Summary and Conclusions

The theological distinction between revelation and inspiration is useful for discussion and analysis of the topic, but it is not fully true to the biblical text. Biblical writers did not seem to have made such a distinction. They spoke about the Holy Spirit carrying/guiding the prophets throughout the whole process of what we call revelation/inspiration. A doctrine of revelation/ inspiration that radically distinguishes between the two separates what the Bible keeps together.GOP 103.3

In the process of revelation/inspiration God condescended and adapted His infinite thoughts to the mind, thought patterns, and language of the prophets. Something wonderful and mysterious happened in the mind of the prophets as the divine mind entered into contact with the human mind. This divine act of condescension establishes that in the revelation/inspiration process God and humans work together. Yet the end result was the Word of God. Any radical dichotomy between thought and words distorts the biblical process of revelation/inspiration. In spite of the fact that the words are not inspired, the Spirit continued to guide the prophets as they conveyed the message to their audiences. The words are not inspired in the sense that God is communicating His message, not in His own language, but in the language and vocabulary of the prophets. The divine thoughts were embodied in the language, grammar, and cultural expressions of the writer. But even in that process God guided the prophets in order for them to use their best cognitive and linguistic abilities in communicating the message. Thus the trustworthiness and reliability of the message was divinely reaffirmed in its oral or written form.GOP 103.4

The phenomena of Scripture reveals that in the revelation/inspiration process God can lead the prophet, through the Spirit, to select and adapt materials from sources that contain information providing useful data or language to the biblical writer. That which originally was not a divine revelation is now, through a process of revision and adaptation, incorporated under the guidance of the Spirit into the body of revealed material. The human utterances have become the Word of God.GOP 103.5