18
Romans 1:1, 7
I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you in the Lord.
Romans
16:22
Who wrote Romans? God the Father? God the Spirit? Paul? Or Tertius? The
answer is "Yes!" There was a Divine side and a human side.
29
Do we understand fully
how it works? "No!" Do we accept it by faith? "Yes!" Do we believe that God dictated
all of Scripture, even though we know that He actually dictated some? "No!" Do we
believe the human authors could have exercised their own will and human acumen to
override what God intended to be written? "No!" Can we explain this with full
satisfaction to the human mind? "No!" Do we have to? "No!" We must live with the
tension that God determined and man participated in recording what Scripture itself calls
"the Word of God," not the "Word of men" (1 Thess 2:13).
30
The same tension exists in understanding that Christ is fully God and fully man.
Who can explain it? No one, but we believe it by faith as taught in the Bible. Mental
tension also exists in attempting to understand what part God plays and what part man
plays in individual human salvation. The same tension is experienced in reconciling how
God's will and foreknowledge relate to the will of humans.
When faced with these immensely important issues which stretch the human mind
to and sometimes beyond its limits, it is best to let God be God, to rest in the fact that
29
Read Clark Pinneck's struggle to reconcile these two aspects of Inspiration in such a way that the human
side overshadows the Divine side; that decision then leads him to disparage the idea of inerrancy in The
Scripture Principle (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1964) 100-05. It is clear that Pinnock is too concerned
with the human side and too little with the Divine. Randall and David Basinger also struggle with this
tension in "Inerrancy, Dictation, and the Free Will Defense," EQ 55 (1983): 177-80. Nicole, "Review
Article," 180 recognizes how the principles of Boyd's Openness view, when applied to the doctrine of
Inspiration, would lead to a low, not a high, view of Scripture. Cf. in contrast to John S. Feinberg, No One
Like Him (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001).
30
See Stephen J. Wellum's well reasoned article, "The Importance of the Nature of Divine Sovereignty for
Our View of Scripture," The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 4/2 (Summer 2000): 76-90.