In his discussion of whether Scripture contains multiple senses, Thomas Aquinas makes the seemingly simple observation that the Holy Spirit is “the author of sacred scripture … not only the author of its words but the things that it mentions.” Nowhere does Thomas discuss the human authors in detail. Instead, he simply calls them “instrumental authors.” What is surprising is that Thomas does not feel the theological need to say much about the human authors. There are many things we can learn from his confident assertion of God’s authorship.
When I was a graduate student in the early 2000s, John Webster published Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, which has become something of a classic in the field of bibliology. Any serious student of the doctrine of Scripture will at some time have encountered this text. In his argument, Webster makes much of the doctrine of sanctification. God sanctifies human textual witnesses to bear witness in the Spirit to the living Lord Jesus.
Webster is alert to the human dimension of the sacred writings. He assumes that modern readers of Scripture have been given far too many reasons for treating the Bible as you would any other book from antiquity. His account therefore emphasizes God as speaking through sanctified witnesses. There is much to commend in Webster’s account, to be sure. However, it is also instructive to consider what is not there, and what we might learn from its absence.
In Webster’s text as in many others, God as author has been eclipsed by God as speaker. In modern Protestant and Catholic bibliology, idioms relating to speech dominate. To my knowledge, the only contemporary theologian who has questioned this is Katherine Sonderegger. In “The Bible as Holy Scripture” (Pro Ecclesia, May 2022), she defends “the notion of God as Author of Holy Scripture.” Indeed, she avers that “Author and Holy Text are to be preferred over Speaker and Divine Revelation.”
If her intuitions are correct, and I suspect they are, why have so many modern accounts elided the notion of God as author in favor of God as speaker? My hunch is that moderns are overly sensitive to matters pertaining to human agency. We have a fairly inflated view of ourselves, and are squeamish about simply affirming God as author, for fear of sounding like a fundamentalist, whatever that might mean. Also, given how sensitive certain strands of biblical studies have become to “agendas” in the text, Webster and others have emphasized sanctification to preclude “divinizing” the Scriptures.
Some theological students of my generation were assigned books like Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror. The complicity of the biblical authors in dehumanizing ideologies was emphasized, as I recall. The pedagogical point was that Scripture shared in the (many problematic) assumptions of the Ancient Near East. A hermeneutic of suspicion was an appropriate response, it was argued. In such approaches, the bifurcation of the human and the divine was all too present. There was confusion about what was of God and what was not.
Sonderegger’s astute observation about God’s “changed relation” to the “Holy Text” highlights the issue. For many, tying “Holy Text” to the divine author is too intermediate, too direct. After all, is not a Chalcedonian analogy available? Do not the human voice and the divine voice cohere in Scripture without confusion, without change, without separation, and without division? Is not Scripture, to paraphrase Barth, the Word of God in the words of men? Catholic and Protestant modernity eschews, I suspect, the unqualified confidence of an Aquinas in God’s authorship. Indeed, is “the principal author of sacred scripture” really God?
The answer is yes. But how do we get there? The doctrine of Creation may provide us with some help. If God created a world that exists as a participation in him, is not the same true of Scripture? Is not Scripture an effect that shares in the transcendent properties of its Creator and, ultimately, its Author? I think so. Scripture is more than sanctified witness. It is a participation in all that God is, and so, as with all created things, it does not simply declare that God made me, although that is true, but that God authored me. Scripture lives, moves, and has its being in God. God is its creator and author.
Human beings do serve as Scripture’s instrumental authors, but their authorship is dissimilar to God’s insofar as God “comprehends everything all at once in his understanding,” to quote Aquinas. God, Aquinas writes, intends Scripture’s literal sense as well as all of the meanings based on it. Divine authorship generates an appreciation of Scripture’s non-literal senses, based as they are upon the fecundity of the literal sense. The upshot is that God has a more immediate relationship to Scripture than models of scriptural authority predicated upon divinely sanctified speech would suggest.
In the aggressively progressive milieu that is the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia, a variant of Revelation 3:6 is enjoined at the end of scriptural readings, namely, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.” Hearing what is said—that is the church’s task—so the argument goes. But there often exists in homiletical practice a great gap between what is written and what the preacher understands God to be saying. God has an occasional relationship with what is written. To tie God as author to what is written in Scripture would, so it might be argued, make God complicit in the many “sins” that Scripture shares, belonging as it does to Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman milieus.
These objections notwithstanding, it is important to think about the metaphysical context in which they are raised. The basic metaphysic that a robust bibliology employs is God. God authors Scripture, and Scripture is God’s creation, sharing in all that God is, in a way appropriate to the kind of creature it is. To be sure, there are “instrumental authors,” but their words are divinely authored words, words that bear God’s intent to “show us the truth necessary for salvation” (Aquinas).
Approaches to reading and receiving Scripture that oppose the divine and the human would benefit, I think, from stepping back and contemplating afresh God’s relationship to Scripture. Invoking divine authorship along Thomistic lines goes a long way toward restoring confidence in Scripture’s immediate relationship to God. God does not stand at arm’s length from Scripture but authors it as a text transparent to his intention to “show us the truth necessary for salvation.”
The Rev. Christopher Holmes, PhD is professor of Systematic Theology in the Theology Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
