God-Breathed Scripture Part 3
Best known for his defense of scripture against higher criticism and liberal theology, Princeton professor B B Warfield (1851–1921) would have agreed that 2 Timothy 3:16 “constitutes a ringing declaration of the Divine authorship of Scripture” (Part 1). In an article entitled Inspiration (ISBE 1915), Warfield discusses the term theópneustos, a compound word made up of theos (God) and, according to most language specialists, pneo (to breathe, breathe out, blow). Warfield argues that ‘The Greek word does not even mean, as the King James Version translates it, ‘given by inspiration of God,’ though he adds that while this translation is “clumsy,” it is not “misleading.”
Explaining his objection to the KJV translation, Warfield asserts that “The Greek term has … nothing to say of inspiring or inspiration: it speaks only of a ‘spiring’ or ‘spiration.” In his view, “What it says of Scripture is, not that it is ‘breathed into by God’ or is the product of the Divine ‘inbreathing’ into its human authors, but that it is breathed out by God, ‘God-breathed,’ the product of the creative breath of God.” He concludes:
No term could have been chosen, however, which would have more emphatically asserted the Divine production of Scripture than that which is here employed. The “breath of God” is in Scripture just the symbol of His almighty power, the bearer of His creative word.
Warfield states that the phrase inspired by God is “the rendering of the Latin, divinitus inspirata, restored from the Wyclif (“All Scripture of God inspired is…”) and Rhemish (“All Scripture inspired of God is…”) versions of the Vulgate.” Undoubtedly he would have preferred translations like the NIV (“All scripture is God-breathed”) and ESV (“All Scripture is breathed out by God) although, once again, he denied that the KJV rendering was misleading. Either way 2 Timothy 3:16 “constitutes a ringing declaration of the Divine authorship of Scripture” (Edwards J Young The God-Breathed Scripture, Grace Journal Fall 1966).
Rex
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