(3) John Webster - Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch

Webster concludes his opening chapter by relating Holy Scripture to God's action of inspiration. Whereas sanctification has to do with the Spirit's making creaturely realities holy in general, inspiration relates to the hallowing of the biblical text more specifically (p. 30 - 31).

Webster's gospel-centred dogmatic approach seeks first to subordinate talk of inspiration under the broader concept of revelation (p. 31). In doing so, he wishes to avoid the "disordered" theology which believes scripture to be revelatory because it is inspired. Inspiration cannot be foundational to any understanding of the bible, but is rather a corollary of God's self-presence and his free sanctification of creaturely reality vis-a-vis the biblical text (p. 32).

Furthermore, Webster wants to warn against the theological traps of objectification and spiritualisation. The objectification of scriptural inspiration occurs when the text of the bible is mistakenly thought to embody the presence of God rather than serve it. Objectification of inspiration fails to recognise the freedom of the Spirit who is not bound by the letter (p. 32 - 33). The spiritualisation of inspiration, on the other hand, shifts it focus away from the text and onto the author or reader of the text. Thus he objects to the views of John Macquarrie and David Law who so distance the Spirit's relation to the bible itself so as to leave it a rather docetic entity (p. 34 - 35). Webster seeks an orderly account of inspiration grounded in God's self-presence and communicative action through the text.

Webster addresses one more danger regarding our understanding of inspiration: the abstraction of inspiration from its purpose and end in salvation. He believes that this separation leads to the identification of the textual word for the Word itself - the so-called "Word made text" (p. 36). Not surprisingly then, Webster is averse to talk of "inerrancy" as a source for Scriptural authority. He believes that the term leads to an undesirable polemicising and away from the proper dogmatic context of inspiration, which is practical and soteriological (p. 36).

With these preliminaries set aside, Webster states his positive description of inspiration based on a theological exposition of 2 Pet. 1:21 - "Those moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God". First, inspiration is "from God", not in the sense of a past event, but as a continuing event in which the purpose and activity of God through the text remains always operative and non-convertible (p. 36). Secondly, inspiration indicates that the biblical text is not spontaneously generated by men, but is "moved" by God (p. 37). Third, Webster attributes the locus of inspiration to the Spirit, which he believes secures both the "being moved" of the biblical text as well as its creaturely status (p. 37). Finally, the Spirit of inspiration generates language which is a human communicative act. Thus, Webster conceives that loaded term "verbal inspiration" not to indicate a kind of Spiritual dictation of texts, but rather "the inclusion of texts in the sanctifying work of the Spirit so that they may become fitting vessels of the treasure of the gospel" (p. 39).