books in print that contain misinformation. I’m not talking about differences of opinion–I’m talking about things that people from many different perspectives could agree were just factually wrong. I find, for example, that a distressingly large number of “insights” brought from Greek or Hebrew in popular books are simply wrong, while many others are at least misleading because they don’t have the proper context.
When you get information from a book, you need to check references, and then you need to assure yourself that the references themselves are reliable. There are some facts making the rounds in Christian books that have simply been quoted so many times that everyone “knows” they are right, but nobody knows precisely where those facts came from. You need to check back to a primary source–the person who actually observed and recorded the data in the first place–whenever possible.
You are responsible for planting seeds in your mind. You are the one who is going to bear the fruit. You need to honor God with your mind by looking up the information.
An appearance of piety can replace wisdom. When someone announces–”God said it, I believe it, that settles it!”–without being certain that God says it, that bypasses the human mind. I have frequently been asked how overemphasizing God's sovereign power can possibly be a problem. But the truth is always important, and the fact is that God works through the natural.
It’s easy to dishonor God while sounding extremely pious. I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone say, “I’m just doing what the Bible says,” or “That is just God’s word!” when they are not, in fact, correctly quoting the material or are taking it badly out of context. What God says for a specific situation should settle it, but what God says and what people say God says may well be two very different things.
Always remember: You will harvest what you plant, and you are the one who chooses what to plant! The human factor is critical.
The Divine Factor
But what does it mean then that our communication is with God? Many people want to find the one solid thing on which they can hang their thoughts and dreams, something that allows them to be sure that they are right. Thus they are comforted by the idea of a perfect communication from a perfect God.
So if God if perfect, why can't he just see to it that we understand perfectly?
Well, he can. There is nothing preventing God from making certain that there is no doubt about his will. But a moment's thinking about your own life and looking around you at the lives of others should be sufficient to convince you that God has not done so.
Nonetheless there are plenty of people who still think God has communicated perfectly, and that we could get it all right if he would just do so. Generally people who think this belong to groups that continuously shrink and splinter, because every disagreement must involve someone who is too stubborn, too stupid, or too demonically controlled to realize their error.
Since the one under the power of demons is not going to admit he is wrong, the group will have to split according to who supports which of the contenders, and they will separate, bemoaning how the devil won again by blinding brother or sister so-and-so's eyes to the obvious truth.
God could also have created us with minds that were unable to incorrectly process data. He would have had to use a somewhat different process, because human evolution is not a tidy thing, and it has not produced a tidy human mind. Our perceptions are easily deceived, and we can be massively disagreeable. We're not even always—or even most frequently—certain of precisely why we made a decision. A couple of times when I was younger I bought a car and then regretted it later. Nonetheless, at the time I thought I was carefully selecting the car and buying it for all the right reasons.
Now I examine more testing data and let my feelings be overcome by actual test results. But there are still many things in my life that are not decided that way.
God chose to make us the way we are, capable of both major feats of learning and major disasters of stupidity, sometimes committed by the same person. Thus until we reach that other plane, we will have disagreements on what God meant, and it is very likely that all of us are wrong on some things.
It's easy to forget, but if you work with communications between devices, you learn right from the start that the speed of a connection is limited by the slower of the two terminals. Now many people, even communications professionals, don't recall the days of slow serial connections. You had hand-shaking to determine what sort of error correction each side of a connection could handle, and then you carried out communications using the best possible set of options.
It is the same way with our communication with God. It's limited not by who he is but by who we are. Any speculations of what God might have done are pretty useless in the face of what he has done!
God Speaks
Inspiration in Action
There are many theories about how God inspires people to write his message. In discussing inspiration, I'm going to start from within the Christian community and specifically with the Bible. This process allows us to examine the elements of inspiration based on material that at least one community regards as inspired.
This method is somewhat circular, but there is no generally accepted set of criteria by which one can determine what is and is not inspired. If there were such criteria, whatever document contained them would clearly be the most authoritative religious work, by which all others would have to be judged.
Because we must test something that claims to be from God by standards that claim to be from God, the process is somewhat circular, though we can anchor it to more objective standards at some point. It will be critical throughout our discussion to keep in mind one simple question: What is God trying to accomplish through inspiration?
It may seem that the answer is obvious—God wanted to give us information. But as we study claims of inspiration, from ancient scriptures to modern prophets proclaiming a current word from the Lord, I'd ask you to keep an open mind on this issue. We have no way to know just what God is trying to accomplish except through his revelation to us.
Typically, Christians have found proof texts in scriptures that make comments about inspiration. “All scripture is inspired (or God-breathed) . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16). “No prophecy of the scripture came by human will . . .” (2 Peter 1:21). These texts are not only used to prove the inspiration of scriptures, but they also provide the foundation for an understanding of how inspiration works.
We will never completely escape this type of circularity, though I think there are better ways to deal with the issue. Claiming that the Bible is inspired because it says so makes a very small circle. The Bible consists of many separate documents that were combined into the canon of scripture. Does a claim of inspiration in 2 Timothy apply to Genesis? If so, why? Should we perhaps be making our claims based on the authority of the church councils that settled the question of the canon? We're going to look at these issues further in the following chapters.
I most commonly hear 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted in this connection. I ask someone what inspiration means. “All scripture is God-breathed,” comes back the answer. “God-breathed” is supposed to be obvious, but somehow the passage doesn’t enlighten us as to what God breathes, how he breathes it, and what this means for the text, other than that it is profitable (2 Timothy 3:17). Another answer, that prophets speak as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), doesn’t really answer the question either.
The process
