THEOLOGICAL TABLE TALK

On the Inspiration of Scripture

WOLFHART PANNENBERG

I
n his controversy with Erasmus, Martin Luther called Holy Scripture
"our first principle." 1 All spirits and teachings should be judged
according to this principle. Accordingly, the Lutheran Formula of
Concord referred to the Scriptures as "the only rule and norm" with
respect to the teachings of the church. Seventeenth-century Protestant
theologians wanted to account for this conception of the authority of
Scripture by transforming medieval ideas about scriptural inspiration into
their doctrine of a literal inspiration of Scripture. This doctrine, however,
disintegrated in the course of time, not so much because theologians turned
to other norms of truth than Scripture, but primarily because the idea of a
doctrinal unity among all sentences of Scripture without any contradiction
among them, an idea that followed from the doctrine of literal inspiration,
could not be defended in the long run. It was falsified by observations of
scriptural exegesis. This conception of the inspiration of Scripture broke
down, then, because it proved to be irreconcilable with the first principle of
the Protestant Reformation, the authority of Scripture in judging all the
teaching of the church.
The doctrine of scriptural interpretation itself has to be judged by the
authority of Scripture. The biblical sentences, however, that have been
quoted in supporting that doctrine—in the first place 2 Timothy 3:16—
cannot bear the burden of proof for a biblical justification of any doctrine of
a literal inspiration of Scripture. First, the utility of "all scripture . . . for

Wolfhart Pannenberg is Director of the Institute for Fundamental Theology and Ecumen-
ics and Professor of Systematic Theology on the Protestant Theological Faculty at the
University of Munich. This is his own translation of his essay "Zur Begründung der Lehre
von der Schriftinspiration," in In der Wahrheit bleiben: Dogma, Schriftauslegung, Kirche:
Festschriftßr Reinhard Slenczka zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Manfred Seitz and Karsten
Lehmkühler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), pp. 156-159.
l
D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. J. K. F. Knaake et al. (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1883-),vol. 18, p. 653.

212
 Theological Table Talk 213

teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," as

affirmed in this passage, is not meant as a guarantee of infallibility of each
and every particular sentence. Furthermore, the phrase "All scripture is
inspired by God" refers only to the scriptures of the Old Testament, and the
sentence aims at the interpretation of these scriptures in terms of their
prophetic function with regard to Jesus Christ. Thus, 2 Timothy 3:16 does
not support the idea of divine inspiration of the New Testament writings.
Does this mean, however, that there is no scriptural basis for the idea of a
divine inspiration of the New Testament? No; there is such a basis in
Scripture, but not in the sense of the old doctrine of literal inspiration. Paul
called the proclamation of the gospel the "ministry of the Spirit" (2 Cor.
3:8), and he claimed that the splendor of this ministry exceeds that of the
dispensation of the law, "for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor.
3:6). The proclamation of the new covenant by the gospel of Jesus Christ,
then, is without any doubt full of the Spirit of God, who enabled the apostle
in his ministry. However, that the gospel is impregnated by the Spirit does
not yield without further ado the idea of an inspiration of the scriptures of
the New Testament. Certainly, the New Testament scriptures are the most
authentic documents of the apostolic proclamation and teaching, and

"The doctrine of scriptural inspiration does not yield a formal

guarantee of the truth of each and every single biblical
sentence before one has concerned oneself with any of the
contents of Scripture."

therefore Paul's affirmation of the proclamation of the gospel as being

impregnated by the Spirit does indeed justify the conclusion that the
writings of the New Testament also participate in some way in that divine
inspiration. But this conclusion is valid only insofar as those writings
witness to the Pauline gospel of God's saving activity in Jesus' death on the
cross and in his resurrection. From this, a guarantee of the infallible truth of
each and every particular sentence of the New Testament writings cannot
be derived. Rather, in the light of Paul's affirmations, the gospel, impreg-
nated as it is by the divine Spirit, has to be considered the criterion of
scriptural authority and thus the basis of a doctrine affirming the inspiration
of Scripture. Thus, there is indeed a biblical basis for the doctrine of
scriptural inspiration, and this basis is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the
content of the gospel that is decisive here. The Pauline affirmation of the
spiritual nature of the gospel is itself founded upon the spiritual reality of
the content of the gospel, because it proclaims the Lord who is spirit (2 Cor.
3:17). The spiritual nature of the gospel of Christ has to be interpreted in
the light of Paul's statement that the risen Christ is "life-giving spirit" (1
Cor. 15:45).
214 Theology Today

