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Friday, September 7, 2007

H.L. Ellison on Biblical Inspiration

The following article is now online in PDF:

H.L. Ellison, "Some Thoughts on Inspiration," The Evangelical Quarterly 26.4 (1954): 210-217.

This is my favourite quote [p.214}:

If we are prepared to say that the Scrip­tures contain, are and become the Word of God, we occupy a position which seems to cover all the facts of revelation and spiritual experience.

We are not, as some might think, making mere empty dis­tinctions. To call the Bible the Word of God without some such qualifications, spoken or understood, suggests that the work of inspiration ended with the finishing of the record, and that the Bible now functions by virtue of some inherent power, so that anything that man may infer from it is necessarily legitimate. We would do well to widen our conception of inspiration. The writing of the Scriptures was only the half-way house in the process of inspiration; it only reaches its goal and conclusion as God is revealed through them to the reader or hearer. In other words, the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit into the reader is as essential for the right understanding of the Scriptures as it was in the original writers for their right production of them.
[1]

[1] This is the view adopted in The New Bible Handbook (I.V.F., 1947), p. 10.

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