Is the Bible a Product of Divine or Human Will?

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield has become a bit of a hero of mine, which is odd, because until tonight I had not finished a single complete work of his. B.B. Warfield, as he is known, was a professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 until his death in 1921.  He is considered by many to have been the last of the great conservative theologians at Princeton, an institute which also employed famed theological thinkers Archibald Alexander, and Charles and A.A. Hodge.  I was first introduced to Warfield several years ago by Daniel B. Wallace in his article, My Take on Inerrancy, which I have commented on previously.  Since I have read a great many of Wallace's papers and have come to admire his expertise in a number of subjects, it was inevitable that I should also come to respect Warfield, a man who he respects.  Steve and I have begun reading Warfield's The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, and will likely post on it in the future.  Tonight, while out of town for business, I found an excellent used bookstore near my hotel where I happened upon a compilation of papers written by Warfield.  The book, called Evolution, Science, and Scripture¹, claims to be an unedited selection of his works which articulate his views on... well, evolution, science, and scripture.  I will presently summarize and comment on the first of these essays, entitled The Divine and Human in the Bible.²

Three Views on the Divine and Human Elements in the Bible

The problem, which Warfield rightly states is most prominently before the minds of today's Bible students, is that of the relationship between the divine and human elements of scripture. Modern and Post-modern scholarship continue to make this a relevant issue by asking questions such as "Did the events recorded in scripture actually take place in history?", "Are the actions authorized and exemplified throughout scripture morally defensible?", or "Are the scriptures right to promote any kind of objective morality at all?" The reason these questions facilitate a narrowing of focus on the problem stated above is only tangentially related to their actual content and not at all dependent on their answers; it is because these questions focus the student's attention on the uniquely human aspects of scripture. And with that focus, the student is left wondering if the Bible really is a human book after all, or if it is divine, or some hybrid of both. This question applies to both the process which brought scripture about, and the product which has in the end been brought about  (that is, scripture itself). Most modern emphasis lies on the product of scripture, but Warfield argues that one cannot hold a proper view of the product of scripture without understanding the process which brought it about. In his paper, he describes three viewpoints of the problem, two which he holds to be quite in error:

1. The first view discussed is the extreme view of Either/Or. That is, either the Bible was brought about by humans qua fallible humans, or else it was brought about wholly by God, and either one leaves no room for the other. Warfield explains this as follows:

At one time there arose in the church, under the impulse of zeal to assert and safeguard the divinity of Scripture, a tendency toward so emphasizing the divine elements as to exclude the human. The human writers of Scripture were conceived as mere implements in the hands of the Holy Ghost, implements by which (rather than through whom) he wrote the Scriptures. Men were not content to call the human authors of Scripture merely penmen, the amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, but represented them as simply his pens. Inspiration, in this view, was conceived as a simple act of dictation; and it was denied that the human writers contributed any quality to the product, unless, indeed, it might be their handwriting.³

However, obvious evidences of human elements in the Bible, such as unique styles and vocabularies, render this view untenable. Equally problematic, on the other hand, is the view which denies divine authorship in favor of a completely human one:

Throughout all these [variants] the germinal conception persists that it was man and man alone who made the Bible, and that it is, therefore, a purely human book, although it may contain a human report of divine deeds and words.⁴

It should be easily understood why a Christian cannot hold this view.  Since Christ himself held such a very high view of Scripture as inspired, his followers would be poor indeed if they rejected it.
2. The second view which Warfield discusses is the one which differentiates which words, chapters, or books of the Bible were produced by humans, and which were produced by God. One problem here is that preliminary efforts to divide up the human elements of scripture from the divine, will likely end up reducing this theory to the rationalistic variety of the first theory:

On such a conception it is easy to see that every discovery of a human trait in Scripture is a disproving of the divinity of Scripture. If, then, it be discovered that the whole fabric of the Bible is human-- as assuredly is true-- men who start with this conception in mind must end with denying that the whole fabric of the Bible is divine.⁵

Thus, at the start, such a theory, crude as it may be, might appear to have merit. But how does one go about determining which elements of scripture are divine? Do humans really have the ability to directly recognize divine origin? If not, then any conclusion of divine element must be inferred by process of elimination starting with knowledge of human element. This ends up too far reaching since, as Warfield notes, the divine and human elements are quite inseparable.

3. Warfield concludes the paper by briefly explaining his idea of concurrence:

The fundamental principle of this conception is that the whole of scripture is the product of divine activities which enter it, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but by working confluently with them, so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human, the free product of human effort, in every part and word. And at the same time the whole Bible is recognized as divine, the Word of God, his utterances, of which he is in the truest sense the Author.⁶

Warfield, unfortunately, does not explain how this concurrence is possible, but only that it must be so in some sense. It is the only tenable alternative to (1) and (2), which have the problems of ultimately rejecting the divine authority of scripture or else rejecting that quality which makes it so unique when compared to other religious texts (that is, the diversity of human authorship throughout different languages, cultures, and times).  He leaves us with this insightful quote from Brook Foss Wescott: "The Bible is authoritative, for it is the word of God; it is intelligible, for it is the word of man."⁷

A Few Follow-up Thoughts

The preceding was little more than a summary of Warfield's views, as outlined in his paper. I have done my best to summarize those ideas in a way that was clear to the reader, as well as true to the author. I note this fact to clarify that I have not, as of yet, offered any opinion on whether I believe Warfield to be right or wrong. My initial reaction to his ideas is one of confusion; while I agree that views (1) and (2) are not defensible to a Christian, there is a part of me which also wishes to reject (3). The reason is because I know that Warfield's view of inspiration is firmly rooted in his view of God's providence, which I believe (though I could be wrong, having not completed any of his other writings) is one of premotion and omnicausality.  This Calvinistic conception of God is not one that I have fully accepted as of yet, and still makes me somewhat uncomfortable.  In short, I have a hard time understanding how the divine and human wills can act "concurrently" toward some end (such as the production of scripture) without the divine will supervening on the human.  However, I will note two things: first, it appears that the Molinistic view of God's providence is also compatible with Warfield's idea of concurrence in the production of scripture.  In this case, God's transcendent will would concur with the human biblical authors' by creating a world in which the human authors would freely choose to write His words.  Second, these thoughts of divine providence take us far beyond the scope of this post, and must therefore wait to be further discussed until another time.

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Notes:

1. Warfield, Noll and Livingstone, 2000.
2. Warfield, 1894.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Wescott, 1881.