BAPTIST BELIEF ABOUT BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
INTRODUCTION
A set of beliefs are classified as Baptist distinctives. These beliefs are designated using the acronym BAPTISTS. In the coming months, I intend to discuss each of these beliefs to show the thorough biblical foundations and core evangelical nature of Baptist faith and doctrine. The first letter of the acronym stands for biblical authority, justifiably so for a people known as people of the book.
Baptists believe that “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by the inspiration of God, and are the only sufficient, certain and authoritative rule of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience”. The Bible, “as originally written does not only contain and convey the Word of God but is the very Word of God” (Beliefs, Policies and Practices of the NBC, 2015, p. 3).
BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND BIBLICAL INSPIRATION
Prominent in the statement above are the concepts of inspiration and authority. Baptist belief on the authority of the Bible derives from the affirmation of the Bible as a product of God’s inspiration. It is God’s inspiration of the biblical writers that guarantees the truth that the Bible does not only contain the word of God but “is” the very word of God though written by men.
Such a high view of the Bible must be sustained by an equally high view of biblical inspiration. When inspiration is used for the Bible, it is different from the way it is used for people being inspired to speak or act in certain ways. Speaking of the inspiration of the Bible refers to the “supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Scripture writers that rendered their writings an accurate record of the revelation or that resulted in what they wrote actually being the Word of God” (Erickson, 2013, 169).
DIFFERENT NOTIONS OF BIBLICAL INSPIRATION
Erickson summarizes the different theories of biblical inspiration into five: intuition, illumination, dynamic, dictation, and verbal theories. Intuition theory holds that the Bible merely contains a high degree of insight like great works of literature. It is promoted mainly by theological liberals. Illumination theory sees inspiration as referring to a heightening of the normal mental processes of the biblical writers. It did not amount to any special or supernatural communication of truth. Dynamic theory is of the view that the Holy Spirit gave the human writers the ideas which they communicated in their words and thought forms. The dynamic view sounds plausible, humanly speaking, but it miserably falls short of sustaining the belief of many evangelical Christians that the Bible is the word of God. The dictation theory is the idea that God dictated the Bible to the writers. While some passages of the Bible are presented as dictations from God, most of the Bible is not presented this way.
The fifth theory, namely verbal inspiration affirms that “the Holy Spirit’s influence extends beyond the direction of thoughts to the selection of words used to convey the message. The work of the Holy Spirit is so intense that each word is the exact word God wants used at that point to express the message” (Erickson, 2013, 175). While this description of the verbal theory may sound like the dictation theory, it is different from it.
JUSTIFYING VERBAL THEORY OF INSPIRATION
Verbal theory of inspiration is preferable by far in explaining the Baptist belief that the Bible is the authoritative word of God. Verbal inspiration is different from the dictation theory. The dictation theory seems to suggest that the writers of Scripture did not process the thoughts they were given by the Holy Spirit and that they simply documented what was dictated to them. The verbal theory, on the other hand, acknowledges that the writers made use of their words, thoughts, and backgrounds but these were masterminded by the Holy Spirit as part of his preparation of the people for the special assignment of writing Scripture. In other words, God who knows each human even before they are born, already knew the role these writers would play in the documentation of his special revelation and took time to prepare and equip them for the task to the extent of shaping their life experiences and verbal repertoires.
The warrant for this high view of the Scriptures come from the way Jesus and biblical writers interpret Bible passages, giving great significance to the minutest details such as tense, number and even punctuations. For instance, in Matthew 22: 43-44, Jesus makes a consequential theological point based on David’s use of the possessive pronoun “my” in describing the Messiah “The LORD said to my Lord … Since David called the Messiah ‘my Lord,’ how can the Messiah be his son?” Thus, the Messiah is David’s son by human reckoning and David’s Lord by divine essence (Compare also Matt 22:29-32; John 10.35-36 and Psalm 82.6; Matt 22.32 and Exodus 3.6; Gal. 3.16 and Gen 12.7, 2 Tim 3:16, etc).
CONCLUSION
Theological precision is required in explaining the idea of biblical inspiration and authority otherwise we may end up contradicting what we claim to believe. Baptists have and will always hold the Bible in high esteem and affirm it as the final authority in all matters of faith and practice.
