On Friday I posted some thoughts on how the Bible can be simultaneously both the words of God and written by humans. Here are some more thoughts on this mind-altering truth, from Thomas Oden’s book Classic Christianity. “God the Spirit,” writes Oden, has been historically viewed by Christians as “the author of scripture.” He continues:
The authors [of the Scriptures] wrote or spoke as moved by God’s own Spirit. Their consciousness, peculiarities of language, personalities, and psychological makeup became fittingly adapted instruments of the divine address. The Spirit found their particular psyches, their intelligence, their readiness, their social location, their historical placement useful to the divine plan and purpose, and spoke through them to and for all. It is the personal particularity that made the most differences in telling the story, since each hearer is unique….Each one’s personal human existence is unique and characteristic of that person; this is especially so in respect to speech…
Prophecy was not understood [even from the beginning] by ancient [Christians] as a product of the human imagination, but of human agency being gloriously transfigured by God’s own Spirit, wherein human egocentricity did not interrupt or distort what God sought to communicate…
The commonly received assumption [in the beginning of Church history] was that the Spirit so guided the writers that, without circumventing their own human willing, knowing, language, personal temperaments, or any other distinctly personal factors, God’s own Word was recalled and transmitted with complete adequacy and sufficiency.
Seriously, isn’t this awesome?
And doesn’t it challenge the common ideas about what it means to be human, and what it means for God to work with humans?