The Word of God.

J.I. Packer has written:

“Because Evangelicals hold that the biblical writers were completely controlled by the Holy Spirit, it is often supposed, as we saw, that they maintain what is called the ‘dictation’ or ‘typewriter’ theory of inspiration—namely, that the mental activity of the writers was simply suspended, apart from what was necessary for the mechanical transcription of words supernaturally introduced into their consciousness…”

“Those who credit Evangelicals with belief in ‘dictation’ often appeal to the thought of accommodation as the correct alternative to that view, but in so doing they misunderstand the biblical idea of accommodation no less seriously than they misunderstand the biblical idea of complete divine control. They speak as if it were self evident that a revelation of truth transmitted through the instrumentality of sinful men would suffer in the process. We are told that, since the biblical writers were imperfect creatures, morally, spiritually and intellectually limited, children of their age and children of Adam too, it was inevitable that crudities, distortions and errors should creep into what they wrote. It is claimed that this is a liberating notion which throws a flood of light on the real character of Scripture, and makes possible a great advance in theological understanding…”

“The twin suppositions which liberal critics make—that, on the one hand, divine control of the writers would exclude the free exercise of their natural powers, while, on the other hand, divine accommodation to the free exercise of their natural powers would exclude complete control of what they wrote—are really two forms of the same mistake. They are two ways of denying that the Bible can be both a fully human and fully divine composition. And this denial rests (as all errors in theology ultimately do) on a false doctrine of God; here particularly, of His providence. For it assumes that God and man stand in such a relation to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If a man acts freely (i.e., voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism. It is Deism which depicts God as the passive onlooker rather than the active governor of this world, and which assures us that the guarantee of human freedom lies in the fact that men’s actions are not under God’s control. But the bible teaches rather that the freedom of God, who works in and through His creatures, leading them to act according to their nature, is itself the foundation and guarantee of the freedom of their action. It is therefore a great mistake to think that the freedom of the biblical writers can be vindicated only by denying full divine control over them; and the prevalence of this mistake should be ascribed to the insidious substitution of deistic for theistic ideas about God’s relation to the world which has been, perhaps, the most damaging effect of modern science on theology. When the critics of Evangelicalism take it for granted that Evangelicals, since they believe in complete control, must hold the ‘dictation’ theory, while they themselves, since they recognize accommodation, are bound to hold that in Scripture false and misleading words of men are mixed up with the pure word of God, they merely show how unbiblical their idea of providence has become. The cure for such fallacious reasoning is to grasp the biblical idea of God’s concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man’s own mind.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 78-82.)