Today I’m going to give our readers something like a sneak peek of our next issue – coming out soon! – by discussing part of the contribution from Peter van Inwagen, John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame and all-around philosophical celebrity (best known for sticking it to atheists, compatibilists, and everyday objects like tables and chairs) that appears therein.  Here are two propositions:

INSPIRATION: The Bible is, throughout, and in every passage, the inspired Word of God – of a God who is an omniscient and morally perfect being.

entailing, according to van Inwagen,

PART OF THE PLAN: God wants there to be such a thing as the Bible – that is, a set of writings that play the role that the Hebrew and Greek scriptures have played in the history of Israel and the Church; and the wording of the various books of the Bible is (more or less) the way God wants it to be.

Van Inwagen devotes his attention to telling a story according to which part of the plan is true and it is also the case that

SCARY STORIES: At many places in the Bible, God is represented as commanding things that are indisputably morally wrong (genocide, for example).

You’ll have to wait for the issue to come out to read the article’s account of how scary stories can be part of the plan.  It will be worth your time.  At the moment, though, I want to reflect on part of the plan on its own terms.  It is, according to van Inwagen, entailed by inspiration.  I think most Christians at most moments in history would agree with part of the plan.  It is, as an element of Christian theology, relatively uncontroversial.  And I think most of them would agree that part of the plan is entailed by inspiration, whatever they take ‘inspired’ to mean.  But I suspect that not very many of them have a clear idea of why they think these things.  So I want to take some time to provide a reason for thinking that inspiration entails part of the plan.  The answer may have implications for our thinking about everything that inspiration entails.  It might, therefore, have a great deal of theological significance.

Let’s first introduce the (unrefined) concept of creative control.  Creative control is the sort of thing a person can have over a thing that is produced.  We will talk about creative control exclusively in the context of documents.  I have creative control over a document just in case I can knowingly make a choice that affects the final text of the document.  Multiple people can have creative control over the same document, and some people who have creative control over a given document will make more numerous and/or important creative decisions than others.

I claim that when we say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, we are saying that God has exercised creative control over the Bible.  On my view, saying that the Bible is the inspired Word of God is almost exactly like saying that Ronald’s essay is the (Ronald-)inspired word of Ronald – it is saying that God composed the Bible (just as Ronald composed his essay), that he was the one who made the important choices regarding its final text.

Of course, God did not write the individual books of the Bible down, nor did he dictate them verbatim to the people who did write them down.  But the fact that God neither wrote the books of the Bible down nor dictated them to the people who did write them down is by no means incompatible with the claim that God composed the Bible, that God had creative control over the Bible.  Many plausible stories can be told according to which God had creative control over the text of the Bible without either writing it down himself or dictating it to the people who did write it down.  So we lay aside the issue of the means by which God exercised creative control over the text of the Bible.

We are now in a position to see how inspiration entails part of the plan.  If inspiration is true, then the Bible is a product of God’s exercised creative control.  But then it is the product of God’s choices about its content.  So, unless he was somehow forced to compose the Bible (a possibility that merits little discussion), God wants there to be such a thing as the Bible.  Similarly, its wording must be (more or less) the way God wants it to be.  But then we have established the truth of part of the plan.  Note that this argument depends on the extent of God’s exercised creative control over the text of the Bible.  I take it to be uncontroversial that God exercised enough creative control over the Bible for the argument to be valid.  If he did not – if, that is, there are parts of the Bible that he would rather not have included – then we should be tempted to deny inspiration altogether, rather than affirm inspiration while denying part of the plan.

So inspiration entails part of the plan.  We ought to pay attention to the form our argument took: it was constructed in terms of claims about creative control.  A parting thought, hopefully to be explored further in the future – can we make similar arguments to establish the truth of other common claims about the Bible, for example that it is infallible/inerrant?