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Sunday, November 10, 2019

Argument from Inspiration for Compatiblism

According to standard Protestant/Evangelical views on Inspiration (Verbal Plenary Inspiration) God, by the Spirit brought about the exact text and wording such that what the authors of the various scriptural texts wrote could properly be called God's word. However at the same time, we Protestants can rightly say that Paul wrote Romans based on his own beliefs, personality, style, history, autobiography and that inspiration is neither via dictation nor merely of general concepts, nor a kind of sentimental "inspiration" like Shakespeare being inspired by a summer's day.

There is concurrence where God determines the exact wording of the scriptures while the authors are also freely writing what they desired to write.

I think this is a good example of Compatiblism. I can say that the Pentateuch is the direct word of God and that Moses should be praised as a literary genius for his composition of Genesis. Whether we think that this is by supervenience or concurrence or some other thesis, the question can be asked - Was it God who determined the content of his word or the authors? To which it is correctly responded - Both/and, yes.

Many Incompatiblists attempt to make a principled objection that if God causally determines the outcome of some action that the agent is not free in their actions. Inspiration seems to provide a clear exception to the principled objection that shows the assumption of Libertarian forms of Incompatiblism to false.

A Molinist may attempt to say that God merely foreknew what Paul would write and actualized a world where Paul wrote what God would have wanted him to write had he intervened. This poses two problems.

1. Why think such a world is feasible? Maybe the Bible is the best that God could get in a feasible world so it's his Plan B (still a plan but not his perfect word to be sure). And why not Plan C? Or D? or AABB?

2. The Molinist would need to give the metaphysics of how that is a concept of inspiration of the Biblical text specifically and not of any other text, for surely God equally foreknew and actualized the world with War and Peace written in the way that we have it. If the exact metaphysics of the Molinist accounts for the Bible in precisely the same way that it does War and Peace or the Devil's Bible, then in what conceptually significant way can we say that the Bible is inspired in a special way or that it is, properly speaking, "the Word of God"?

To the Incompatiblists reading this, based on the numerous objections to Compatiblism (that it undermines freedom, that it removes the ability to be praise/blameworthy, that if we are determined we cannot said to be rational, etc.) does that fact that God exhaustively determined the Scriptures mean that Paul and the other authors were not free, praiseworthy, rational, etc. in their composition of their texts?

Or to escape this problem, do you then feel the need to alter your view of Inspiration to affirm either a Dictation view or an Aeshetic Inspiration view?

1 comment:

  1. That kind of concurrence seems equally available to an LFW advocate. God desires that Peter write his gospel a certain way. His Spirit draws him to write it. He submits.

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