into the choice of expressions, and that in the whole of Scripture without turning off the personality. Pache also quotes FE Gaebelein, who thinks that every word of the original text conveys in perfect form the message that God wanted to convey to man without error. Pache concludes that if the thoughts are input, so must the words.

Verbal inspiration in contrast to other ideas of inspiration

The concept of personal inspiration was coined in Romanticism ( Johann Gottfried Herder , Friedrich Schleiermacher ), which initially means that it was not the script but the authors of the texts that were inspired, but in the romantic sense not understood as God's influence on the human spirit, but Self-efficacy of a deified human spirit.

In addition, there is also the concept of real inspiration , according to which it is not the script itself, but certain contents or ideas of the script that are inspired (mostly more related to timeless religious or ethical ideas and without taking into account any historical claims of the texts).

Verbal inspiration, on the other hand, does not mean that the Bible is a dictation in which the human authors were mere, willless instruments of God, but rather it emphasizes that the Holy Scriptures themselves (not just the authors - but usually with the inclusion of the element of personal inspiration - and not just a few ideas and contents) is inspired, i.e. can be traced back to the work of the Spirit, on the basis of which one can call all of the Holy Scriptures verbum Dei ( Word of God ). In this sense, Gerhard Maier also coined the term “ total inspiration” .

Eugen Biser referred to the poetic : “Language kstases”, in which “the language [...] says itself”, are given in the Bible. Martin A. Hainz proposed the term intentio scripturae for this moment in biblical language, which suggests that inspiration is seen as permanently necessary and given: Faith can only move back to the roots to a limited extent because this backward movement is no longer "towards Christ" ( Benedict XVI. ) Can be.

See also

literature

  • Joseph Ratzinger : In the beginning God created. Four Munich fasting sermons on creation and fall . Erich Wewel Verlag, Munich 1986, here v. a. P. 21.
  • Eugen Biser : Paul. Testimony - encounter - effect . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003.
  • Hans Urs von Balthasar : Theologics . Vol. III: The Spirit of Truth . Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln 1987.
  • Franz König , Jacob Kremer: Live the truth now. Faith on the threshold of the third millennium . Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1991 (= Herder library, vol. 1746).
  • Martin A. Hainz: Intentio scripturae? On Revelation and Scripture, at Klopstock and in Derrida's Kafka reading . In: TRANS - Internet magazine for cultural studies, No. 16/2005.
  • Johanna Rahner : Introduction to Catholic dogmatics. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-20063-4 , especially p. 77ff.
  • Stephan Holthaus, Karl-Heinz Vanheiden (ed.): The infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible . Edition Bibelbund, Hammerbrücke 2001, ISBN 3-933372-38-0 (Second ISBN 3-935707-07-X ).

Web links

Wiktionary: Verbal inspiration  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Maier: Biblical Hermeneutics (= TVG monographs and study books. Volume 355). 7th edition. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 2011, ISBN 978-3-417-29355-5 , p. 94.
  2. ↑ Jörg Lauster : The enchantment of the world. A cultural history of Christianity. CH Beck, Munich 2014, p. 363.
  3. ^ Kern Robert Trembath: Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration: A Review and Proposal. Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1987, ISBN 0-19-504911-X ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ George Mitrovich: How Fundamentalists Became Evangelicals. In: huffingtonpost.com. October 9, 2008, accessed December 30, 2014 .
  5. ↑ M. James Penton: Apocalypse Delayed. The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses. University of Toronto Press, 1997, p. 172.
  6. ↑ Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 36, DeGruyter, New York / Berlin 2004, p. 662.
  7. ^ Gerhard Maier: Biblical Hermeneutics. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal / Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-417-29355-3 , pp. 97-99.
  8. ↑ James I. Packer, How God Spoken In Ancient Times. Scripture inspiration and inerrancy. Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell 1988, ISBN 3-88002-326-3 , p. 29.
  9. ^ I. Howard Marshall: Biblical Inspiration. Brunnen, Giessen / Basel 1986, ISBN 3-7655-9705-8 , p. 58.
  10. ↑ René Pache: Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. 3. Edition. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1985, ISBN 3-417-24534-6 , p. 63.
  11. ^ Frank Ely Gaebelein: The Meaning of Inspiration. Chicago 1950, p. 9, in: René Pache: Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. 3. Edition. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1985, ISBN 3-417-24534-6 , p. 63.
  12. ↑ René Pache: Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. 3. Edition. R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1985, ISBN 3-417-24534-6 , p. 67.