In biblical and systematic theology, “inspiration” is one of several descriptions of God’s involvement in the production of Scripture. It is not an exhaustive description of the many ways in which divine revelation is mediated.

Taken as a description of “all Scripture” (as in 2 Tim. 3:16), inspiration must necessarily encompass such diverse modes of revelation as words audibly spoken or dictated by God and written down by humans (i.e., dictation: “the Lord said to Moses,” “thus says the Lord”), words spoken by angels, texts in which a divine or angelic voice is entirely obscured by the voice and identity of the human author (e.g., the letters of Paul), and, in the vast majority of cases, texts that are essentially anonymous, invoking no human author or divine author in particular. Moreover, any catalog of divinely inspired texts must include not only direct quotations of God’s speech but also occasional letters (the NT Epistles), prayers directed to God by humans (the Psalter), divine oracles given through prophets, the results of historical research (e.g., Luke 1:1–4; 1 Kings 14:19), and anthological texts that were collected and edited over a long period of time, often by unnamed individuals or groups of individuals.

Thus, the inspiration of Scripture must be regarded as a concept that is applied in the broadest possible way to the materials of Scripture. While the doctrine of inspiration constitutes a strong statement concerning the authority and divine authorship of Scripture, it must remain highly flexible with regard to the particular modes and literary products of divine revelation in Scripture.

God-Breathed (theopneustos) in 2 Timothy 3:16

The idea of divine inspiration is stated most clearly in 2 Tim. 3:16–17: “All Scripture is God-breathed [theopneustos] and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Here, the fact of divine inspiration serves the apostle’s interest in the authority and relevance of Scripture, especially as Scripture undergirds Timothy’s religious education (2 Tim. 3:14–15). This sole biblical use of the term theopneustos says little about how inspiration is accomplished, and the emphasis is entirely on the consequences of the fact. Because it is inspired, all Scripture is useful and authoritative for a variety of purposes.

In some older English translations, the key term, theopneustos, was translated as “inspired,” following the ancient tradition of rendering the term in Latin as divinitus inspirata. Strictly speaking, “inspiration” is not a biblical term. In one classic Protestant evangelical exposition of the text and doctrine, B. B. Warfield noted that the Greek word denotes not so much a “breathing in” as a “breathing out” on God’s part. Scripture is not simply a container into which God has breathed his word (so that Scripture merely “contains” God’s word), nor is Scripture only “inspiring,” in the sense that it works an effect on the reader (taking theopneustos in an active rather than a passive sense: “God-breathing” rather than “God-breathed”). Scripture is not the product of inspiration, as if produced by inspired authors but not itself inspired. Rather than all these things, it is most correct to say that Scripture is, in the strictly literal sense of the word, “expired”—breathed out by God himself. This view of the matter is reflected in, among other places, the NIV translation of theopneustos as “God-breathed.”

The translation by the NIV—“all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful . . .”—takes theopneustos as a grammatical predicate. Others have suggested that theopneustos can be understood attributively: “all God-breathed Scripture is useful.” This interpretation remains a minority position, especially among evangelical scholars, both on grammatical grounds and because it implies a distinction between inspired and noninspired Scriptures. There is little other evidence for such a notion in the NT.

The application of the notion of inspiration to the whole of the Christian canon (OT and NT) inevitably involves some extension of the original meaning of 2 Tim. 3:16. By no account were the NT writings either composed or collected prior to the writing of 2 Timothy, and the final shape of the Christian OT canon may also have been undecided at the time 2 Tim. 3:16 was written. In postbiblical Christian theology, however, what is said of “all Scripture” (pāsa graphē) in 2 Tim. 3:16 is applied to all Christian Scripture, regardless of what was directly in view when the verse was written. It is likely that by “all Scripture,” the apostle meant nothing more than the Christian OT—that is, the books that lay before Timothy as he was educated in the faith from his infancy (2 Tim. 3:14–15). In systematic theology, the application of inspiration and other descriptors of “Scripture” to the NT writings owes much to a comment in 2 Pet. 3:16 that places the letters of Paul in the same class as “the other Scriptures” (tas loipas graphas).

Why “Inspiration”?

The sheer diversity of the modes of revelation described in the Bible raises a question: Why is “inspiration” (or, as Warfield argued, “expiration” or “breathing out”) a particularly appropriate description of God’s involvement in the production of the scriptural text? At the root of theopneustos, Greek pneuma (as well as its Hebrew cognate, ruakh) denotes several related concepts ranging from “wind” or “breath” to “spirit,” as in “the Holy Spirit.” It is from this complex of meanings that the relevance of theopneustos is evident.

Physiologically, several of the speech organs are also organs of respiration, so that the spoken word can be thought of as a kind of breathing, as in Acts 9:1: “Saul was still breathing out [empneuōn] murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” To speak of Scripture as “God-breathed,” then, is simply to identify it as God’s spoken utterance or word, as in the many biblical texts that introduce a scriptural utterance as “the word of the Lord” or with the phrase “thus says the Lord.” To the extent that 2 Tim. 3:16 has in view the physiological dimension of “breathing,” it extends these explicit statements of divine speaking to the whole of Scripture. In one sense, theopneustos is an anthropomorphism: God does not speak as a human, with lungs, throat, and mouth. Scripture is not God-breathed as opposed to being written by humans; the figurative breathing or speaking of God does not circumvent other processes of textual production. Again, the idea of inspiration pertains more to the authority of Scripture as revelation than to the mode of the mediation of God’s word.

As with the concept of “inspiration” itself, to speak of Scripture as the “word of God” specifies its divine authority without exhaustively describing how that word is mediated to the human author who then commits it to writing. To speak of Scripture as the “breathing out” of God is to invoke the broader concept of God’s (anthropomorphic) breath, and thus to place scriptural production among the other phenomena that are so described. These include the divine creation of life (Gen. 2:7; Job 33:4; Ezek. 37:5) and the cosmos (Ps. 33:6), divine judgment and destruction (Job 4:9; Isa. 30:33; 2 Thess. 2:8), the impartation of divine wisdom (Job 32:8), the impartation of the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), and the continuing action of God in creation (Exod. 15:10; Job 37:10; Isa. 40:7). In contrast to the living God of Israel, the idols lack breath (ruakh) and are therefore false gods (Jer. 10:14).

Equally important as the anthropomorphic description of God’s role as exhalation or speaking is the fact that pneuma refers not only to bodily breathing but also to the spirit of God—that is, the Holy Spirit. The inspiration of scriptural revelation is the particular work of the Holy Spirit, as comes to light particularly in 2 Pet. 1:20–21: “You must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Unlike 2 Tim. 3:16, this verse gives a description of the mechanism by which God is involved in scriptural production: the Holy Spirit “carries along” humans speaking from God. Again, however, if this is to be taken as a description of the entirety of the Christian Bible, it must encompass a wide variety of literary phenomena.

As in 2 Tim. 3:16, the emphasis is on the authority and divine origin of Scripture rather than on the worldly history of the Bible. Like the adjective “God-breathed,” the Holy Spirit’s “carrying along” of the prophets is figurative and anthropomorphic, and the expression leaves many questions unanswered regarding the mode of revelation. Nevertheless, the specific mention of the role of the Holy Spirit as the divine agent of scriptural production sheds light on the term theopneustos in 2 Tim. 3:16. This is consistent with the citation formula in Acts 4:25, which quotes Ps. 2:1–2 by saying, “You [God] spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David.” This verse highlights several facets of the notion of the inspiration of Scripture: its character as divine speech, the agency of the Holy Spirit, and the concurrence of divine and human authorship.