The consequence is that Christian theology is not entitled to use the idea
of the divine inspiration of the biblical scriptures in a formal way in order
to establish the authority of the Bible before dealing with the contents of
Christian teaching. Rather, the affirmation of the divine inspiration of the
apostolic writings of the New Testament has to be examined and estab-
lished on the basis of the content of the apostolic gospel proclaiming Jesus
Christ. Therefore, the inspiration of Scripture should not be dealt with in
the prolegomena of Christian dogmatics but after the doctrine concerning
the person and work of Jesus Christ has been explained and in connection
with the gospel that proclaims the reconciliation of the world with God in
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and prior to the doctrine of the
church, because that doctrine has to deal—among other things—with the
ministry of the church that is called to teach under the authority of the
gospel as it is witnessed to in the apostolic writings. Here, between
christology and the doctrine of reconciliation on the one hand and the
doctrine of the church on the other, is the appropriate place to explicate the
special authority and primacy of Holy Scripture with regard to all the
subsequent teaching of the church, in keeping with the emphasis of the
Reformation on Scripture as the rule and norm of all teaching in the life of
the church.
It is for these reasons that in the first volume of my Systematic
Theology,2 the doctrine concerning the inspiration of Scripture was dis-
cussed only in terms of criticism of its use in seventeenth-century Protes-
tant theology in the attempt to justify a formal concept of scriptural
authority before any discussion of the content of the biblical writings. The
criticism of this conception of inspiration, however, does not discard the
idea of the inspiration of Scripture as such. Rather, the second volume
offers a new foundation of the idea of scriptural inspiration in the context of
a discussion of the concept of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the
foundation of the authority of the Bible in the church and over against the
church. Because the gospel is impregnated by the Spirit of God, it is
justified to speak of an inspiration of the apostolic writings by the Spirit of
God, insofar as they witness to this gospel and transmit it to the church of
all subsequent ages. This is to say, among other things, that the inspiration
of Scripture is to be understood in the light of the center of the Scripture, in
the light of Jesus Christ as its center and criterion. The idea of the
inspiration of Scripture cannot establish a formal concept of the authority
of Scripture as the word of God independently of the content of the
proclamation of Christ. Such a formal concept of the authority of Scripture,
considered as a presupposition for the doctrine of Jesus Christ and the
revelation of God in him, cannot be established on the basis of the idea of
inspiration. The sequence of the argument has to proceed the opposite way,
starting from the apostolic gospel about Jesus Christ. Therefore, the
doctrine of scriptural inspiration does not yield a formal guarantee of the

2
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vols. 1-2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991—
1994).
 Theological Table Talk 215

truth of each and every single biblical sentence before one has concerned
oneself with any of the contents of Scripture. Certainly, the Scriptures are
to be understood as divinely inspired in the literal concreteness of their
wording, but only insofar as they witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The observation of the close connection between the inspiration of the
gospel and the person of Jesus Christ also offers a clue to the Christian
understanding of the divine inspiration of the Old Testament writings. They
are to be understood as inspired by the Spirit of God in the sense of 2
Timothy 3:16 insofar as they were read by the early Christians as witness-
ing to the divine promise aiming at Jesus Christ. The Jewish tradition of the
divine inspiration of these writings, whichfirstemerged in connection with
the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, received a new meaning in early
Christianity through reference to Jesus Christ. This is to say that even the
Old Testament writings were considered by the church to be divinely
inspired, because they witnessed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, not in their
function as "letter of the law" but in their function as prophetic Scripture
(graphe).
In 2 Corinthians 3:6-8, Paul opposed the apostolic proclamation in terms
of the ministry of the spirit to the ministry of the letter of the law in the old
covenant. The authority of the gospel, and therefore that of the apostolic
writings and even that of the Old Testament writings in their Christian
usage, is not one of the "letter," corresponding to the letter of the law, but
is to be understood in terms of the content of the gospel. That does not
exclude that the gospel itself has to be taken literally in its affirmations and
that the apostolic writings need literal interpretation. It is only by literal
interpretation that the gospel they contain can be discerned. Nevertheless,
the authority of the apostolic writings, but also that of the writings of the
old covenant, in the church of Jesus Christ is not the authority of the letter
but that of the content that is accessible through the letter. This authority is
in its nature spiritual authority, the authority of the crucified andrisenLord
of the church, who, because of his resurrection, is "life-giving spirit," so
that the gospel proclaiming him passes on that spirit (Gal. 3:2) to all those
who believe its message.
 ^ s
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