BIBLE,
INSPIRATION OF
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
The Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16–17
Just as the Holy Spirit came upon the womb of Mary, so He came upon the brain of a Moses, a David, an Isaiah, a Paul, a John and the rest of the writers of the divine library. The power of the Highest overshadowed them, therefore that holy thing which was born of their minds is called the Holy Bible, the word of God. The writing of Luke will, of course, have the vocabulary of Luke and the work of Paul will bear the stamp of Paul’s mind. However, this is only in the same manner that the Lord Jesus might have had eyes like his mother’s or hair that was the same color and texture as hers. He did not inherit her sins because the Holy Spirit has come upon her. If we ask, how could this be, the answer is God says so. And the writings of men of the Book did not inherit the errors of their carnal minds because their writings were conceived by the Holy Spirit and born out of their personalities without partaking of their fallen nature. If we ask, how could this be, again the answer is God says so.
Donald Grey Barnhouse
My whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavor to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit.
Karl Barth
I know the Bible is inspired because it finds me at a greater depth of my being than any other book.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The whole of Scripture and all of its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. The written word in its entirety is revelation given by God. Confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of Christian faith.
Warren Doud
Since the writers of the Bible wrote the things which God showed and uttered to them, it cannot be pretended that He is not the writer; for his members executed what their head dictated.
Gregory the Great
We loyally believe the Holy Spirit to be the author of the book. He wrote it who dictated it for writing; He wrote it who inspired its execution.
Gregory the Great
We do not assert that the common text, but only the original autographic text, was inspired.
A.A. Hodge
The plenary inspiration of the sacred writers made them infallible in all they taught; but it did not make them omniscient. The time of the second coming was not revealed to them. They profess their ignorance on that point.
Charles Hodge
The Bible is the only book that has been written not just by human characters inside the story but also by the divine author of the story. Its perspective is double, that of the characters and that of the author, or that of the human authors and that of the divine author. Like Christ – the word of God in person – the Bible, the Word of God in writing, is the Word of God in words of men. It has both a human nature and a divine nature.
Peter Kreeft
For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Spirit; and so far is it from being possible that any error can coexist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church.
Pope Leo XIII
[The Holy Spirit] assisted the authors of the books of the Bible so that they “expressed in apt words and with infallible truth.” Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the entire Scripture. Such has always been the persuasion of the Fathers.
Pope Leo XIII
The sacred books are pervaded by the Spirit. There is nothing either in the prophets, on in the law, or in the Gospels, or in the epistles, which does not spring from the fulness of the divine majesty.
Origen
The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad preaching.
A.T. Robertson
The particularity of each New Testament author was in no way smothered by the unique process of inspiration. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit first prepared, and then used, their individuality of upbringing, experience, temperament and personality, in order to convey through each some distinctive and appropriate truth.
John Stott
Divine inspiration makes the Bible uniquely the Word of God and not merely a book containing the Word of God, and as such is different from any other book sacred or secular.
M.F. Unger
The books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council [Trent] and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their Author.
The Council of the Vatican, 1869–1870
[This differs from the commonly held view that inerrancy and inspiration only refer to the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek documents.]
If criticism has made such discoveries as to necessitate the abandonment of the doctrine of plenary inspiration, it is not enough to say that we are compelled to abandon only a “particular theory of inspiration …” We must go on to say that that “particular theory of inspiration” is the theory of the apostles and of the Lord, and that in abandoning it we are abandoning them.
B.B. Warfield