God-breathed

Craig Allert’s A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church’s Future) is mostly about the implications of the history of canon-formation for our understanding of what the Bible is, our understanding of canon and inspiration. Much of the book is a historical review of the process of the formation of the NT, but toward the end he addresses the question of inspiration directly. He focuses attention on 2 Timothy 3 in an effort to discover what the Bible itself says about inspiration.

He spends several pages, for instance, discussing the meaning of the hapax theopneustos . It is not a strong performance.

He notes that it is a unique term in the Bible, possible a Pauline coinage. He warns that etymologies that translate the term as “God-breathed” cannot be trusted. He notes Warfield’s use of parallel ideas in Philo, but warns against reliance on Philo’s, whose wording and conceptual framework is different from Paul’s. He admits that “the passage does indicate that the authority of Scripture is from God,” but concludes that this is not the main point: “The stress of this passage is not on theopneustos ; instead, it is on the usefulness of Scripture.” This is part of a section that argues that while Scripture teaches inspiration, it does not present a “theory” of inspiration.

What Paul does mean by the term is unclear in Allert’s presentation. He doesn’t discuss the rich and complex meanings of pneuma – that Paul’s rare (if not original) word brings into play – the connection with the wind and breath and Spirit. He doesn’t discuss the Spirit’s role in prophecy. In the end he resorts to disputable, unprovable, and unargued (!) claims about “emphasis” and the red herring about “theory.” Of course Paul has no “theory” of inspiration; he is an apostle, not a theorist. But he means something, something more than he could capture with a simple ek theou , and it seems reasonable to pursue the hint back into the Old Testament’s portrayal of God’s breath. And as for emphasis – would Paul consider Scripture to be useful in the ways he claims it is useful if he did not believe it was theopneustos ? Would Scripture equip the man of God for every good work if it were not theopneustos ?

I take Allert’s word that he believes Scripture to be inspired and authoritative, “the final source for the believer’s faith and life.” But I have a hard time seeing how his discussion of 2 Timothy 3 can have any effect other than to undermine those convictions for the reader.