What is concursive inspiration?

Question 1170

When we say that the Bible is the Word of God, we at once raise a question about the men who actually wrote it. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people who lived in real times and wrote with their own hands. How then can the words they wrote be at the same time fully their words and fully the words of God? The answer that best fits what Scripture says about itself goes by the name of concursive inspiration, and though the term sounds technical, the truth behind it is precious and steadying for the believer.

The word concursive comes from a Latin idea of running together, of two things acting at the same time toward one result. Concursive inspiration teaches that in the writing of Scripture, God and the human author both worked together, the one through the other, so that the finished text was wholly the work of the man and wholly the work of God. This is not a compromise between two views but a careful description of what actually took place when holy men of God spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

What the Word Means

To grasp concursive inspiration, picture two streams flowing together into one river. The divine author and the human author are not taking turns, with God supplying some verses and the man supplying others. Rather, every word is at once the product of God’s purpose and the product of the writer’s mind and hand. The Spirit so worked in and through the personality, the experiences, the vocabulary and the style of each writer that what came out was exactly what God intended, expressed in the genuine voice of the man.

This is why we can speak of the Gospel according to Luke and at the same time call it the Word of God. Luke tells us in his opening lines that he carefully investigated everything from the beginning and set it down in an orderly account, drawing on eyewitnesses and earlier records. He used his mind, his research and his skill as a writer. Yet the Spirit was guiding that whole process, so that the orderly account Luke produced was precisely the account God willed to give his church. The human labour was real, and the divine authorship was real, and the two ran together without conflict.

The Witness of Scripture Itself

This understanding is not imposed on the Bible from outside but drawn from what the Bible says about its own origin. Paul writes to Timothy that all Scripture is breathed out by God, using a word that pictures the Scriptures as proceeding from the very mouth of God. This puts the stress firmly on the divine source. Yet Peter, writing of the same matter, says that no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Here the human speakers are fully in view, real men who spoke, and yet they were borne along by the Spirit as a ship is carried by the wind.

Put these two passages side by side and the doctrine of concursive inspiration appears. The Scriptures are breathed out by God, and they were written by men carried along by the Spirit. Neither truth cancels the other. We are not asked to choose between a divine book and a human book, for the Bible presents itself as both at once. The men spoke from God, and what they spoke was the breath of God.

How It Differs From Dictation

It is important to set concursive inspiration apart from the idea of mechanical dictation. Some have imagined that the writers of Scripture were passive instruments, like a pen in a hand or a secretary taking down words letter by letter, with their own minds switched off. On this view the human author contributes nothing of himself, and the differences between one book and another become hard to explain. Yet the Bible plainly shows the personality of each writer shining through.

The polished Greek of Luke is not the rougher Greek of Mark. The passionate outpourings of Paul are unlike the measured reasoning of the letter to the Hebrews. David writes as a shepherd and a king, Amos as a herdsman, Daniel as a statesman in a foreign court. Their vocabularies differ, their concerns differ, and their emotional temperatures differ. If God had only dictated the words to passive scribes, we would expect a single uniform style throughout. Instead we find a rich variety of human voices, each one bearing the unmistakable marks of its author, and yet every one of them speaking the Word of God. Concursive inspiration accounts for this in a way that dictation cannot.

There are a few places where God did dictate words directly, as when he spoke the Ten Commandments and they were written on tablets of stone, or when a prophet was told to write down a specific message word for word. Yet these are the exception rather than the rule, and even they fall within the wider work of the Spirit who superintended the whole of Scripture. Dictation describes a part of the process in certain places, while concursive inspiration describes the whole.

How It Guards Inerrancy

Concursive inspiration is the key that holds together the human reality of Scripture and its complete trustworthiness. Because the human authors were truly involved, the Bible bears all the marks of real literature written by real people in real settings, with their own styles and their own ways of arranging material. Because the divine author was equally involved, guiding and superintending the whole, the result is free from error and entirely reliable in all that it affirms. God did not need to bypass the humanity of the writers in order to keep them from error, for his Spirit worked through that humanity to produce exactly what he intended.

Some object that human authorship must mean human error, since to err is human. Yet this assumes that God could not work through a man without that man’s limitations spoiling the result, and the assumption is unwarranted. The same God who could form a sinless human nature in his incarnate Son was well able to so guide the writers of Scripture that their words, while fully their own, contained no error. The humanity of Scripture no more requires error than the humanity of Jesus required sin. In both cases God worked through what is human without being dragged down by human failure.

The Mystery and the Comfort

We should admit that exactly how God worked in the minds of the writers without overriding them remains beyond our full understanding. It belongs to the same family of mysteries as the way God works in the heart of a believer who freely chooses to obey, and yet it is God who works in him both to will and to work for his good pleasure. We see the two realities clearly in Scripture, the divine working and the human acting, even though we cannot map out the precise mechanism where they meet.

This need not trouble us, for the same pattern runs throughout the ways of God with men. He accomplishes his purposes through the free actions of people without doing violence to them, and the inspiration of Scripture is one shining instance of it. We are not asked to explain the mystery but to receive its fruit, which is a Bible that speaks to us in the warm and varied voices of real men, and that comes to us with all the authority of God himself.

So, now what?

When you open your Bible, you are holding a book that is at once thoroughly human and wholly divine. You can study the background of its writers, the circumstances they faced and the styles they used, knowing that all of this is part of how God gave us his Word. The humanity of Scripture is not a weakness to be apologised for but a gift, for it means God spoke to us in language shaped by real human hearts who knew sorrow, joy, fear and hope as we do.

At the same time you can rest your whole weight on its truth. Because the Spirit carried these men along, what they wrote is the breath of God and cannot fail. When you read the Psalms you hear David’s heart and God’s voice together, and when you read Paul you meet a real man writing to real churches and the Lord himself addressing you. Let this double truth make you both warm toward the Scriptures and unshakeable in your confidence in them, and let it draw you to read them as the very Word of the God who chose to speak through men like us.

“For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter 1:21

For Further Study

The classic defence of the doctrine is found in the writings of B. B. Warfield, gathered in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, where the language of concursive operation is set out at length. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology treats the modes of inspiration helpfully, and Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a clear and accessible account of inspiration from a conservative standpoint, affirming both the full humanity and the full divinity of the written Word.