About the source of Scriptures...

There need not be any great resistance to the idea that literature and culture infuse God’s revelation in the Bible. In some sense, this influence makes the unity of content more miraculous instead of less.

So much of modern literalism seems bent on making God as simple as possible. He speaks, and things are created fully-developed, like Athena springing out of the head of Zeus. He reveals, and those very words are written down like a grammar school dictation, in Elizabethan English, no less.

There is another, much more intriguing way of looking at things which enhances God’s majesty and power and teases the imagination to wonder. What if the entire act of creation was indeed a creative and dynamic process directly superintended by God and developing in amazing complexity and function. Scientists might view the physical evidence of such creation and observe the obvious connections along the process of development, but God’s purpose infuses the entire evolution. THAT sort of a God certainly inspires through its creativity and imagination in ways that the “point and poof” view of creation does not.

The same sort of process can be inferred from the process of God’s revelation. One can move beyond the simple view that specific words were dictated to individuals who did nothing but apply ink to paper. How is God’s revelation diminished by the thought that certain individuals were raised up and selected to record their divinely inspired experience of God. Moses, for example, was raised with the best education available to a young man of his age – that given to a royal progeny of one of the most ancient civilizations of the day. Literary traditions and vocabulary from Mesopotamia and Egypt are harnessed to describe the work of God as Moses observed it. (It fascinates me to notice that Moses’ account of creation so closely matches the order of species development posited by evolutionary scientists today, yet Moses had no scientific method of uncovering such a process.) Oral traditions of the One True God were collected by those uniquely capable of recording them for future use. The Greco-Roman world provided a medium for the spread of God’s word throughout the civilization that followed.

One might even go so far as the suggest that the beauty of the poetic language of Elizabethan English provided an ideal opportunity for the introduction of the Bible into the English language. Historians will notice the cultural context of such a scholarly effort, but that in no way precludes a divine purpose to such an endeavor.