For Christians, particularly those of an Evangelical Protestant persuasion, the Bible stands unique and alone as the only rule for faith and practice. As such, it is important to understand why Evangelicals (including a ministry like DTM) have such a high view of the Bible. It is important to understand why the Bible is not just one other piece of ancient literature produced in the ancient world, but that it is the very Word of God himself. In this article, we will briefly survey the conservative Evangelical teaching on the Bible concerning the concepts of "revelation" and "inspiration."
Revelation is simply a revealing. That is the basic meaning of it. When someone tells you something that you did not know before, that is in some sense a revelation. But in theology, the word Revelation means much more than that. It is not just the name of the last book of the Bible (though it is that, too). It is a revealing from the mouth of the eternal God. It is God himself speaking to his special creation about his nature, ways, and will. That is why we will capitalize the "R" in "Revelation" when we are speaking in this way.
Traditionally, theologians have distinguished between two types of God's Revelation - General Revelation and Special Revelation.
General Revelation is what God has revealed to us in creation and nature. In other words, if you want to know something about God, just look around you! The created universe speaks quite a bit about God,
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
(Psalm 19:1-4 ESV)
But when it comes to the Bible, that is a different kind of revelation. Theologians call this Special Revelation. While the Bible is not the only kind of special revelation (for example, the coming of Jesus the Son of God in the flesh - the Incarnation - is another kind), it is the most common and available to us today. The Bible is an altogether different kind of special revelation. It is written down by the work of the Holy Spirit to serve as the Church's complete and sufficient rule for faith, conduct, and practice.
But how did the Bible come down to us? On the one hand, there is much that could be said about how the Bible was copied and transmitted, but that is beyond the scope of this article. The means through which the Bible came to us is something theologians call "Inspiration." The Bible is "inspired" because God "breathed it out" to us. Paul writes about this to Timothy,
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
(2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV)
The Apostle Peter also writes about this work of the Holy Spirit to inspire the Bible:
...no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
(2 Peter 1:20-21 ESV)
The Christian position on the Bible then is that the Bible and the Bible alone was produced by a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit and speaks with the full authority of God himself. No other work of literature can claim this, although some try to claim it for another book or for some other source of authority. But the passage in 2 Timothy reminds us that Scripture makes a person "complete." If that is the case, then what need have I of something else to go alongside the Bible? And because the Bible is inspired as a revelation to the human race from God, then we must hear what it says and obey it. Ultimately, it points us to Jesus Christ, who is the true revelation of the character of God (John 1:18).
